Honky Tonk Man Do you have any idea what you will be doing in 2002? Leif Ove Andsnes does. The 29 year old Norwegian piano virtuoso is more or less fully booked for the next three years, on every continent. His first name sounds more similar to «life» than «leaf». The whole thing sounds a bit like «life over and snazz». Just a tip to impress your local record salesman. If you have the slightest interest in classical music and the piano, we predict you will be asking his name pretty soon. Or rather, you already are. The man´s been Grammy nominated two years in a row, and received the prestigious Gilmore Award in 1998. When he played Liszt, Schumann and Carl Nielsen at the Carnegie Hall in New York this March, the 2700-strong audience grudgingly let him off the hook after four encores. Undoubtedly, Andsnes has become the Scandinavian classical performer of the Nineties. And he´s still not thirty. Listen to a small sample of what they say about the man: «powerfully energised ... his artistry is a potent blend of bristling intellect and inspiration.» (Daily Telegraph) «... unusual excellence and distinction» (Classic FM). «... embraces Liszt as much with his soul as with his hands» (The New York Times). «... reveals an unselfconscious individuality, a healthy disdain for empty virtuosity, and a maturity beyond his years.» (Tamara Bernstein, Toronto). There is more, discovered almost by accident. A few hours before meeting Leif Ove for this interview, I decided I needed a short nap. Why not explore his possibilities as a lullaby pianist, something pleasant with which to doze off? I slipped his recording of Chopin´s Sonatas — something quiet and pleasant, right? — into the Discman and assumed the position. Didn´t work at all. It took a minute to figure out why. The goddamn dynamics! Chopin would be rippling along dreamily, and suddenly Leif Ove would hit a couple of bass keys hard, and I´d be literally a foot above my hotel bed. That´s the sort of musician he is. I´m happy he´s not my neighbour, which I tell him. «Actually,» he says, only half laughing, «I´ve heard of two unrelated episodes from the U.S., where people required that very CD to be played on their deathbed, and expired to it. I guess I´m supposed to feel honoured, but it gives me this creepy feeling ...» You mean you killed ´em? «Yes. I did, didn´t I? Of course, the third movement of one of these sonatas is actually a funeral march, but that´s a bit premature while still breathing, don´t you think?» And your neighbours are still alive? «Barely. I had to compromise and buy a Yamaha digital piano, which I can play with headphones. It´s amazing how they can make them feel and sound almost like the real thing, these days.» Leif Ove lives just behind the excellent Hotel d´Angleterre in central Copenhagen, in a spacious bachelor pad furnished — he says — part in Danish minimalism, part silly memorabilia, part with a concert-size Bösendorfer grand that has been fussed over for the last two days by an English piano tuner. He moved here in 1997, and this is his first home abroad. «Why Copenhagen? Well — it´s home, and it´s not. They speak a Scandinavian language and the culture is fairly similar, but the city is more cosmopolitan, and definitely has a more European flavour than cities in Norway. For a while I considered London, but after visiting a few times I realized that the music scene is not all that great, and the city isn´t very user-friendly either. Copenhagen really is. The city centre is walkable. I have friends here, and I love the cafés and restaurants, the relaxed atmosphere.» Also, Copenhagen possesses that commodity essential to Leif Ove, who travels 250 days a year — a hub airport. «Sounds stupid, but it´s pretty important to me. In Bergen, where I also keep an apartment, I´m one flight further away from everything. And Oslo pretty much ruled itself out last year ...» He laughs, implying six months of public outrage since the opening of the new Oslo Airport Gardermoen, a horror story of pea-soup fog, computer problems, lost luggage, half-day delays and cancelled flights. Anyway, people from the Western part of Norway never hold their Eastern capital in high regard. If possible, they totally avoid the damn place. «I appreciate the anonymity here as well. I realize I´m not the Spice Girls, but I´ve appeared in Norwegian media a bit, and the clever ones know me. You know Norwegians — they don´t approach you until they´re blind drunk, and then they ask: Hey, piano man, why don´t you give us a tune on that piano over there?» Well, do you? «Usually not.» Leif Ove Andsnes was born in 1970 and grew up on Karmøy, Norway´s largest populated island, off the weather-harrowed southwest coast a few miles from oil business city Haugesund. 35.000 souls live on the island, a community sufficiently intimate that when we ask about one of Norway´s most famous unsolved crime cases, a sex murder a few years back, it turns out that Leif Ove´s mother and one of his younger sisters both knew the girl personally. His parents are teachers, both majoring in music. Leif Ove was not yet five when he first took interest in the piano. «My parents were giving private lessons at home, to children of an age I could identify with. It looked like fun, so naturally I tried it. In the beginning i was puzzled by the problem of coordinating the right and left hand, but suddenly — at age six — it clicked. I got it. I started to play Mozart sonatas, stuff like that.» Karmøy is not a place where children are bred to arrogance or delusions of grandeur; probably the opposite, to nearly self-effacing modesty. It also had no professional musicians, but a rich amateur music environment. The prodigy was never really recognized as such, but went on to do normal boy things — playing football and joining a brass band, where he played the euphonium. «For quite some time, the brass band was more important to me than the piano. Through the band I discovered orchestral music, stuff like Strawinsky´s Rite of Spring that gave me a pure, physical ecstasy. Until I was fourteen, I seldom practised the piano more than an hour a day.» That changed sharply when at 14 he met his teacher, the Czech Jiri Hlinka, who talked him into leaving home and joining the Bergen Conservatory. «Those years, after making the decision, were intoxicating, breathing the piano 24 hours a day. It turned out I had developed quite far on my own. I wouldn´t call it fooling around — I´m quite serious about what I do — but it sure wasn´t the traditional Eastern European child prodigy affair either. I´m happy that I was allowed a normal childhood, and I think it serves as proof that raising a pianist can be different to making foie gras — by force-feeding music to defenseless kids.» Today, he betrays habits that conflict with his egalitarian, rural middle class background; Leif Ove can tell a Cuban Cohiba cigar from the quickest glance, knows his French wines and indeed confesses an addiction to foie gras, that most immoral of foods. In fact, we´re both having it. It turns out his major hobby is food and cooking. Truer to his roots, now, he dismisses the attempts as being «nothing fancy ... mainly Italian stuff», but the way he listens when we explain the basics of home-made sushi (another favourite), you really sense the passion. There´s a major obstacle, though — his highly rational fear of sharp knives. Contrary to popular belief, most concert pianists, or indeed most classical soloists, do not have their hands and fingers insured. Lloyd´s of London are the only insurance company that specialises in this sort of thing, and as Leif Ove explains, «you just can´t afford the premiums. Say I cut off my left little finger making sushi. What they would do, was to pay me one tenth of the sum total, while I´d be finished as a musician forever. So what you need is insurance that covers ten times what you require to go on living in the style you´re accustomed to ... it´s out of the question.» Rather bread-baking than Japanese cuisine, then. «But to me cooking is definitely a sort of therapy. Also, when you spend as little time in a place as I do, cooking is essential to establish a feeling of home. I do that as often as I can, cooking for friends.» There is that time-honoured connection between classical music and gourmet cooking. Just consider opera composer Rossini, who lent his name to about twenty dishes, the most famous being the «Tournedos Rossini»; steak with truffles, madeira sauce and a thick slice of Leif Ove´s personal soul food, the foie gras. «He was a lazy bastard as well,» tells Leif Ove. «He employed a scribe, and would lie sprawled on a sofa composing while the scribe took dictation. Once one of Rossini´s notes accidentally sailed down on the floor beneath his sofa; he just started a new one, to avoid the physical exertion.» Leif Ove claims he´s lazy too. For instance, he says, he wants to learn French, but doesn´t have the energy. We´re not so sure. He took a gruelling 18 months to study and rehearse Rachmaninoff´s Third Piano Concerto, affectionately known as the «Rach 3» and recently made popular by the film Shine, the story of half mad child prodigy David Helfgott. Leif Ove was touring with the piece when Shine broke big. Comparisons with the real-life Helfgott — who emerged from obscurity to play the Rach 3 in wake of the film — were usually, even brutally, in Andsnes´ favour. He´s exceptionally gifted, but would never be dubbed a «mad genius». Reviewers have praised his intellect as a performer, but Leif Ove Andsnes is hardly what you´d describe as an intellectual. He has no formal education. «I approach my choice of repertoire wholly by intuition,» he says. «I started doing mainly the romantic period, but lately I´ve been branching out in both directions — on one hand toward earlier music (he recently recorded five Haydn sonatas), on the other towards the 20th century classics. Bartók is a current favourite.» Bach and John Cage next, then? «Cage is getting pretty old, isn´t he? But yeah, something of the kind. I´m planning a six month sabbatical in 2000, and will use some of that time to explore both Bach and contemporary music. Musical history doesn´t interest me that much, though. What I´m really into are the sounds.» You advocate absolute music? «Sure. I don´t hear any waterfalls in Edvard Grieg´s music, for instance. Programmatic thinking about music really puts me off. Same thing with musical manifestos and ´revolutions´, textbook radicals like Pierre Boulez ... In a hundred years, dogmatic music won´t be what´s remembered from our century; it will be Bartók, Sibelius, Janácek — music that conveys a psychological form rather than one based on ideas, experiments and theory.» We´re in the fourth week of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia. Less than 24 hours before we sit down to talk, two school kids in Denver shoot and kill 15 schoolmates. A question is in order, we feel, whether classical music has any civilizing influence, conveys values that might prevent such tragedies? «Don´t think so,» says Andsnes, not quite cynically. «It didn´t stop Hitler, did it? Again, it´s just sounds. If these sounds have the power to create emotions, they might be used either way, for good or evil purposes. Just think about the damage World War II did to classical music. I recently played Grieg´s A Minor Concerto in Baden-Baden, Germany. It was the first time it was performed there in more than 50 years, just because it happened to be one of Hitler´s favourites.» Karlheinz Stockhausen and the German post-war generation tried tackling this problem head-on? «Sure. He wrote music that couldn´t possibly move anybody. That can´t be the solution. Politics influence music; I can´t tell if music influences politics. But as a classical performer, you just have to love Germany. The music is so much a part of their culture, compared to Norway or the U.S. In Cleveland, Ohio, they have one of the four best symphony orchestras in the world, but they don´t have an audience educated to appreciate the fact. Germans would. Once, attending a concert with the Berlin Philharmonics, I saw two businessmen in the back, with their briefcases, loudly asleep. You only do that if you go every week.» There´s a story circulating in Norway, that when Leif Ove Andsnes signed his first recording contract (with Virgin Classics), there was a special clause specifying that he must shave off his moustache. This, according to the former bearer, is plainly untrue. «Morten Krogvold (Norwegian celebrity photographer/photographer celebrity) has been heard bragging that he convinced me to shave it off. Also not true. But yes, the point has been taken. However, my first album was recorded with the moustache, so the cover doesn´t tell the entire truth about the circumstances under which the record was made ...» Even relieved of the offending growth, Leif Ove has something of an invisibility problem. He doesn´t have the wild, flowing hair, the classic Jewish profile, the funny walk or any of the other distinguishing features that makes you able to tell a classical virtuoso from across the street. Leif Ove looks like a plain Norwegian Joe, slightly taller than average, sharp-profiled but still plain. If he showed up in a restaurant, wearing his concert fineries, you´d probably give him your order. He´s so polite, he´d probably bring it as well. Micke, our photographer, has brought a necktie with a piano key pattern that he wants to try for the cover photo, to sort of make the visual point that Leif Ove is not a waiter. Something Elvis Costello would wear, and very few besides. «Why don´t we try painting every other of his teeth black?», I irreverently suggest instead. (His teeth are quite large.) «You probably won´t believe this, but it´s been suggested to me before!» he reveals, doubled up in laughter. «It was a guy from VG (best-selling Norwegian tabloid), and he was real careful about putting the idea across; he´d probably given it a lot of thought. They get real desperate at times, you know.» This non-pop star has recently not only been twice Grammy nominated, but regularly shows up on bestselling lists. We are made to understand that these do not monitor astronomical sales. «The classical record business is pretty much a shambles», Leif Ove says. «I believe in 10 years it will largely have disappeared.» Why? «Because they cheat. Revenue is so low that they cut back on post-production, and performances suffer. There are lots of fabulous performers without recording contracts. Also, the budget labels, like Naxos, is undermining the business. Often they pay only symbolic fees, and there is no post-production to speak of. The public doesn´t always hear the difference — they are mainly interested in buying a piece of music they like, and will choose the cheaper alternative.» If you — as I — thought that recording a classical work takes about the same time as listening to it, think again. «Not at all. There´s digital editing now. So if you´re recording the cheap way, the producer will ask you to play something like the first eight bars, then stop, and piece the work together gradually. In my opinion, this practically guarantees a lousy result. I will try to do the whole thing in one take, as much as 25 versions of one movement, and this puts much more strain on studio time and post-production. The producer will have to review all this material, then painstakingly pick the parts that work, and fits the mood and energy level of the rest.» «You kinda get jealous of rock stars and their budgets,» he concludes. Also, the repertoire is kind of finite? There´s a lot of classical music around? «Of course. A new performance competes with piles of ´historical´ recordings, which the record companies already have paid for. That´s a bit of a sham as well; currently anything taped before the CD arrived is a ´historical´ recording. Personally, I´ve been mixing well-known work with less recorded material. But you can only take it that far. For instance, the world does not really need another collection of Beethoven´s symphonies — there must be 50 around. But it´s great music, more rewarding than taping some obscure work just because it´s ´new´. If you feel you could do Beethoven better, or just different, you should. After all, what makes a work great, is that there are more than one way to interpret and play it.» And you believe you can do it better? «I have to. There´s no point in going to Philadelphia to perform with one of the world´s best orchestras, if you feel that the guy who appeared there last week could do it just as well.» The difference between a good and a great musician is largely in attitude? «von Karajan said so. He said he didn´t need to hear a conductor to decide if he was great; it was enough to see him walk up to the podium. I personally hope it´s not that simple. But greatness is a mythical quality. You either have it, or you don´t.» The standing ovations, the posh flat, the cigars and the foie gras nonwithstanding, I´m not sure I´d want Leif Ove Andsnes´ life. Being a piano soloist must be the loneliest business on earth. He travels alone, has no family or steady girlfriend, and after a concert things can be pretty desperate. «Well, you hope to meet someone to have dinner, share a drink with. You´re still high on your performance, and no way you want to walk back to the hotel. Usually there are receptions and similar, and in places you´ve played before you know people. But I´ve experienced a week in Philadelphia completely by myself, even celebrated my birthday solo, eating sushi and seeing a movie.» Are there groupies? «The weird kind. Giggling Japanese, or a band of Norwegian-Americans. I get some funny letters once in a while. There´s always somebody, but compared to succeeding in front of 2000 people, everything is anti-climactic.» You ever felt the desire to smash up a hotel room? «Not really, but I think I can understand the rationality of such a thing. You´d have to have the added tension of group dynamics, though. Then after-show energy would do the trick.» Does the word «sacrifice» occur to you? «Once in a while. But I feel like having no choice, which makes pondering the alternatives pretty worthless. I don´t view music as an escape from reality, more like an inroad to reality.» We´re suddenly a bit removed from the sick glamour of something like the Three Tenors circus, which Leif Ove happily also detests. «The first time, you could see them having fun, but now it´s all money. They don´t even prepare. I think it´s a bit arrogant to get paid $ 1 m plus to sing straight off the sheet. Good singers selling themselves short. Also, they bring something unhealthy to the business. Fees for the most sought-after performers are spiralling, which leaves less money for others, fabulous musicians who coincidentally aren´t stars.» But you yourself are caught in the nice arm of that spiral? «Yes, I got to admit I am. But that´s not why I do this. I just dig the sounds.» ---- Torgrim Eggen (born 1958) is an author and journalist based in Oslo. His infrequent piano recitals of «Chopsticks» are flawed, but soulful.