Scottish piano star Steven Osborne invites the music to "do what it wants to do"
Improvisational intution informs a Vancouver Recital Society program that spans Schubert, Debussy, and Crumb
Scottish pianist Steven Osborne listens for “the way music breathes”. Photo by Ben Ealovega
The Vancouver Recital Society presents Steven Osborne at the Orpheum Theatre on June 5.
IF YOU’RE LOOKING for clues about a performer’s personality, biases, and mindset, you can do worse than take a look at how they assemble a concert program. So what do we see when we apply musical forensics to what Steven Osborne will play for the Vancouver Recital Society this weekend?
He’s a pragmatist.
Now, this isn’t that much of a surprise: the 51-year-old pianist is Scottish, after all. But Osborne’s VRS program is decidedly unusual, pairing as it does Franz Schubert’s sprawling and emotional Sonata in B-flat major with a selection of relatively concise Claude Debussy etudes and the terse, quiet Processional, from American modernist George Crumb.
And the reason for this? Blame Seattle.
The night before he arrives in Vancouver, Osborne will be south of the border, performing Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Étoiles with the Seattle Symphony. Following such an extraordinary and taxing work with the gymnastics required by the Sergei Rachmaninoff sonata that had originally been scheduled would be too much, even for Osborne’s experienced and agile fingers.
The Messiaen, Osborne says in a telephone interview from his Edinburgh home, “turned out to be just an utterly monstrous thing to learn. I’m finally just about getting on top of it, but I know that this month is going to be quite consumed with properly finishing to prepare that. I really doubted I was going to have time to prepare the Rachmaninoff, which I won’t have done for about 16 months by the time of the Vancouver concert. That’s quite a huge thing to re-learn.”
Opting for the Sonata in B-flat major instead, he continues, was purely an intuitive decision. “From Schubert to Crumb seems bizarre on paper, but somehow I love this progression,” he explains. “Like Schubert’s in F minor, and Crumb starts in F. It starts in the same kind of mode, but then takes a left turn into some kind of dreamworld. I feel that’s just beautiful, instinctively, although on paper it might not seem so. And the Debussy and Crumb have got quite a shared sonic world, in some ways. But there’s no kind of intellectual line behind the program. I just like how the pieces flow together.”
For devotees of pianistic virtuosity, however, there’s no fear of being shortchanged by any lack of Rachmaninoff. The Sonata in B-flat major is renowned for its technical difficulty as well as for how open it is to interpretation. Online, we found excellent performances by a variety of virtuosic keyboardists, ranging in length from 37 minutes to, in one instance, 56.
“56,” Osborne says, sounding bemused. “That’s [Sviatoslav] Richter?”
Yes it is, we confirm.
Photo by Ben Ealovega
“That’s crazy,” he says. “But basically I try not to think about this being Schubert’s last sonata, and things like that. It’s more a question of ‘What does the piece say in itself?’ I also try to stay away from a sense of its profundity. Probably if you polled classical pianists about what is the greatest classical sonata ever written, it would be very high up there. It’s easy to be a bit intimidated by pieces like that; they have such incredible quality. And it’s also easy to skew your interpretation towards trying to make it sound profound, which can give it a kind of fake profundity, right? It seems to me that you can’t try to make something sound great; all you can do is respond to what it is telling you—what it feels like to you—and then simply present that and not try and overlay it with anything else.
“Certainly that Schubert sonata has this amazing overall shape,” he adds. “There’s just not a weak note in the whole piece. Although, funnily enough, there are a couple of bars early in the first movement that Alfred Brendel refuses to play because he thinks they’re so crap. But I kind of like them.”
Osborne obviously has too much respect for Schubert’s score to make any edits, on the fly or otherwise. But among the tools that he’ll bring to his concert are some that he developed in his parallel practice of improvisation, which he considers as important as his constant desire to learn new material.
“Doing that fundamentally changed how I felt about the shape of a piece of music, because when you improvise, you don’t know what you’re going to start with,” he says. “You simply sit in silence, and you see what wants to go into the silence. I became much more acutely aware of how one thing follows another, and how much time a gesture needs to have its effect, and how much time you need before something else has to happen….There are so many different ways of how a piece of music gets put together.
“You’re sort of sensing in real time. ‘Oh, this wants to happen,’” he continues. “And that only happens when you’re relaxed. But the point is, all of that gave me a much deeper sense of how to play classical music. It basically helped me feel, in a much more visceral way, the structure of a piece of music—the way music breathes, and what the music wants to do.”
In other words, we might hear flashier Schubert, or even slower Schubert, than what Osborne will deliver in Vancouver. But we would be very lucky to hear a performance that is more purely alive.
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