How a fallen piano prodigy found the key to recovery

Russian pianist Andrei Gavrilov was a superstar in the 1980s, before he fell apart. He tells Stephen Mosshow he got back on track.

Sometimes in an interview you beat about the bush, take a while to get to the point. Not today. I blurt out the key question immediately, insultingly - not so much a question as a statement. "You don't have so much of a career now," I say, when I meet the Russian pianist Andrei Gavrilov. In 1974 Gavrilov was the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Tchaikovsky piano competition, aged just 18. He was a protege of the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, and a superstar in the 1980s. In 1990 he had a recording deal with Deutsche Grammophon and the world at his feet - or, rather, his fingertips.

That was then. It's been all downhill since - a story of abandoned concerts, loss of confidence, the end of the DG deal, a broken marriage.

It was a personal and artistic implosion, though which fed which is hard to say. He was history.

Hence my abrupt question - and it is to Gavrilov's credit that we are still together two hours later. This large, affectionate (his friends say childlike) man is only too willing to explain his own falling apart. Or, rather, to give the version of events with which he feels comfortable, a sort of psychological accommodation.

Gavrilov talks of having taken an eight-year sabbatical. One morning in 1993, he decided he couldn't make the journey from Frankfurt to Brussels to play that evening. "I suddenly realised I was not going to play this concert," he says. "It came spontaneously. I called my agent in Belgium and said, 'I'm not coming.' He said, 'Don't be crazy, we are sold out and the Queen is attending.' I couldn't really even explain what was happening to me."

Gavrilov no longer believed what he was playing. "I wasn't satisfied with myself. I was on top of my career, had everything, was giving lots of concerts. In a material sense I was doing very well. But I knew if I was to continue in this way I would never be the artist I dreamed of being - free, original, idealistic, out of the so-called musical industry, which is a contradiction in terms. Music cannot be an industry - music is not like producing tractors."

Gavrilov believed he had to find what the composer was trying to communicate - the "message" behind the notes. "Musicologists say music is a material thing and doesn't need any decoding," he says. "That you should just use your intuition. But for me it wasn't enough. It was so bitter and so painful that by the end of the eighth year I was totally exhausted by this search." Fine words, but not quite true. Later I talk to Gavrilov's agent, Mark Buhl, who says this is an artist's rationalisation of his collapse.

There was no conscious decision to take an eight-year sabbatical, rather a gradual loss of confidence that, as well as the Brussels cancellation, saw Gavrilov walk off stage during a concert in Vienna that was broadcast live on radio. The music industry does not easily forgive such lapses.

THE ONLY CHILD of an artist father and pianist mother, Gavrilov was propelled towards stardom in his teens, winning the Tchaikovsky competition and being hailed as a genius by Richter, for whom he stood in at the Salzburg festival in his annus mirabilis of 1974. His international career came to a sudden halt five years later when the Soviet authorities decided he needed taking down a peg or three.

"I was becoming rich and independent," he says. "I was driving a Mercedes that was better than Brezhnev's." Gavrilov was put under what was effectively house arrest for five years, unable to travel outside the Soviet Union and restricted even within Russia.

"I was constantly watched and constantly threatened," he says. "By the end, the militia people watching me had a licence to kill. One showed me a paper signed by Andropov [ Soviet leader from 1982-84], which said the authorities wouldn't mind if a fatal accident happened to Mr Gavrilov."

In 1985, he was given permission to leave Russia - one of the first artists to be released under Gorbachev's new, more liberal regime. He settled first in London, then in Germany; rebuilt his concert career; made his US debut at Carnegie Hall; and started on a frenetic series of recordings, first with EMI, then with Deutsche Grammophon.

His recovery from incarceration at the hands of the Soviet authorities was only the prelude to an even greater hiatus in his career. By the mid-1990s, Gavrilov was suffering both an artistic crisis and the beginnings of a marriage break-up that was to see him lose his house, his money and, it seems, his son. (He says his first marriage was childless, but friends talk of a son with whom he has no contact.) By the end of the decade, he had virtually given up performing.

"It was a death battle," says Gavrilov. "I was desperate. I win or I die." He won, or perhaps it is truer to say he is winning. Again, his version of events is that he triumphed artistically: suddenly he understood what the notes meant, what the message was. He talks of this revelation in religious terms: he was blind, then he could see; he had found the key; he even had an out-of-body experience on a plane somewhere over Nova Scotia.

"God opened my eyes and I saw at once the meaning of every note," he says. "It was like lightning striking." He must believe this to be able to perform. Gavrilov talks of his greater maturity, of the direct bond he feels with his audience, of the inability of recordings to capture all the colours of his musical palette. Well, maybe. But there were more prosaic factors at work, too: a move to Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2001; a second marriage to a young Japanese pianist and the birth of a son; as well as a number of supporters determined to help him resurrect his career.

With the help of wealthy Swiss benefactors, Gavrilov is performing again. It is difficult to know what this second coming will amount to.

He is now 51, no longer young in an ultra-competitive world that thrives on new pianistic sensations. The music business had written him off, and his rejection of its values, his bombast, will not endear him to it.

There is always a danger that his nerves will get the better of him, that the Queen of Belgium will again be disappointed. But the day after he and I talked, he gave a sell-out concert at the Lucerne piano festival - nine Chopin nocturnes in the first half, Prokofiev's Sonata No 8 in the second. The audience was rapt, the standing ovation instantaneous. Knowing his story, I found his playing deeply moving, his theatricality on stage - he has always been a showman - overwhelming.

A veteran critic sitting next to me thought he took too many liberties with the Chopin, but I found it thrilling. I asked the critic whether, if Gavrilov were playing, say, Beethoven sonatas - classical repertoire perhaps unsuited to his romantic temperament - he would go to the concert with fear in his heart. "Oh yes," said the critic, "but I would certainly go." ... - Guardian service

Andrei Gavrilov joins the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra to perform Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3 on Friday at the National Concert Hall as part of the RTÉ NSO 2007-2008 Season in association with Anglo Irish Bank. www.nch.ie