Interview, Steven Osborne on Beethoven

I've been looking forward to the prospect of Steven Osborne's take on Beethoven's radical Hammerklavier Sonata on Hyperion for several months now, as the Scottish pianist has won considerable acclaim in contemporary repertoire and Beethoven: reviewing his disc of the Moonlight, Waldstein and Pathétique Sonatas on the same label back in 2010, The Times observed that 'Osborne’s brisk contemporary approach never distorts the traditional Beethoven glories', whilst The Guardian praised his 'very special ability to make music that you thought you knew inside out seem fresh and totally alive'.

Steven's recently completed the first stint of his CBSO artistic residency down the road from us in Birmingham, where he performed works by Messiaen and Beethoven (any readers who are reasonably local might like to know that he'll be back for Tippett, Britten and Rachmaninov early next year), so I took the opportunity to catch up with him and find out more about the process of getting under the skin of such a colossal and unbiddable work…

You kicked off your Birmingham residency by performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the CBSO – obviously this is a much earlier work than the three sonatas on your new recording, but how much cross-fertilisation do you think there is between the concertos and sonatas in general?

With Beethoven for me, it’s not so much a question of the differences in genre as of differences between each individual work: there are hardly any other composers that have quite so much distinctiveness between each piece (even between each of the sonatas, particularly as it gets later), and each of the concertos is so very different from the other in terms of the character. So really it feels more like approaching each piece entirely on its own terms – to an extent that’s true of any music, but with Beethoven it’s absolutely crucial. The concept of the pieces [on this recording] are enormously different – in the most banal terms, one’s got two, movements, one’s got three, one [the Hammerklavier] has got four or five depending how you look at it, but the shape of them is so radically different. There’s an incredible thing with Beethoven, this ability to not go through the motions but to fundamentally create something each time – for instance, the E minor sonata is in just two movements, and there’s this profound contrast between the tautness of the first movement and the expansiveness of the second. The A major sonata is fairly improvisatory in many ways, particularly in the first movement, and in the third movement there’s a lot of searching for direction before it emerges into this incredibly vibrant last movement. There’s a certain connection with the Hammerklavier there: obviously there’s the fugue in its last movement and there’s a little fugue in the A major’s last movement, but also before both of those movements there’s this improvisatory section – it’s more obvious in the Hammerklavier, where it’s absolutely searching, but in the A major it’s pretty much true as well. So you can make these kind of formal connections, but the feeling of the pieces is so totally different: the A major has quite a lot of amiability and the Hammerklavier is much more extreme, in fact really on the edge of sanity!

Tell me a bit about your relationship with the Hammerklavier: how and when did you first encounter the piece, and when did you start work on it yourself?

It wasn’t all that long ago, maybe four years – I’d somehow avoided the piece for a long time. My piano teacher at music college said I should learn it, and I looked at it and just didn’t connect to it at all. But when I was at college I heard Charles Rosen play it when he came to Manchester, and it was an unbelievably striking concert: it still didn’t make me want to play the piece, but it made me think ‘WOW, this is really quite something’!. But about four years ago, I got the bug out of nowhere – I honestly don’t know why but I suddenly knew I really wanted to play it. I’ve always been attracted to challenges, things that are on the extreme of what’s physically possible, but more than just the physical challenge there’s the intellectual challenge of the piece: how do you digest a work like this and make it meaningful? So that made me really curious – over the years I’ve played a lot of Beethoven’ s music and got used to trusting his instincts, because even when he does something strange there’s a point to it, so there must be a real point to how extreme this piece is. So I was very excited to go through that process, and it was incredibly hard work but it was really, really worth it!

You perform a lot of twentieth-century repertoire - how much does that feed into working on a much earlier but extremly radical piece like the Hammerklavier?

As an aside, apparently an Oxford or Cambridge entrance exam for the undergraduate music programme, they showed students a page for the Grosse Fuge and a page from a Bartók string quartet and they had to identify which was which; I think that's a lovely way of illustrating that there’s certainly a sense in which late Beethoven is looking very, very far forward in terms of how extreme his writing can be. But ultimately you have to take each piece on its own terms – something that’s modern might actually feel relatively conventional, something that’s older might feel more on the edge of something disturbed, with its own very striking emotional world.

You mentioned Charles Rosen’s live interpretation as a source of inspiration – are there any particular recordings that have influenced your thinking about the piece?

I really don’t listen much to recordings when I’m preparing something, but that Rosen concert is absolutely seared on my memory – I couldn’t get the impact of the live performance out of my head. It really felt like hearing Beethoven play. So in many ways (and this is really quite unusual for me) I was trying to recreate something like the feeling that I had when I heard him play it, because I just thought ‘I can’t really surpass this’. Funnily enough, I’ve listened to recordings of Mr Rosen playing it a lot since then, and it’s really different from how I remember it. There’s a lot that’s different to how I do it, and I guess you can’t avoid the fact that your basic psychological make-up’s different and you make different choices. But what really struck me about his playing was how extremely radical the piece was. I remember one particular moment totally vividly, which was in the first half of the fugue: there are what seem like unending semiquavers which build up to this unbelievably frenetic climax, and there’s this single chord like slamming a door shut and then silence and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! And then there’s a beautiful slow supplementary theme that gets treated fugally, and I so wanted to convey that impression, that shock, in my own interpretation.