Interview with Pianist Hélène Grimaud

Hélène Grimaud, the pianist whom Le Figaro dubbed “perhaps the most fascinating artist of our age”, apologises that her overalls smell of deer meat. She has, she explains, been feeding her wolves. While she goes back into the fenced compound with them, she suggests I stay outside. “They’re actually not as dangerous as you might think. But they are socially ambitious, and might attack if they sense you are weak". I feel weak, suddenly.

I’m more than happy to stay outside the fence with her pet German shepherd, Eno (named after the “sonic landscaper” and U2 producer). As she hugs a younger wolf called Kyla, she tells me how the wolves’ social structure is much more similar to ours than to that of other primates, pointing out the alpha male, Apache, and alpha female, Lucas.

She says she hates people to think her collection of wolves is some kind of eccentric hobby. It’s a serious conservation and educational project - schoolchildren come to see her wolves. “As with classical music, education is the key. Wolves are an endangered species and if we can’t find a way to live with other species, how are we going to get along with each other?”

Her first encounter with a wolf was in 1991 (my first encounter with Grimaud and her wolves was in 2002) by accident in Florida - it was actually part she-wolf and part dog, she now says, “probably not a real wolf”, but the chemistry was immediate.

“She came up to my left hand and sniffed it,” she writes in her memoir Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves. “I merely stretched out my fingers and, all by herself, she slid her head and then her shoulders under my palm. I felt a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body. The single point of contact radiated throughout my arm and chest, and filled me with gentleness, ... a most compelling gentleness, which awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force."  Her activities with wolves had liberated her as a pianist, she writes. “I had become a wild woman."

I ask her if she sees herself as an alpha female, a leader of the pack. “I’m strong-willed, certainly.” As she says this, I can’t help feeling she is sensing my weakness. She is, let’s face it, more talented, successful, famous and better-looking - but once we have both accepted that she is superior and the hierarchy is established, we relax and get on with the interview.

Back at her small house in the country, about an hour’s drive north of New York (she now spends most of her time in Europe and has a place in Berlin) she admits she is “inflexible” about certain things, particularly repertoire. She edits her own recordings, makes her own travel arrangements, vets her photographs, only accepts about 60 dates a year (she doesn’t want to be away from the wolves too long and wants to keep fresh) and tells me she would never accept a date if the proposed repertoire didn’t “resonate” with her.

While she has played everything from Gershwin to Bartok, she has concentrated on romantic music - particularly Brahms and Rachmaninov, although she has recently been focusing on Bach a lot.  Whatever her working method, it has paid off, from the beginning of her career. The New York Times said her Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto was “bold, assured and properly rhapsodic” and recommended it as one of the preferred recorded versions of the work - considerable praise, bearing in mind it has been recorded by some truly great pianists, from Rachmaninov himself to Mikhail Rudy and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

That Rachmaninov disc was her first recording, made for the Japanese label Denon when she was only, amazingly, 15 - but she has since disavowed it. Although it won a French Grand Prix du Disque the next year, she writes, “It took me four years — four years of purgatory — before I returned to Rachmaninov."

It was Ashkenazy who conducted her recording of the piece - and will be conducting it this week’s concert at the South Bank. Does she ever feel at least a little intimidated? “I could have been, but it didn’t cross my mind. And I like pianist-conductors. They give you a freedom - for example, on a tricky run it can be hard for the conductor to catch the pianist, but someone who knows the piano is better able to know how and when it will end." Her playing has an impact wider than the normal classical audience – when I saw her perform the Rach 2 a few years ago at the South Bank I took along an Algerian jazz-rapper called Kad Achouri, who immediately understood what she was trying to do.

As you might expect, neither her personal style nor her playing could be called dainty. She has a fairly severe look on stage and for someone who is quite petite she manages to combine an unexpectedly muscular approach with a sweeping lyricism. Despite being French, she hardly plays any French music, finding much of it, such as Debussy, “too pretty for me, although I like to listen to it”. She makes an exception for Ravel’s Concerto in G, which is a regular part of her repertoire.

