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For this week's revised program, Leif Ove Andsnes will perform works by Mozart, including the Piano Concerto No. 23, featured on the recently released disc “Mozart Momentum 1786,” with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Please note: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra program featuring Leif Ove Andsnes has changed. Instead of the originally scheduled Britten Piano Concerto, he will perform three Mozart works, Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 23 and the solo piece Rondo in D Major, K. 485. He will conduct the concertos from the keyboard. Lina González-Granados, replacing Riccardo Muti, who has tested positive for COVID-19, will lead the CSO in overtures from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Acclaimed pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has finally returned to Chicago for the first time since fall 2019, when he gave his last set of concerts in at Orchestra Hall.
Since his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1993 at the Ravinia Festival, the Norwegian-born pianist had regularly performed with the ensemble. Then starting in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to end his public performances. Andsnes was supposed to appear with the New York Philharmonic in October 2021, but was unable to obtain a visa because of the pandemic, so he had to delay American concerts until now. “I’ve been really excited to come back,” he said.
After appearances April 1 and 3 with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Andsnes will join Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on April 7-9 and 12 for a program featuring Benjamin Britten’s Piano Concerto, Op. 13. The famed 20th-century British composer wrote the work in 1938 and served as soloist for its premiere that same year. He composed a replacement for its third movement in 1946, and it is that version that is performed today. Andsnes got to know the work through a famous recording of a 1970 performance featuring the English Chamber Orchestra with Sviatoslav Richter as soloist and Britten as conductor. Andsnes first performed it when he was around 22, revisiting it occasionally since.
“At that moment I was very much into doing pieces that not everybody else was doing,” he said. “We pianists have so much great music available, but there is just a small percentage that is very famous. So there are so many joys to find. The Britten Concerto wasn’t much played, and it still isn’t all that much played.”
From 2012 through 2015, Andsnes devoted much of his time to what he called “The Beethoven Journey,” a project that took him to 108 cities in 27 countries for more than 230 performances. He put the emphasis on the composer’s five piano concertos but also performed eight or 10 of his sonatas and some of his chamber music.
For many of the concerts, he collaborated with the Berlin-based Mahler Chamber Orchestra. They started performing together in May 2012 and went on to record the complete set of concertos, with their version of the Second and Fourth concertos winning both the Concerto Award and Recording of the Year Award from BBC Music Magazine in 2015.
"When the soloist enters, it’s with a lonely singing line that you could imagine as a human being separated from the rest of society, and that is completely new in the genre.” — Leif Ove Andsnes on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20
Andsnes has followed up on “The Beethoven Journey” with another massive undertaking featuring the Mahler Chamber Orchestra titled “Mozart Momentum 1785/1786.” It began in May 2019 in Frankfurt and was supposed to run through this year, but like everything else in the performing-arts world, the undertaking was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. The first of two related recordings, a two-CD set titled “Mozart Momentum 1785” was named one of the best classical albums of 2021 by Gramophone magazine.
That second disc, which focuses on 1786 and includes performances of the Piano Concertos Nos. 23 and 24, recorded in the Vienna Musikverein, is set for release on April 8. In this project, which is more contained than what he did with Beethoven, Andsnes is focusing on just two pivotal years of Mozart’s career in Vienna — 1785 and 1786 — emphasizing piano concertos, as he did with Beethoven, and also focusing on solo and chamber works. “I think that is interesting, because it is such a long time ago, and it’s very difficult to have a clear idea of this music and what it meant at that time,” he said. “I’ve been researching quite a bit and obviously studying all these pieces from this time.”
Mozart composed 27 piano concertos, which are considered among his most important and influential creations, and Andsnes believes that the ones composed during these two years were critical to the development of the form. Starting at the beginning of 1785, the composer begins to separate the soloist from the orchestra more than he did previously. “Very poignantly, in Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, the orchestra plays very restless, dramatic music at the beginning of the concerto, and then when the soloist enters, it’s with completely different music. It’s with a lonely singing line that you could imagine as a human being separated from the rest of society, and that is completely new in the genre. So by doing this, Mozart really expands the storytelling and the psychological drama. Therefore, that is real momentum. That is a real moment.”
Andsnes likes these kinds of concentrated looks at one composer, because he feels like he is too often jumping from one style or musical period to another. “I decided to do this big Beethoven project, because even if I’d played a lot of Beethoven, I felt like I needed to have a period of time with that vocabulary, with him, almost exclusively,” he said. “I’m glad I did, because the music became so much about freedom and possibilities. Earlier, I thought about structure and form and the revolutionary quality of Beethoven’s music, but suddenly I felt there was so much more. It embraced me in a different way after working intensely for these three years.”
Unlike some star pianists who focus almost exclusively on solo recitals and orchestral appearances, Andsnes has always made chamber music of all kinds a significant part of his music-making. “From the time I entered the conservatory in Bergen when I was 16, and I discovered chamber music, I just thought this is the greatest — to be able to discover together with one or two or three other persons. And I wouldn’t be without it. I wouldn’t be without that incredible repertoire. I can’t imagine just being a solo pianist and keeping that world at a distance.”
One of the latest examples of his chamber collaborations is a recording of 28 of the mostly little-known art songs of Edvard Grieg with Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen. Andsnes believes the 150 works in this form are the greatest creations of this quintessentially Norwegian composer, who is best known for his Piano Concerto and incidental music for Peer Gynt. The album was one those rare bright spots in the pandemic. Because of the cancellations associated with COVID-19 pandemic, the two artists had much more time to rehearse and record the album. “It’s been a wonderful process,” he said. “I admire her so much. What she can do with that dark, velvety voice is just unbelievable.”
The disc was released in January on the Decca Classics and received a five-star review in London’s Daily Mail. “If you have never invested in an art-song album before, this could be a good first buy,” wrote music critic David Mellor. “I can’t imagine a better start to my 2022 than listening to this marvelous album. More, please.”
