He is one of the grand masters of the piano: Piotr Anderszewski gives a recital at Beethovenfest 2024 with a (partly) surprise programme based around the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
A puzzle of a higher order: »There are two or three parts, sometimes there are four. But you only have two hands and have to mould these individual parts like individual characters,« says pianist Piotr Anderszewski about the challenges of Johann Sebastian Bach’s piano music.
For several years now, Anderszewski, who was born in Warsaw and has lived in Paris for many years, has regularly returned to Bach’s music. »There is always a story, an emotional narrative in these works.« And he wants to make this audible. This is why his Bach never sounds analytical, never intellectual, but rather like something that has been experienced.
Anderszewski has avoided the straight and narrow path in his career. In 1990, at the prestigious Leeds Piano Competition, the then 21-year-old appeared as a no-name and only had two works to offer: Beethoven’s »Diabelli Variations« and Anton Webern’s Variations op. 27. His Beethoven performance quickly made him a co-favourite. Then Webern. In the middle of this, the piano suddenly falls silent. Anderszewski breaks off, gets up and leaves. A blackout? No, his playing was not perfect enough for him, he says afterwards.
As a child, he listens to Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. »Those are the first musical impressions I remember. My parents later told me that it was the only way to keep me quiet.« Anderszewski later fled the Polish countryside, first to the United States thanks to a scholarship, then to the big city, first London, then Paris – because the city offered him solitude. »You can perhaps find solitude better in the big cities.«
In conversation, Anderszewski is a quiet man. He is unconventionally specific, then elegantly evasive. He once said that concerts are like long monologues for him. Does he like to monologue? No, not at all. »I can be very economical with words.«
Piotr Anderszewski prefers to let the music do the talking. His repertoire is rather limited. You regularly encounter Mozart in his programmes, as well as Béla Bartók and Karol Szymanowski, probably the most important Polish composer after Chopin.
»Everything about him is extraordinary, beyond the norm,« French filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon once said. Piotr Anderszewski is a pianist who utilises the possibilities of the piano to perfection in order to express his musical ideas. He often comes across as unpredictable – and that is exactly what he wants to be: an individualist who does not allow himself to be influenced by anything or anyone. Anderszewski is so critical that he sometimes finds it difficult to fulfil his own expectations – even when the audience thinks he has long since reached his goal. On the other hand, he is, as the daily newspaper »Die Welt« once wrote, »a natural gambler, a juggler, an equilibrist who reinvents himself every evening on the podium. Without a net. He plays hymnal and brittle, virtuosic and piercing, dazzlingly extroverted and then suddenly disappears into his own labyrinths.«
This brings us back to Johann Sebastian Bach. Does this music go straight to his heart? »No. I don’t even understand it. But it gives me the greatest possible freedom to understand something about it. This music is like a code.« Anderszewski’s Bach playing has a rustic motoric quality at times, but is characterised by an incorruptible clarity. »Fortunately, Bach can be played in so many different ways. Every different tempo turns his works into a completely different piece. He constantly surpasses us. It constantly surpasses us. The intelligence of this music always seems to me to be greater than our own abilities.« Piotr Anderszewski is also true to himself in this respect, as a perfectionist with understatement.