The speaker reflects on how Iceland's volatile, isolated environment fostered a childhood of creative focus, free from global comparisons. Their foundational piano education emphasized joy and spiritual connection over technical rigor, instilling music as a personal spirituality. They distinguish between live performance—a variable, communal experience—and the private intimacy of studio recording, expressing a desire to shift toward more studio work. A central theme is the interpretation of Bach's music, described as a "free country" where the performer becomes a co-creator, making specific decisions that bring the timeless score into a modern context. The speaker argues that all artistic interpretation is filtered through contemporary experience and personal history, and that detailed preparation is necessary to achieve genuine, improvisatory freedom in performance, which varies greatly with each venue and audience.
[Music] I think there's a certain kind of instability about an island in that specific location and the North Atlantic Ocean with the kind of volcanic eruptions every other every third year it seems these days and the earthquakes and the high contrast between the seasons. You know we have basically two seasons the dark and the bright season. The winter and the summer and every year the idea of autumn and spring is just a deception and we fall for it every year. You know you might have snow in May and you never know what's going to happen. Icelandic winter is May? No Icelandic winter is basically from October. So we basically have we just have summer season like June whatever July, August but it's brief and it's wonderful. You know it has a white night so you know complete daylight is amazing to actually make music at summer solstice in Iceland you know it's amazing but it has the light but it also has the kind of focus of the slightly colder temperatures you know the kind of crispness of the air but I think also growing up in Iceland is a different question to ask like me as opposed to asking my sons because growing up in the 90s is such a in retrospect wonderful thing growing up without the internet without YouTube and without all of it right without Spotify and all those things it's kind of so wonderful to to grow up not aware of anything really outside of here little island and just get the kind of luxury of being the best at playing piano. Building here sort of you know I thought of myself as an international pianist since I was like ten and I wasn't of course yeah but that's how I define that's interesting right that's an interesting idea that you thought of yourself that way at a young age I think it's something that many people have in common who do something like this to define themselves quite early on whether they admitted or not. When I met my first piano teacher I was five and I was actually accompanying my older sister to her music school and we were picking her up or something and I met this lady Erdlass Diffon Stuttis who was a famous person and I was not for her piano teaching but for seeing through mountains and believing in elves and in sort of different worlds. He was very spiritual woman and she asked me would you like to learn how to play the piano and five year-old me said I know how to play the piano. Wow the answers. It was ridiculous. Does it answer? But I felt like I knew how to play the piano my way you know I played the piano yeah so did she become a teacher? She did tell me what it's like learning to play piano from somebody. It was wonderful because she was maybe she was a great teacher and not a great teacher and she was great in that she had just inspired joy with the music so there were not so many mistakes but not so great perhaps because there were so many mistakes so it wasn't the most disciplined we have teaching but she always put me at the end of the day for her schedule so she could spend extra time with me and we would just go on and on and on and I would just play and we would think she was enjoying it as much as I did but it was basically about the fundamental joy of getting that response from the piano just you know having that dialogue with the instrument that started early on so she would never make me play really scales or all the kind of strict technical academic exercises that we then have to go through at some point most of us was just the response to music so I was very lucky in that way and she played for you a little bit now not much almost nothing she would just smile at me yeah that's that was the kind of feeling you know it was for joy it wasn't for suffering was it a feeling of acceptance or how would you describe what you felt from her acceptance absolutely as a good word but I think also just celebration you know so she was a very spiritual woman and you could see how touched she was by the music and that affects you as a child very early on and and you learn from that as much as from the skill of actually playing the piano you learn you know by seeing people being inspired it grows something inside you I believe that now and so I think it was free but you know there were no piano competitions there was no direct comparison I was simply the best there wasn't that school and that's it you know so I would never practice out of duty and my