Steven Osborne on Lammermuir, Schubert and Rutter

Acclaimed Scottish pianist Steven Osborne recently released a Schubert album on Hyperion, which has garnered deservedly excellent reviews across the board, and his premiere recording of John Rutter's piano concerto will be released by Decca on 19th September (in advance of the composer's eightieth birthday next week). Tomorrow evening, 10th September, he is playing at the Lammermuir Festival in beautiful East Lothian. I spoke with Steven about all three of these things.

You’re patron of the Lammermuir Festival, and you’re playing Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 with the Philharmonia this year - is there a special poignance to playing his final work in the genre?

I've not performed it for a little while, and it’s one of my real favourites. This concerto just stands out as particularly beautiful because there's no spare notes. It has its virtuosic moments, but mainly it's just very meaningful in its little gestures and beautiful tunes… It’s nice getting away from the sense that is this is some kind of autumnal farewell, because I don't really think that's what it is. It's beautiful like that, but it feels to me like it's loading the music with a bit more than it was built to bear. I want to call it this human disease of trying to make sense of things: it's fantastic that we have this instinct, but it easily leads you to make connections that actually don't exist. Mozart’s was quite a concise life anyway, and to me this piece has a freshness about it that doesn't really quite fit with this 'last concerto' weighting.

What's the acoustic like at St. Mary's in Haddington, where you’re playing, and what sorts of allowances do you have to make? 

Honestly, I've never found a good way of dealing with those kind of questions. Yeah, it's quite resonant. What do you do? In simple terms, you play a bit slower and you use less pedal. But that feels very unnatural, and I've always had a thing about tempo: because my instincts tend to be on the fast side it's hard to slow things down, but you do your best. In those acoustics it's important to have someone listening at the rehearsal to get feedback, because then if someone says 'That sounds a bit too fast' then you know a slower tempo is what's going to sound good in that space. 

When I’ve seen the Philharmonia, I have always been struck by their clarity.

They're fantastic. It's not a woolly orchestra, and they're a very enthusiastic orchestra as well. It's always hard in London because you're so very busy, but I think they've kept a really good spirit alive, which is very helpful for that kind of thing. 

Why did you choose D959, out of Schubert’s late sonatas, for your recent album?

It was partly just a simple practical thing, in that I really wanted to record the last sonata but wasn't sure if I was ready. I felt clearer about this penultimate sonata, and Hyperion accepted that. In terms of my connection to the music, I'm always attracted to music with extremes, and I feel very strongly about late Schubert's music anyway.

In terms of the structure, the music is quite conventional in a lot of ways. If you compare Schubert's late music sonatas to Beethoven's late sonatas, you see this incredible risk-taking and curiosity in the structure of Beethoven's pieces - whereas with Schubert there are some very subversive things going on under the surface, but the basic components of it are all there. So there's this relative incuriosity about structure, and yet the emotional content is so chaotic at times. There's this great quotation from Brendel, which is that Schubert composes as if he's sleepwalking - there is this sense that he's not quite controlling what he's doing, that it's coming from some kind of very deep place. It's about as direct communication as you can get in classical music, I think.

When you approach a piece, do you start from appreciating the overall arc of the work, or do you start with the nuts and bolts? 

As I get older, I think less about it because this sort of basic sense of instinct feels more and more important to me. I don't think I could be doing that now without having done all the thinking and analysing that I did in my twenties. One of the most helpful things I did was an awful lot of singing and moving to the music. It started with Schubert's G major sonata: I remember doing a performance of that, and I spent a lot of the month beforehand singing and just trying to feel this instinct for how the music moved.

The G major is very difficult because there's so much space in it, and it can easily feel like it stops and starts like a hundred times. Something about that kind of work of just feeling what was happening between the notes gradually became really integrated into my approach. That helped very much with this question of how you find the sense of shape. That’s the fundamental thing: you can have all the greatest ideas, but if it's divorced from your basic emotions then it's not going to communicate.

What about the Moments Musicaux? 

In the Moments Musicaux, I had to think more about how I wanted to characterise them. The second one has this unbelievable outburst out of the blue. I would say it's almost as shocking as what happens in the piano sonata, because it's so gentle and thoughtful, and then there’s this kind of desperate emotion that appears from nowhere when the piece sounds like it's ended. 

One of the recordings I loved most as a kid was an early recording Brendel did of that piece. I learned so much from that about characterising music. If you listen closely to what Brendel does, you notice that he changes a lot. He alters the rhythm in subtle ways, and there are lots of things that just kind of clarify the character. Whenever I play that, there's always Brendel at the back of my mind.

Your next album is the world premiere recording of John Rutter's new concerto Reflections, to be released just as we celebrate his eightieth birthday. Somehow, I never would have expected a piano concerto from him. What's it like? 

Beautiful. It's recognisably his kind of style, and I was excited to be asked to do it. I went to a music school, grew up singing his music and I always loved the honesty of it. The most important thing, I think, is that somebody's writing the stuff that they believe in, and he does. He's just got this innate knowledge and understanding of the music and the way it fits together.