Hélène Grimaud

Another pianist of Sephardic Jewish ancestry is Hélène Grimaud. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1969, Grimaud is an exceptionally beautiful woman, which unfairly put me off her at first. I thought she might be being marketed because of her face.

I suppose it helps, but there is more to her than beauty. There are wolves, for a start. Grimaud co-founded a wolf sanctuary in the States and apparently remains very committed to it.

An interesting choice, wolves.

She has a fairly wide repertoire, covering Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Bartok, Pärt and Corigliano. A generous set of recordings issued very cheaply by Brilliant Classics includes some that date from her mid teens; she was playing all sorts when she was still very young.

She plays with great sweep and freedom and has a distinctive sound. A hyper-clarity has been in vogue for some time. Perhaps it started with Pollini’s astonishing Chopin Etudes, but you can hear it everywhere now, in Kissin’s brittle, crystalline fingerwork or Hamelin’s pianistic anatomy lessons.

Grimaud uses lots of pedal, though. She allows the inner lines of harmony to become desynchronised causing a slightly clattering and thick texture. She plays the middle and lower registers of the keyboard with weight producing a voluptuous sound. She accents boldly and uses rubato liberally.

These are characteristics that most recent pianists seem to regard as faults. Clean and crisp chords, a minimal interference with rhythm and accents designed not to draw attention to themselves are the order of the day. Grimaud breaks all these rules, yet the sound she makes is gorgeous. She is an exceptionally beautiful pianist. And for all her freedom with rhythm, her performances have great impetus and exhilarating life. Not the Argerich push, but a natural topple like a waterfall.

I think her performance of the Brahms 3rd Piano Sonata is the best I know. It’s a piece that seems badly written, misjudged, in many versions, pompous and heavy, but Grimaud’s way with its many flourishes works better than anyone I know (apart, perhaps, from an LP I have of an Edwin Fischer version, that probably doesn’t count because it’s from a piano roll).

Her album of Chopin’s and Rachmaninoff’s 2nd sonatas makes me wish the word ravishing hadn’t been so mishandled. Give it a good listening and I think you might find words intrusive. There is, though, an extraordinary essay by Grimaud on death included in the liner notes.

And today I listened to a recording of Dichterliebe by Grimaud and the cellist Jan Vogler. By the half way mark I stopped missing the words and the human voice and looked forwards to hearing how different each song sounded as an instrumental.

Always interesting, always original, old fashioned in a very good way (I think she reminds me of Moiseiwitsch more than anyone else) and with that freedom that inspires because it is infectious. Even in the stuffy world of classical music it appears that it is possible to be yourself.

[ On my browser, if you click on the ‘watch it on YouTube’ button on the bottom right, you will be able to watch without the horrible video quality.]