Leif Ove Andsnes on Via Crucis

Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes recently released a new album focused around Via Crucis - a late and rarely performed work by Liszt which is one of the most direct musical reflections of his deep faith. I talked to Leif Ove about the challenges and unique beauty of Via Crucis, his long relationship with it and the pieces he chose to complete the programme.

Via Crucis is an interesting choice, and you haven’t recorded much Liszt – a solo recital album and the second concerto. What drew you to him for this album? 

He was figuring more often in my early recital programmes. In my debut recital, I played the first Mephisto waltz, and I guess my teacher was also emphasising the importance of developing technique through Liszt's piano music, which is fantastic. 

Over the years, I've become more curious about these different aspects of Liszt, and exploring something very unique with Via Crucis. I've been fascinated by this piece for quite a few years, not understanding whether it's great, or just strange. 

In the beginning I was a little bit in despair, because there are so few notes. What is really the meaning, and can I trust that this comes across and that it's something special? I was intrigued by it, but I was very unsure of how it would work in performance. It has been an interesting process, also feeling how the audiences and how the singers and everybody connects with this world. It’s a very religious work, meditating over the 14 Stations of the Cross, and it's fascinating how it's built. It’s a work for piano and choir, but most of the time we're not playing together. 

How difficult is it to establish unity, and a real arc over the work? 

It's challenging. It helps to perform it for an audience and to feel where it needs to move, and more importantly, where you just need to trust that the music comes across in its slowness. It is part of the music to have this enormous space. There's quite often no tonal ground; he gets into abstraction, and that points to modern music, but he does use the note D as an anchor, coming back to it at points in the music, and at the end.

It’s thought-provoking, isn't it? 

What's made me fascinated is that despite the simplicity and the spareness of it, it has an incredible tension in performance. It creates something. Of course, it's also the storyline, you know, there's drama in it.

What made you choose the Consolations for this album?

The Consolations are much earlier, and more traditional in a sense. They are beautiful and fascinating pieces because they show how he could write in very different textures for the piano.

The last one is maybe the only one that shows a bit of the more virtuosic Liszt and has more flourishes and exuberant piano writing later in the piece. But it shows very different sides of him writing this kind of spiritual piece; the way he worked with textures on the piano and his understanding for that, which is not so diverse in the Via Crucis.

I wanted to show different contrasts of how he was dealing with these religious themes and Andante Lagrime also is a very sorrowful piece, and very much a typical piece.

One can imagine him sitting down and just improvising, coming up with this beautiful motive and improvising around it.  It sometimes takes turns that you don't expect. Then I wanted to finish with a piece which comes back to the kind of chant-like quality of the beginning of the Via Crucis.

And to this Palestrina piece, which also then ends with this kind of abundance - romantic flourishes that have Liszt's stamp on them. It’s nice to finish the album freely like that after so much restraint and tension. 

There’s a new box set of all your EMI and Warner recordings. How does that feel to you? 

I was lucky to start my career when there were real opportunities for young musicians to do recordings. I was 20 years old in 1990, and this was the CD boom. I was always interested in showing these different sides of myself, and I recorded Nielsen, Szymanowski and things like that, as well as some of the well-known repertoire.

Do you ever listen to older recordings that you've made? 

Very rarely. When I've come back to some pieces, I've maybe listened once to my older recordings, and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised, and think okay, I did well there. Other times it feels very foreign, like a different person.