mother was a piano teacher and my father architect and the composer they would rather encourage me to not play the piano quite so much and just go out and play football with my my friends and do whatever just to be a normal kid that was more of the direction you know and there were always whenever there was media attention on me as a kid they would turn it down just to keep everything very very very very private do you remember the first time you played in front of people yeah when I was five six first year and I remember it was hilarious actually because I was told not to forget to bring my music book with me on stage but you know I always memorize things and I learned them by heart so five year old me just thought okay I'm supposed to bring the music book and I brought the book sort of under my hand and then I didn't know what to do with it so I played the whole concert with the book here and my elbow like this I just shut down that playing and then I sort of like took a bow and left the stage and was like what was the people's book so that that's how you do it but I mean playing for people I was always something I looked forward to I didn't realize you know that things could really go wrong so privilege way different is playing the same piece in a room by yourself versus playing it in a beautiful people it's not one experience or two experiences to compare it's like every night it's different just like we are different from day to day so I feel like it's a discovery like every every single concert but then at two sides the introvert and the extra right side you know and I think we need both just like I need the studio which is the introvert side and then I need Carnegie hall which you see which is the extra right side couldn't be without people though you know but I think about this all the time what should be the proportion in my musical life as a pianist's live touring which today is actually quite extensive and then the home time the sort of scheduled time for nothing but then for everything perhaps to happen and I'm drawn more and more to the idea of going into 50/50 splits you know and I think there's something that has been lacking a little bit in my life in the last 10 years it's been incredibly busy yeah basically touring the whole world and trying to get to know my audience and allowing my audience to get to know me a little bit but I see different now I've just turned 40 you know and I see a different decade ahead and I want to really what do I want I think I want to like make Glenn Gould turn in his grave with jealousy of the kind of life in the studio I mean imagine if sort of an ideological man like him would have actually had the luxury of the modern studio with all the creative possibilities that technology affords us yeah so I want to want to go more into that but you know it's a little bit like the studio is where you tell people very confidential things and you whisper your secrets to the microphone the concert is something else it can be very intimate and it can be very personal but it's never entirely intimate there's always three thousand or whatever it is two thousand people whatever the size and so it's so that's always a mix but I'm building my own studio now under my own house it's happening right now in Reykjavík and yeah that is my gift to myself I know you you know that gift very well having built all these studios around the whole world there's something about having a place to make music that is not a corporate environment having windows in the studio is really nice absolutely changes everything yeah I went for the golden ratio in the kind of shoe folks size of that my whole house is gorgeous house in 1960s in Iceland perfect sort of for me timing architecture and we just analyzed the house and I don't know if it was on purpose but the whole house is in the golden ratio my favorite ratio so of course we've done the studio like that as well you say that the your first teacher had a spiritual relationship to music would you say you have a spiritual relationship to music music is my spirituality absolutely yeah how do you describe the connection you and music it's like plants and water you know it's it's my water it feeds you it feeds me yeah do we feed the music I don't think so them we gain from the oxygen I think we get from the water yeah I love it more and more I guess the the older I get and they're closer to death you know we are in our lives the more it seems to matter to me
When I was young, I was a game. And now it is something more than that, you know? Is there ever time when you're playing in front of people where you forget that there are people there all the time? - All the time. - Are you joking? - Yeah, I'm afraid all the time. But I think that's sometimes the aim and sometimes it's not the aim. Sometimes, you know, for instance, if you play in the BBC problems and you have like all these people there and they're just there on the floor with you, you don't really forget about them because they're in your face. But I always, almost always turn my audience into a, it's a very dark room that I have with a very single spotlight, very, very simple setup where I want to have the luxury of being able perhaps to forget about everything and forgetting about myself as