In 2011, the French pianist Hélène Grimaud committed an act of rebellion of the kind that usually pays dearly in the closed estate of classical music. She had recorded two Mozart concertos with the powerful conductor Claudio Abbado, and in one of them, no. 23, she had used the cadenza of the romantic composer Ferruccio Busoni.
In concerts of Mozart’s time, before the orchestra’s final outburst, there was room for the pianist to show off his technical prowess in a few minutes of solo performance, usually variations on the movement’s central themes. The great patriarch Abbado had asked Grimaud to also play Mozart’s own cadenza, which is sometimes used in this concert. The pianist says she played it in deference to the maestro. When everyone left, the pianist received the news that Abbado had chosen Mozart’s cadenza, and had ordered the technicians to insert that recording instead of Busoni’s.
The young interpreter refused. She claimed that she had the right to choose the cadenza. She knew perfectly well that Abbado had boosted her career and had chosen her to record some of her most popular concerts with him. Her video recording of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto shows them in a state of total rapport, like an old master and his best disciple. But Grimaud was no longer a young promise, and to the astonishment of record company officials and critics, she did not give in. Abbado decided to disinvite her from the Lucerne Festival, which he directed, and from a concert in London, for which she quickly contacted another pianist.
The petite French artist did not sit idly by: she asked the musicians of a cooperative orchestra, which played without a conductor, to record with her, among other pieces by Mozart, the concert of the dispute. This time, with the cadence she wanted, the one she had played since her childhood, the one that represented her own vision of her work.
It was not the first nor would it be the last time that Hélène Grimaud showed an indomitable spirit and what she herself describes in her autobiography as an inability to compromise: when she is sure of something, her decisions are unalterable. Already as a sixteen-year-old student at the Paris Conservatory, he refused to perform the end-of-year program that his teacher had indicated to him, full of delicate pieces of French sensibility, a repertoire appropriate for the typical French debutante, a blonde girl. and timid like her. Instead, she took the train to her hometown, Aix-en-Provence, and played Chopin’s second concerto with fire and romantic vigor with her former classmates from the city’s conservatory. When her teacher saw the result on a video, she let her mistake go and changed her game.
Since then, and especially since he began recording on small labels at the age of seventeen and on Deutsche Grammophon since 2002, his volcanic interpretations, at once personal and in deep search of the composer’s voice and presence, have never gone unnoticed. His first concept album, Credo (2004), already showed its own path: a journey through the spirituality of the piano combining works by Mozart with mystical pieces by contemporary composers.
In concerts and recordings, the center of his sound universe was always German Romanticism, and above all the works of Johannes Brahms. Brahms will in fact be at the center of the program that Grimaud will present in Barcelona and Madrid. After Sonata no. 30 by Beethoven, and before the Chaconne from Partita no. 2 by Bach, he will delve into intermezzos and fantasies of the romantic genius.
For a quarter of a century, Hélène Grimaud has combined two central passions and activities, apparently incompatible: the carpets and chandeliers of the concert halls, and the mud and stones of her mountain refuge, where the wolves howl. On the one hand, his career as a concert pianist, the hypnotic intensity of his performances and the palpable joy in his encounters with symphony orchestras: in the memory of Barcelona music lovers there are memorable performances, sparking off with large orchestral formations, a surprise for those who see it. for the first time, with her calm walk, her modest smile and white or black dresses, made of loose, flowing fabrics.
And, in her other facet, she is the creator of a refuge for endangered wolves in Westchester County, in the State of New York, with whom she spends many months a year, who recognize her as their human mother, and to whom , in the photos of his maturity, with his sharp face and loose hair, he looks more and more alike.
In a long profile of T. D. Max for The New Yorker titled Her Way, the journalist follows her as she accompanies her pack of wolves at night, and the leader of the pack begins howling at the yellowish moon. “It’s a flat yes,” says the pianist, with an absolute ear for the wild nature of untamed animals and for music, to which she gave her soul and her immense talent.
