Francesco Piemontesi on Brahms and Alchemy

The Swiss-Italian pianist Francesco Piemontesi has established an international reputation as a deeply thoughtful pianist who gets to the heart of the music and communicates it with an uncommon combination of depth and clarity. I enjoyed a conversation with Francesco about his new Brahms album, and the recently released film, The Alchemy Of The Piano.

Your new album of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Op. 117 pieces is out now. What has your approach been to this vast and much-recorded concerto? 

Cécile Ousset, who recorded this piece with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Kurt Masur in the seventies, encouraged me to learn it very early on. I remember when I went to study in Hanover at the conservatory, there was one specific colleague who told me 'you cannot play this piece when you are so young, it's too early' - but I think it was right for me and it worked very well. I'm listening now to this very pianist playing the piece twenty years later, and I don't think those twenty years really made a difference.

Every singer has a specific voice; some singers can sing Siegfried, for example, and some cannot, and with pianists, it's the same. You have hands which are typical for a composer, and my hands are quite large, and therefore I think I really have Brahms hands. So I just put them down on the keyboard and this Brahms sound somehow comes out. It’s not the same challenge as I have with Chopin, which often needs smaller hands. Of course, there are technical difficulties to solve, but still it felt very natural, and my conception maybe has changed over time. I have played it with a number of conductors and orchestras, with different pianos and different acoustics: going back, going forward, changing things, and at a certain point something became very clear on how I want to play it and share it with the public. That was the moment where I thought I should record it.

It is a piece written on a monumental, epic scale - full of majestic moments, and at the same time, the writing is technically extremely difficult. You also feel you're a part of a big symphony, because you're surrounded by this amazing orchestra, and it's not that they are accompanying you, more that you're creating something together. The piano becomes a kind of second orchestra, and it's the challenge to create all these colours that the orchestra give you and to try to realise them on the keyboard.

An orchestra can also reduce and feel like chamber music, so that third movement is beautiful because if it's performed well in concert the energy is so focused on piano, cello and oboe in the recapitulation: everybody is really meditating and taking time to listen with full attention. Then you're into this dance-like figuration at the beginning of the fourth movement, which switches into strong, firm writing. There’s a lot of variety.

Somebody said to me when I was young that they didn't like Brahms because he was too heavy and his writing too dense. As I've grown up over the years and I've played Brahms solo pieces, and listened to the whole range of his music, I feel that it isn't the writing - it's the approach to the music, and the clarity of playing is so important, isn't it?

Often, yes, I think it is. Julius Katchen, for example, took that into account right from the beginning. He was recording and playing at a time when Brahms was considered really, really heavy and he did it in an incredibly light and elegant way. So there were people seeing this already before, and Katchen remains in that respect, especially for the solo pieces, one of my big references.

What made you choose the Op.117 Klavierstücke?

The first piece of the set reminds me very much of the writing of the third movement of the concerto, with the cello and so on. You have this left hand that can become in your imagination a cello, and I think that works very well. It's nice to come from the concerto and then into this more intimate world; you're almost reflecting on the concerto and what's happened. Until you find the right tone, the right gesture and the right intimacy, it takes a lot of time. The technical difficulties of the second concerto, of course, in a way, are more spectacular, more athletic, but I wouldn't say that it's more difficult. You know, the shading of sound, the colours in the Op. 117 is, at least to me, a big journey.

Cartier part-sponsored this recording, didn't they? 

Yes, they helped a lot. Just before COVID I played a recital at the Théâtre de Champs-Élysées in Paris, and Cyril Bigneron, who was the head of Cartier at the time, showed up at the end of the concert. He is completely obsessed with music, and he said 'we would like to help you realise things that you maybe couldn't otherwise do'. You don’t expect that after a concert. We sat down some months later in Geneva to discuss several projects, and Cyril asked me about my favourite concerti. I said both Brahms, and he said 'let's make it work', so this is how these recordings came about. 

I'd played with Manfred Honeck a number of times before, and I remember the first time we collaborated, in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic. In the rehearsal, the orchestra played incredibly well under him, and I knew he's the man for Brahms - this is the kind of sound I want. It was the same with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. I thought especially for the incredible sound of the strings they have, this is the right combination. I couldn't believe we actually made it work, where Manfred, the orchestra and I were free for both periods.

A piece like this is so important for your life; it's one of the peaks of European art, so this is why I thought this is the moment to share my twenty years of connection with this piece. Never say never, but you probably do these things once in life, and they need to be the best of what you can do, with the best orchestra and conductor possible, and I’m so happy Cartier and Pentatone saw the point of this.

I very much enjoyed your film, Alchemy of the Piano. You spoke earlier about certain music fitting the hand, and that was very much part of the conversation, especially with Maria João Pires, and Stephen Kovacevic. 

It was a wonderful journey that Jan Schmidt-Garre and I wanted to share with the public for many years. After concerts there were people coming and asking 'what is it that you do on stage? Is it about the precision, is it the technique? Is it how fast you can play?'. This kind of thinking is very much still in the mind of many people, and we found out that there was an interest from public broadcasters (like the Bayerischen Rundfunk and Arte, who co-funded the project) to discuss what's behind the score for a broader public.

The idea was to interview older colleagues, and we still had the luck to film the late Alfred Brendel. We ended up with something like forty hours of material, and Jan had an incredibly difficult job to choose. Maria, for instance, was very much into this breathing thing about trying to explain the pianistic technique from a different side, starting from the back with a certain movement rather than something which is in your fingers.

Then we had the inner world of images from Jean-Rodolphe Kars, who recorded incredible discs for Decca like the Debussy Preludes, which for me remain the absolute peak, and then became a priest. Stephen Kovacevich explains the idea of using flat fingers came from his work with Horowitz and Myra Hess, and Brendel was the incredibly strict teacher who doesn't leave one note to chance. The beautiful thing was in the end, you have this broad view of what you can do with sound, with your body, with imagination... It's still a lot of work, with so many details that you need to master.

This was some of the message that we wanted to convey in the film: that good piano playing is not just about how many notes you play per second and how precise they are. Some of the audience came up to me after a concert, saying they watched and listened in a different way after seeing the film. This is the best of compliments.

Part of the alchemy is in working with the instrument that we find. There's a moment in the film where Kars plays his out-of-tune piano, yet he makes it speak. How important is the set-up of the instrument to you, and do you work with a technician?

I’ve now played most of the big halls in the big cities, several times in some of them. I note down if I particularly like an instrument and I try to have that instrument back. If I didn't like an instrument, I ask well in advance if we can have one which is different. I always try to work with the best possible technicians and some of them, like Uli in Steinway in London, know exactly what I like, so we don't lose a lot of time because it just works. What you said about Kars is the most important thing in the end. It's the imagination that you have of the sound, even on a horrible instrument. This is not an invitation to have horrible instruments in concert halls - but still, even on an upright piano, you can make things sound.