well. Sometimes it's just like when I'm playing the Goldberg Variations of Bach, it feels like a meeting with him somewhere in between 2024 and 1741 when the piece was written. You know, it's a strange thing. You know, Philip Glass said, "Mu'swick is a place." You know, I swear, I lost any place to you ever been to. I think it's a wonderful quote. So we go to that place and that's maybe the goal. You mentioned when Bach lived and when I hear you play Bach's music, written 300 years ago, it feels completely modern to me. And I don't completely understand it. You're not changing the music. You're playing the music as it was written. But for some reason, you're bringing something modern to it. Is it something you're aware of or aim for or is it just an organic thing that happens? Well, I'm glad you think it's modern because I feel very much like Bach's music is more modern than anything I play by any living composer. And I work with some of the very finest composers. He seems to me always to be the future why is that? You say that it's true that I don't change the music, but I do change the music because I don't change the notes and the proportions of rhythm inside the score. But that's where it ends because he doesn't write almost anything about how to shape those notes. There are almost no dynamic markings. The tempo markings are so open and so broad. And anyway, what do we know about how people felt the time in the 18th century when the horse was the fastest way of traveling? Of course, Bach couldn't have dreamt about the modern grand piano that I'm using. But I feel like it's a weirdly minimal, maximal sort of tension in Bach, maximal in terms of the greatest musical structures ever created, in my opinion. And minimal, in a sense, that they're completely open. So an old man said to me late in the 20th century that Bach is a free country. Wow, that's beautiful. I've been a stage with me. His name was Gierby Scherbach. It was a very great Hungarian pianist. Bach is a free country. And I think of that all the time. Then I feel like with Bach, you have to take a stance in so many different ways in every single moment in time. In every measure, you make so many decisions in the moment and different in each performance. So when you play the gold-big variations tonight on the road, it's really two different pieces. Yeah, so in a way, it feels you feel very much like a co-creator in a very sort of compositional sense with Bach, even if you're playing his sort of eternal text. You are still in a way creating and such a big part of it. And to play that music, which is built as much on sort of harmonic blocks, but even more on linear, on the horizontal, on the way these voices in the texture, on this polyphony. How you have two, three, four, five voices, so to speak to each other, just like actors on a stage, where you sometimes feel almost like a theater director when you're playing Bach, giving these different voices, their unique roles and allowing some to take the spotlight, but always to keep the supporting actors absolutely alive as in any good staging of a play. That's how it can feel with Bach. You feel sometimes more like a director than a pianist. And to then bring that to the studio, and to think about how we record the piano, which is a very difficult thing to do, actually, with success. To get the three-dimensionality of the piano, as opposed to that very often two-dimensionality and push it in your face, approach of piano recordings, that is one of the most fascinating challenges. And one of the most creative things I know, to me, as a creative dealing with the microphone setup before the Goldberg Variations recording, as perhaps writing my own music or doing whatever, or arranging something, it's so interesting how moving the microphones for centimeter here or there, changes the narrative. For instance, in the Goldbergs, we actually placed, for the first time, I tried this, two mics just above my head, because I wanted to really give people the listeners the impression that they were basically playing the piece themselves, almost. So there is the sound and the way we record with Christopher Tano, he's my dear soulmate producer and Christian Batura, as well my wonderful A&R from Don't You Grab a Phone Universal. The way we do that is such a musical joy. And that's why I mentioned earlier Glenn Gould, and how I wish he had the kind of opportunities that we have today. You know? One of the things that really strikes me as modern about your playing has to do with a rhythmic interpretation. But again, I think, if you look at the music, it hasn't changed, but there's some internal rhythmic thing going on when you play it that's not in Glenn Gould, and that I hear the person playing now, he's heard hip-hop music. He's listened to hip-hop music. I'm not saying it's inspired by hip-hop music, but it's played in a world where hip-hop music exists, and I can feel those inner rhythms that I don't hear in old recordings, even the greatest old recordings. It brings it even more to now. I like the idea of hearing like Kendrick Lamar and the Gouldberg variation. Going back to Gould, his favorite artist in those days in the '70s or '60s was Barbara Streisand. Oh, fantastic. I didn't know that. She's amazing. But yeah, we