Mussorgsky's score for Pictures at an Exhibition
Onto how you approach learning and playing a
piece like this, it's obviously monstrous in size
and complexity. How do you find you get into the
zone, do you have any kind of ritual that you do?
I find that calmness and concentration are very,
very important. One can of course practise for 12 or
14 hours a day. I think that for me that's
counterproductive. I think one can get a lot done in
3 or 4 hours. I think that taking regular breaks is
important, because this is such dense music. Some
music I just love the first time I hear it. With
something like Pictures at an Exhibition I admire it,
and I'm in awe of it, but a lot of it I'm
uncomfortable with, so I really need those breaks
quite a lot. In terms of the learning of the notes
there's no great magic to that, it's repetition - but
that's in many ways the easy part, because it's the
amalgamation, it's the intellectual and emotional
coming together of a sense of unity. How are you
going to sustain 40-plus minutes of some of the
densest music ever written?
And it's all by heart isn't it, you don't read off
the music in performance or anything like that?
No, and there's a reason for that. It makes it much
more frightening, but conversely it gives an
electricity to the performance, and you really don't
want to be looking up, you just want to be searching
within. For a piece like that you don't even want to
be thinking what does the audience want me to be
playing this like. You can't give a moment's thought
to that, you have to be absolutely - to the extent that
you can as a human being - true and authentic to
yourself.
What kind of effect does that have on your
mindset afterwards? I know that I've spoken to
you a couple of times after recitals, and you're
kind of a space cadet...
It's