As soon as musicians touch an instrument, the dead object suddenly turns out to be a living being. They whisper to it in their heads and it answers. The famous pianist Vladimir Horowitz often called out to his grand piano: “Then sing. Sing!” Long marriages develop between string players and their violins, cellos and double basses. The traveling pianist, on the other hand, has a different sweetheart in every city. And Kristian Bezuidenhout (43) will even have to divide his attention next Monday between a trio in the Concertgebouw’s Great Pianists series.
He introduces the audience to three classical beauties: fortepianos from the first half of the nineteenth century, forerunners of the modern grand piano. They all have a distinct character. The eldest is the somewhat irritable Lagrassa, “an inappropriate uncle or aunt who usually says the wrong thing at parties,” says Bezuidenhout. “Experience your mastery to the limit.”
Opposite her is Graf, ten years her junior, warm, generous, gentle, listening to what you ask. “No wonder a composer like Schubert saw this grand piano as essential to the expression of his imagination, which is tender and singing.” And finally – another generation later – there is an Erard, proud and expressive. “Where De Graf opens her arms and invites people into her intimate circle of warmth, Erard presents herself as a player of a large audience, she scatters her notes into the room.”
Far from the Vienna of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and the Leipzig of Clara Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn – composers he interprets on Monday – Kristian Bezuidenhout was born in the late 1970s in the South African mining town of Dundee. His parents were entrepreneurs who loved classical music and believed that piano lessons were part of a broad upbringing. “My grandmother might have been able to become a pianist,” he says, “but she left Germany for Angola to become a governess.”
Around the age of nine, the Bezuidenhouts left Apartheid-torn South Africa and emigrated to Brisbane, Australia. At school he was able to resume his piano lessons. “My parents never gave me the feeling that they had in mind a future as a concert pianist. I know quite a few colleagues who did. And that leaves its mark.”
And then, a year later, he saw the feature film Amadeus, about the life of Mozart. “Nothing had ever allowed me to experience such a deep love for music,” he says. “The indescribable beauty of all those shreds of Mozart and its wonderful eloquence. That music anchored itself deep in me.”
The first months it was difficult to get a nice sound out of it at all.
Another two years later, record label Philips commemorated Mozart’s two hundredth anniversary with a complete CD edition of all his work. Collecting them grew into an obsession. Then, for the first time, he heard a fortepiano played by his later teacher Malcolm Bilson.
“The instrument seemed a bit thin and boring to me at first, because my ears were used to the full and powerful singing voice of the Steinway. But I was captivated by the orchestral sound, the palette of beautiful colors that conductor John Eliot Gardiner managed to elicit from his agile musicians. I wanted this too, and with these people.”
Discouraging
Through a summer course in the US, he ended up at the Eastman School of Music, where he focused on the harpsichord, and then on the fortepiano. “Sometimes I wanted to give up because it was so daunting. The first months it was already heavy enough to get a nice sound out of it at all. And then I hadn’t even tried Beethoven on it.”
But Bezuidenhout persevered. “There was the rock-solid belief that the fortepiano was the instrument into which I could throw my heart and soul. And where to find the real Mozart. You need to develop a deep understanding of these instruments. They are so demanding. The 1780 Mozart fortepiano is merciless, it takes no prisoners. It exposes all your weaknesses. For the best sound you have to be in control and relaxed at the same time.”
As a teenager he was mainly drawn to virtuosity, nowadays it is the androgynous slow movements that Bezuidenhout loves. “In those places, a composer gives you a glimpse into his heart. Mozart and Schubert are masters at it. That longing or sadness that is in each of us, without us knowing exactly what it is. Both composers struggled with feelings of alienation from society. They can let self-consciousness reign on the surface in one piece, while at the same time you hear the undercurrent of doubt.”
Kristian Bezuidenhout plays Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Clara Schumann and Mendelssohn on three fortepianos in the series Great Pianists, on 9/1 in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam.