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May 19, 2002
Another Maverick Finds a Home in Kalamazoo
By JAMES R. OESTREICH

KALAMAZOO, Mich.
FOUR years after it came to know and love Leif Ove Andsnes, this city has a new unpronounceable musical household name: Piotr Anderszewski (pronounced pee-OH-tr, with the merest breath of an R, ahn-der-SHEV-skee). Mr. Anderszewski, an idiosyncratic 33-year-old Polish pianist, was presented as the latest winner of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award at the recent Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival here. In a setting that exudes stalwart Middle Western values and under the name of one of this city's most upstanding citizens and philanthropists, a department-store magnate who died in 1986, the Gilmore was born to be wild. Specifically, it was founded in 1989 by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation as a subversive sort of anti-competition, a polar opposite to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth. (Though, lacking the blood-sport element, it has never rivaled the Cliburn in reputation and publicity.)The differences begin with the titles.

The Gilmore embraces a variety of instruments, from the reticent clavichord to the gregarious electronic keyboard, as well as a variety of musical styles, from antiquarian to jazz and pop. It presents young artist awards every few years. But the heart of the matter is the Gilmore Artist Award, a $300,000 windfall conferred at longer intervals — now, every four years — on a performer who, ideally, doesn't even know he is being considered. (All four winners so far have been men, and all classical pianists.)

Gilmore Award 2002 Articles:

WALL STREET JOURNAL
• A Prize-Winning Pianist And His Taste for Paradox

KALAMAZOO GAZETTE
• Gilmore Artist does things his own way

• Anderszewski makes every note count at Gilmore opener

• All-Bach program is subdued, a challenge

NEW YORK TIMES
• Another Maverick Finds a Home in Kalamazoo

MIAMI HERALD
• Anderszewski's Prize

"It's a strange feeling to know that you've been followed for a few years and that you've been chosen," Mr. Anderszewski said.The idea is to avoid not only the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a competition but also a certain uniformity in results. Competitions today, it is widely thought, reward caution, blandness and technical perfection rather than risk-taking, individuality and real artistry.However that may be, there is no question that the Gilmore, for its top award, has turned up individuals if not mavericks: David Owen Norris, an obscure English pianist and radio personality with a streak of vaudeville, in 1991; Ralf Gothoni, a similarly obscure but soberer Finnish musical polymath interested as much in chamber music and composition as in solo performance, in 1994; and Mr. Andsnes, a Norwegian soloist already well established, in 1998.

Mr. Anderszewski, though a sometime partner of the violinist Viktoria Mullova and not yet well established, at least in the United States, is also a performer with solo aspirations and great promise. His repertory, which runs deep rather than wide, is largely summarized in excellent recordings of Bach's French Suite No. 5 and French Overture (Harmonia Mundi France), Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos. 21 and 24 (Virgin Classics) and Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" (Virgin).

With the director Bruno Monsaingeon, he also made a video of the variations, accompanied by insightful commentary (Video Artists International).At the Gilmore, he opened with concertos by Mozart and Bartok. But his showcase solo recital, in its single-minded concentration on Bach (the last six preludes and fugues from Book 2 of "The Well-Tempered Clavier," the English Suite No. 6 and the Partita No. 6), may have revealed more about his headstrong temperament.The program undoubtedly seemed stern and lacking in variety to many in the audience, as it did to C. J. Gianakaris, the critic of The Kalamazoo Gazette. "Anderszewski chose to play a daunting program of all Bach, daunting because the three works shared so much in common in terms of musical strategies and technique," Mr. Gianakaris wrote. "The uniformity of effect," he added, "became a challenge to the audience.

The performances, too, had a certain sameness, a dreamy, introspective quality that ran somewhat counter to the Bach recording, which is notable for its rhythmic spine. The tone was set by the excerpts from "The Well-Tempered Clavier," which Mr. Anderszewski was performing for the first time publicly." `The Well-Tempered Clavier' is very much private music," Mr. Anderszewski said the morning after the recital. "It is music to study and analyze." He has been immersed in it for months, and he intends to continue working his way through it — backward. (Eccentrics don't have to explain.)

"There are no limits in how far you can go in this music," he added. "It can go at any tempo. You are completely free, yet you are somehow tied to the counterpoint. I know I will learn something incredible from this. I know I'm going to be a different person at the end."Some contrasts did emerge in the suite and the partita, which consist mostly of dance movements. The Gavotte of the suite, in particular, almost literally danced, in the body, in the hands, in the sound.In any case, the townsfolk here have come to treasure their mavericks, and though the large Chenery Auditorium was far from full, especially after intermission, the die-hards responded with an immediate standing ovation. Mr. Anderszewski, in turn, restored the introspective mood with a Beethoven bagatelle.

He is especially fond of late Beethoven, only slightly less so of early Beethoven. "I have a problem with middle Beethoven." he said. "Maybe it's because that's when his ego was the biggest."

A great love of Mr. Anderszewski's that was not represented here and has not yet appeared on record is the music of Chopin. "I really like his music more and more," he said. "But somehow I don't know how to confront an audience with Chopin. I don't know how to practice Chopin. To me it's so fragile, so delicate and so spontaneous that I would almost want to sight-read it onstage, and this I don't have the courage to do."

Mr. Anderszewski comes by his love of Chopin (and Bartok) rightly. He was born of Polish and Hungarian parents in Warsaw in 1969. He lived for a time in Paris, as he does now. He took up the piano at 6 and eventually studied in Lyon and Strasbourg, France, Los Angeles and Warsaw.

"When I started music, the piano wasn't really something that interested me particularly," he said.

"And to me the piano is still only a means of expression. What's great about it is that it's an instrument you can use to suggest. You can suggest that it sings, even though it doesn't. You can suggest that it's percussion, which in essence, of course, it is. You can suggest that it's an orchestra. It's an instrument of suggestion, and that's the beauty of it and the difficulty of it."In the Leeds International Piano Competition in England in 1990, Mr. Anderszewski followed a worthy tradition of recent decades by generating a splash of publicity without winning. Dissatisfied with his performance in Webern's Variations for Piano, he simply quit playing and left the stage.

He later developed other outlets for his self-criticism. After a recital at the Frick Collection in Manhattan in 1998, he announced his dissatisfaction with his performance of Bach's French Overture and repeated the big first movement."I feel divided when I do that," he said. "In a way, it's a betrayal of the profession, because performance is all about having one chance."Thus mellowed, he can even find a good word, with a twist, for competitions. "Competitions can be a good thing if you go there for the experience," he said. "It's a lot of stress, quite cruel, very unfair. It prepares you for life. Professional life is full of stress, so it's a good exercise."

Not that Mr. Anderszewski has many career complaints at the moment. Most pianists would welcome his immediate quandary: how best to spend the Gilmore money, which is intended to allow career-enhancing ventures that the recipient might not otherwise be able to undertake. That sounds like the very definition of the Szymanowski recording Mr. Anderszewski has wanted to make. Virgin Classics, with which he is under exclusive contract, has shown no interest.

"They are scared that it won't sell," he said. "I understand. They have to make money. But for me it's not about making money. It's an artistic project that I find exciting, and I feel almost a duty to do it, because I know that it hasn't really been done properly. Szymanowski deserves to be better known. Someone has to take the risk."He will probably buy "a beautiful piano" for his small apartment in Paris, in which he lives alone, he said. He may also commission a piece from a composer he likes. (There aren't so many, he admits.)But the most valuable aspect of the Gilmore Artist Award may turn out to be intangible. Mr. Anderszewski describes himself as a creature of moods without being able to explain how they may play into his interpretations. "If I only knew," he said. "It's very difficult to pin down. The more I perform, the less I know."

But he has had several months, since learning of the award, to gauge its effects. "In moments of weakness, when you don't feel confident, when you wonder whether you can play at all," he said, "it can help to know that what you've done has been appreciated."