Learning to make every note count

Murray Perahia's hand injury meant he might have spent the rest of his life listening to music instead of playing it, he tells Eileen Battersby

A small boy went to the opera in New York with his father and discovered something wonderful. Some 20 years later, that same small boy, by then a man, won the most famous - and toughest - piano competition in the world. It sounds fantastical but it describes the earliest phase of the artistic journey made by American concert pianist Murray Perahia who, having performed all over the world and made some definitive recordings, finally makes his Irish debut tonight at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. "I was not a prodigy," he says. "My parents didn't want that for me, I had lessons but I went to normal schools and didn't make my debut until I was 17" - in the Carnegie recital room.

His international career spans more than three decades. It began by winning the Leeds Piano Competition in 1972, "the first and only competition I ever entered; they worked us hard." He was 25. Since then he has been acknowledged as a perfectionist blessed with rare understanding, daring, sensitivity and a subtle, deeply musical sensibility. Unaffected, kindly Perahia retains his youthful enthusiasm and passion for music as the most emotionally engaging of the arts. When he says, "German music gave us counterpoint - and counterpoint is such an achievement. Harmony is also important, but counterpoint . . ." you immediately feel the warmth and accessibility to which those who know Perahia the man and the musician invariably refer.

Perahia, who was born and raised in New York but has been settled for many years in London, where he is principal guest conductor of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, has no hesitation in describing himself as an American - although he quickly qualifies this.

"Well, I am about as American as any American can be, most of us coming from somewhere else - my family came from Greece. They were Spanish Jews from Greece, and I grew up speaking Spanish." How did the music begin? "My father used to take me to the opera, the Met."

He seems pleased at my surprise. After all, the closest most toddlers get to things operatic is throwing a tantrum. "No, I just loved opera. I was three and a half, four year old when I began going to the opera every Saturday with my father. He wasn't a musician, but he was passionate about music and took me to the opera because my mother was bored by it. I have a brother who went on to be a mechanical engineer and he had no interest either."

But little Murray was interested, and his habit of singing arias in the unrarefied atmosphere of his home on the Sunday morning following the performance suggested there was something deeper at work. "They saw I was musical, and I began having lessons when I was four."

He is far more comfortable discussing music and the lives of the composers than he is speaking about himself. Whereas his conversation flows about music - and he speaks informally, a relaxed New Yorker with slightly accented echoes of somewhere else, he has to be constantly directed back to his own story. He did not enter one of the elite conservatoire - and studied in New York. "I went to Mannes - you know, the school in Fame?"

Again, this is a surprise. I got the impression from the TV series that the students there mainly danced and burst into song. Perahia says, "Yes, they did. It was that kind of school."

THE ALMOST CASUALLY normal approach that appears to have shaped the softly spoken Perahia is unexpected, such is the European polish and subtle grace of his playing. In person, he may not appear intense, but he is in his approach to playing.

Perahia is a great reader of the music. "I think the wrong notes - and there often are wrong notes - are as important as the right ones." He is known for studying a work, examining each note. Meticulous and thoughtful, he writes very well about music and analyses technical points without losing the spontaneity. At present he is editing the works of Beethoven.

"You try to have both, the technical and the readable. It's important to appreciate the emotional engagement, music is emotional," but as he points out, it is also technical.

In 2000, he recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations and describes the project as "one of the most challenging of my life". Perahia was conscious that Glenn Gould had already recorded them, and that he himself had other ideas about playing them. By then he had already recorded Bach's English Suites No 1, 3 & 6 and had enjoyed the experience. When writing an introduction to the recording, which won a Grammy award in 1999, he had prefaced his comments with an insight made by Bach: "The ultimate end aim of thoroughness should only be the glorification of God and the recreation of the mind. Where these are not kept in view, there can be no real music - only infernal jingling and bellowing."

Practicality is one of the essential elements of Bach's genius - that and his improvisational flair. "He was the great improviser, and that's why his music is so spontaneous."

Perahia had begun his career in the late Romantic repertoire - for many he remains the Chopin interpreter who surpassed Rubinstein. Perahia's recording of Four Ballades is perfection. When the young Russian pianist, Evgeny Kissin, emerged on the international scene, many critics asked, would he approach Perahia? Perahia also looked to the music of Schumann and Schubert, while his engagement with Beethoven's music produced majestic recordings of the five piano concertos, including a superlative Emperor with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bernard Haitink.

