In Mozart Momentum Leif Ove Andsnes explores a variety of the composer’s masterpieces written in two prolific years – 1785 and 1786. Here, the pianist discusses the inspiration behind the project with Michael Church
PHOTOGRAPHY: HELGE HANSEN
Our story begins with a 14-year-old Norwegian boy making his debut with a professional orchestra in Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto, K466. The experience, he recalls, took him aback: ‘It was a shock to have all this sound so closely around me – it scared me.’ Fast forward to 2007, and he was recording the same piece with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Though when he listens now to that recording, he isn’t impressed: ‘What I was doing, and what the orchestra was doing, didn’t cohere enough. My playing was flashy, going for effects rather than integrating itself into a bigger drama.’
Fast forward once more to today, and the ruthlessly self-critical Leif Ove Andsnes has recorded this work yet again, and is going to direct it from the keyboard at the Proms. He’s also making it the centrepiece for a multi-faceted project entitled Mozart Momentum, whose origins lie in a similar project which he dubbed The Beethoven Journey, and which had its own off-beat genesis.
ANDSNES HAD BEEN STAYING IN a hotel in Brazil where the lifts played snatches of Beethoven’s First and Second Piano Concertos, and at first he thought it would drive him mad. ‘But the more I listened,’ he tells me on Zoom, ‘the more I loved hearing short fragments of pieces that are so familiar that we take them for granted: I fell in love again with this music.’ So in tandem with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) he devised a ‘journey’ which would take the concertos, plus some sonatas and chamber works, on a tour covering 55 cities in 22 countries.
For a performer used to spreading his musical net promiscuously, the project came as a relief. ‘It was liberating to have only one style, one musical language to work in. And it taught me how far you could go with one ensemble if you work as intensely as I was doing with the MCO. You had the feeling that everybody was striving for the same common goal. If you play with that multi-national orchestra, you have to accept their lifestyle. Because they don’t have a geographical base, they are constantly touring. They make their decisions communally, and that’s why every member feels responsibility for the outcome.’
The orchestra’s leader is Matthew Truscott, whose professionalism Andsnes praises to the skies: ‘When he joined the project, everything came together in a way it hadn’t before.’ Truscott reciproc
