Intimate music on a grand scale

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 2003 by Gurewitsch, Matthew

In just 13 years-to a great extent through the efforts and presence of world-renowned pianist Leif Ove Andsnes-Norway's Risor Chamber Music Festival has secured its reputation as one of the finest musical events of its kind.

ACCORDING TO A CLICHE as dear to romantics as to the cultured bourgeoisie, the artistic imagination springs from existential wound, some inner grief or demon that puts the artist at odds not only with himself but with the world. For confirmation, Norwegians need look no further than their greatest playwright, Ibsen, or their greatest painter, Munch. And in music? The case of Grieg, their greatest composer, is much less germane. Not that musicians as a breed enjoy any blanket exemption from the general law. (Think of Beethoven.) But maybe, of all artists, they do have comforts closest to hand: another notion that has acquired the authority of cliche. "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast," in the words of the poet, "To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."

Such may be the charms that have molded the personality of the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, born in 1970 on the island of Karmoy, near Haugesund, south of Bergen on Norway's rugged western coast. Or was it a well-tempered personality that drew him to music? Either way, Andsnes strikes most who meet him as uncommonly harmonious, affable and down-to-earth. "Leif Ove is very normal," says Bernt Lauritz Larsen, managing director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, in Oslo, and festival director of the Risor Chamber Music Festival, in a postcard-perfect town of trim white houses on the Skagerrak coast. "Even on a concert day! He'll give me a ring sometimes, and I have no idea where he is. We'll chat for a while, and then he'll say, 'Well, I've got to go now. I'm going onstage in 15 minutes.' And it turns out he's at Carnegie Hall, or in Vienna." Larsen and Andsnes have a lot to talk about. Back in the early 1990s, when the festival in Risor was in its infancy, Larsen drafted Andsnes as artistic director, in tandem with the distinguished violist Lars Anders Tomter.

NORMAL THOUGH Andsnes may be, his credentials as an artist of depth and sensitivity nevertheless are entirely in order, as critics and civilians from Tokyo to Sao Paulo, from San Francisco to London (not to mention New York or Vienna), will readily attest. Without apparent effort, he speaks to every generation. Walking out onto the stage, other pianists on impresarios' A-lists-the glazed Evgeny Kissin, the exuberant Lang Lang-may strike an audience more instantaneously by force of personality, but by the final double bar, few are receiving more tumultuous cheers than Andsnes, whether he has been tracking the spooky fantasies of Lutoslawski for the blue-haired retirees at a Friday subscription matinee with the New York Philharmonic or pealing forth in four-handed Schubert with his genial compatriot Havard Gimse at a family concert this past summer in Risor. "If I'd heard a concert like that when I was a boy," Andsnes said after the latter, strictly intramural event, as contented as after some triumph in a metropolis, "I would have been pretty excited."

With good reason. As artistic co-director along with violist Lars Anders Tomter, Andsnes had a few strings to pull, and he pulled them, bringing along some stunning reinforcements. Albrecht Mayer, principal oboe of the Berlin Philharmonic, dropped in to join Andsnes in some celestial Bach. On his own, the Swedish clarinet virtuoso Martin Frost donned a satyr's mask to play-and dance!-a mesmerizing excerpt from Hillborg's recent "Peacock Tales," written with him in mind. For comic relief, there were goofy comedy turns by Omar Viseth, latest member of the festival's hard-working band of chefs, and Hans Ronning, a festival factotum. But the music, throughout, was of festival caliber, however casual the showcase.

Andsnes was in blue jeans that afternoon, hardly his usual concert garb. As on any stage, he came across as prepared and at ease. I suppose he owns the white ties and tails of hoary tradition, but have never seen him wear them. More in his line are dark suits by Issey Miyake, chosen not for snob appeal but for understatement. Photographs show that he has sometimes let his straight dark-blond hair hang down in bangs, but lately he has preferred a soft brush cut. At the keyboard he sits quietly, indulging in no extraneous theatrics, suffering no apparent agonies or ecstasies, simply concentrating on the music, laying it out with exemplary lucidity, yet with a particularity of fresh detail that always makes it immediate and personal. He has power to spare, but never squanders it in hollow thunder. And while he sometimes takes great liberties, notably in varying the tempo, the effect is never wayward, but organic. In the words of Dan Gustin, director of the Gilmore Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which in 1998 lent Andsnes the distinguished title of Gilmore Artist (an honor bestowed once every four years, along with the most generous cash award in the field), "Leif Ove's quiet and modest personality belies his performances of music, which are anything but."