"I enjoyed that very much. You really see the influence of Mozart in those works - Four even begins with the piano. I love Beethoven for his vulnerability - he was very human, very suspicious. He couldn't trust anyone and usually left a party in a sulk."

Perahia discusses music in the context of its technical demands - but always in relation to the humanity of the men who composed it. His understanding of the mood gives his interpretation texture and balances his scrutiny of every note.

Brahms enters the conversation and Perahia says, "I love his music." The fact that Perahia has not recorded either of the piano concertos is a loss. He has, however, memorably performed Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, one of the greatest 19th-century piano works. It also combines baroque form with Romantic intensity - particularly appropriate considering Perahia's choice of repertoire.

For all the splendour of his achievements, Perahia has known hardship, and it seems merely to have heightened his innate empathy. His career has been disrupted by a recurring hand injury traced to a mystery infection in his thumb, which led to a bone spur; it was possibly caused by a neglected cut. "For five years I couldn't play at all," he says.

There was a recent recurrence, and he is only back playing two months. When he is playing, he "practises all day". There is no complaint, no bitterness. "When I couldn't play, I listened. I love music - opera, choral, chamber and symphonies." Even when studying music on the score, Perahia "hears" it.

After his long absence from playing, he returned to the recording studio in 1996 with keyboard works by Handel and Scarlatti. Of Scarlatti, Perahia had close experience through his friendship with Horowitz, who was one of the great Scarlatti interpreters. But the Handel works were different. "I had always loved the oratorios and the vocal works, but I discovered the keyboard works much later."

It was when touring Germany that he wandered into a music shop looking for something different to practise and came upon Handel suites. It was a revelation. Handel was an organist, Scarlatti was the harpsichord specialist composing more than 500 pieces for it. Perahia recorded four of Handel's suites included in a collection from 1720. Perahia also played them on a harpsichord and has since bought his own. The fact that none of the Bach, Handel and Scarlatti works that Perahia has recorded were originally composed for the piano is irrelevant.

"Everything's a transcription on the piano - there's no purity in piano music, it's borrowed from everything."

There is also, in the case of Perahia, something of a career benchmark, in that he had established himself playing the late Romantic repertoire, before moving on (though back in time in terms of chronology) to Beethoven, "really a classical composer" - and then to composers of the baroque period such as Bach.

"Yes, that's true. But then it all begins with Bach, doesn't it?"

HE WILL TURN 60 in April. His two grown "English American" children attend university in the US, and neither are musicians, although his wife, who is English, studied music. As recently as 2003, he won a Grammy for his recording of Chopin's complete Études Op 10 and Op 25. It was hailed as "the finest of all modern discs of the Études" by one critic, who concluded, "faced with artistry of this calibre, criticism falls silent: one can only wonder at such unalloyed perfection."

His 1989 recordings of Chopin's Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2 with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta possess extraordinary clarity and tonal shifts. The first LP I ever bought was on the CBS Masterwork label and it was Murray Perahia playing the complete Chopin Preludes. It was recorded in 1975, and the photograph on the cover shows a slightly goofy-looking young Perahia slouched in a chair looking off camera.

Another famous recording, dating from 1984, is that of him and Radu Lupu playing Mozart's Sonata for 2 pianos in D major and Schubert's Fantasia in F minor. "That was great fun," he says.

The passage of time, though, has not been easy for classical music. Despite the advances made in the recording industry, and the new hype in marketing performers, Perahia fears for its future.

"I don't think it is good. Classical music is not taken as seriously as it was, as it should be." He says this without elitist dogmatism, just concern. "It's like everything, even these classical music stations. I suppose they're good, but like most musicians I have a problem with the fact you rarely hear a complete work."

He is far more positive about recording than many classical musicians and seems to have had mainly pleasant experiences in the recording studio. "I am recording either Bach or Beethoven this summer. But, yes, live performance is the best. It is about the moment."

In Dublin he will perform an attractive programme of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin. Perahia would be an ideal interpreter of John Field; has he considered the works of the Irish composer who lived in Moscow?

"His work is beautiful, and obviously an important influence for Chopin. I should have included one for Dublin."

Conversation returns to his injury, about which he is impressively philosophical. Did he fear he would never play again? "All the time. It was terrible. But I love music and I could listen to it. Although it's not the same. It's like not being able to sing the song."

Murray Perahia plays at the National Concert Hall tonight