She tells me that, while she was born in France, her background is a mixture of “Italian, German, North African and Jewish” - her father was adopted by a Frenchman at the end of the war. He is a retired Italian and Latin university teacher who married one of his graduate students. She never met her grandparents and when I ask her about this she clams up, saying “you really don’t want to know”. There was, she says, “a lot of suffering” in the family. “Considering how fucked up their childhood was, I’m proud of them. They provided inspiration, stability and strength."

I tell her I read an American psychologist who said that in a severely damaged family, the children often self-destruct in some way or, less often, are extremely gifted. “The greater the wound,” he put it, “the greater the potential gift." “That’s absolutely true - one of the few justices in life,” she says, her tough persona slipping for a moment. “Even if it may be an uphill battle, you can’t keep blaming your childhood. At some point you have to choose what to do with your everyday life and decide what you want to accomplish."

She says she was an “extremely agitated” child. “Without music, I could easily have been a delinquent of some kind. Music changed my life - it gave me a sense of purpose and direction. It saved me. The wolves saved me too."

What is extraordinary is that she only began playing the piano at the relatively advanced age of nine. Three years later, she had entered the Paris Conservatoire (the next year the minimum entrance was raised to 15) and at 15 there was the Rachmaninov recording. In the same year, despite rebelling against “the bureaucratic rigidity” of the French system, she won first prize at the conservatory and defied her teachers to enter and make the final of the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

She quit the conservatory and had no teacher - but by then had attracted the interest of older performers such as Daniel Barenboim, Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich. She said she had felt like “an extra-terrestrial”, but these other performers made her realise she “was not the only one”.

Her eccentricities included the fact that for years she had only a “beat-up” upright piano at home, despite playing at many of the most prestigious venues in the world. “I thought it was more important to have a clear mental image of what you want to do. I didn’t want to become a slave to a beautiful sound and the tactile pleasure of finding colours on the keyboard.” Eventually, she relented and bought an expensive Steinway.

Being a "gauchère" or left-handed has also given her a particular view of piano-playing. “All I can tell you is it’s true the left hand is quite present in my playing, sometimes to the detriment of the right so I guess everything that is an advantage is also potentially a disadvantage... but maybe it’s a different way of thinking too - maybe it leads to a more intuitive approach to life, who knows?” She also has the synaesthetic ability to see music in colour, like Scriabin and quite a few other musicians. “It’s not every time I make or listen to music but it’s quite often and it’s powerfully evocative but I’m not sure it adds anything to the experience. If anything, it’s more an indication that the mind, body and soul are aligned - which of course is a beautiful thing because it’s so rare.”

As she explained to music journalist Michael Church, “It was when I was 11, and working on the F sharp major Prelude from the first book of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier - I perceived something that was very bright, between red and orange, very warm and vivid: an almost shapeless stain, rather like what you would see in the recording control-room if the image of sound were projected on a screen. But as numbers had always had colours for me - two was yellow, four was red, five was green - and as I have always found music evocative, I didn’t regard this as unusual. It was more the idea of colour than colour itself. Certain pieces always project me into a particular colour-world. Sometimes it’s a result of the tonality - C minor is black, and D minor, the key that has always been closest to me, being the most dramatic and poignant is blue.”

While she had contemporary composers like Arvo Pärt to write for her, she isn’t much of a fan of modern composers unless “it is something I can’t live without”. What really excites her is live performance. For a self-described “control freak” she says the real point of a live concert is actually to “lose control”. Her criticism of other pianists is their unwillingness to take chances.

“Live music has to be highly personal and has to take risks in the moment - if it’s too safe, classical music will die and I would have no problem with it disappearing. It’s scary and frightening putting everything on the line, but the notion that a performance has to be clean and with no wrong notes is missing the point. The most beautiful performances are often the most dirty - it’s about the strength of the line and the musical discourse as well. But if there is nothing out of the ordinary and spontaneous then you may as well stay at home and listen to the CD.”

She has a surprisingly mystical view of live music, saying that, on certain nights, she is in “an altered state . . . It’s like a visitation, some sort of black magic happens. You commune not just with the composer but with the inner world of the audience. You have to let go, and something new happens - and that is what makes it all worthwhile.”

Hélène Grimaud plays Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8 at the Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra on 22 September.  Book online here.