have to embrace our ties. We can't escape them. That's why I always think it's interesting, but sometimes a little bit arrogant when people pretend to know the correct historical way of playing music, old music, it's so strange. As if the composers would play the Gouldberg variations twice the same, if Bach was here today, Los Angeles coming to Disney Hall, would you play the same tempo, the same expression? Would the piece tell him the same narrative two nights on the row? I bet my right kidney, it's not going to be the same. You know. But I think we have to embrace it. And coming from my little island, Iceland, I think this is one of perks of coming from that island, that we do many different things out of necessity, perhaps. We have very few, and it's a very small and very intense musical scene. I'm not so much a part of it anymore, because I'm just sort of always somewhere out in the world. But as a teenager, I played in a big band, and I've done rock quintet improvisations, a little bit like Emerson, like in Palmer's style. You know, I've done my weird things as well. And I think people back home in the symphony orchestra, almost have played heavy metal on Friday nights, having played a Mahler symphony on a Thursday, which is to be celebrated. You know, I did my duet with Björk, etc. That's like so many. So I think perhaps that has to feed into the way you play music, and perhaps in particular how you play baroque music, and even more in particular how you play it, you want to play. I think he becomes very easily a mirror for those who play him, and for those who listen to him. Yeah, to me, the music is Björk, but your interpretation is not even though it's very by the book. It's like you're not reinventing the wheel. That's what's so interesting to me about it is how it can be so similar and so different at the same time. Yeah. That's my experience as a listener. Sometimes I just think like when you're making a record, and I wonder how you feel about that, like the one thing you need to always be is specific. You know, when you play Bach in terms of rhythm, in terms of the exact voicing of what you're doing, and the exact proportion of time you steal there on that note and then give back in the following measure, how specific can you go? And if you go specific, usually you go honest, because being specific means you have to search somewhere, I think beyond your ego. You know, if you really want to be specific, you go beyond yourself almost. So I think that is sometimes what happens, and I think what you are trying to describe, I think every recording is different, but they all have to be specific. Is everything always intentional, or does it just come out that way sometimes? I think life is incredibly improvesatory. I think sometimes I work really hard, and I'm quite serious about what I do. Yeah.
and I don't ever feel like I'm really working, you know, just I play. But I think I make so many decisions in the process of preparing just in order to forget them in the moment of doing. So, yeah, you study to be able to forget everything in the moment and do something completely different. Because I feel like actually with myself at least maybe I think it might be lack of talent, but I think I actually need to go through that insane process of sometimes overthinking and, you know, over deciding everything in order to surprise myself and allow myself consciousness to sort of take over a little bit. How different are performances for you tonight? Sometimes very different. But pianos are different, yeah, and audiences are different. I mean, when you play, let's just take two cities like West New York and Tokyo. So when you play in Carnegie Hall and Santori Hall, come on to the stage and Carnegie Hall and it's a Friday night and it's a party. And you feel the vibes come on to the stage and you have what I think is the greatest acoustic in the world. Sounds like a cliche because it's Carnegie Hall, but actually that cliche is true. And you play a performance and it's that Friday night in Carnegie Hall with those people in that mode. And then you go to Santori Hall in Tokyo and you have the most unbelievably beautiful audience. And they applaud and the applause is so rapid, you know, they really work for the applause there. And then you sit down and silence like a zippery, you know. When that happens, I always think, "Oh, I've just lost my hearing." It's just like, "Oh God, it's like a vacuum, you know." And then you play and it's a very different occasion. And it becomes sometimes perhaps more sacred, if you can you say, or sort of maybe elevate it. But it's just different and it's not better. Prefer the human element there in Carnegie Hall, you know, even if a cell phone goes off in variation 15 or something. You know, but just these two concerts just to give you one, you know, I played the Galbag Variations now and I don't know, I stopped counting, but I think it's 96 or 7 concerts or something like that. Almost everywhere in the world. I'm not tired with the music because I feel like I'm doing at this point the 85th variation on the Galbag Variations. The piano is a living creature, you know. People don't realize sometimes that one grand piano has 12,000 plus parts. And they are living and breathing, I dare say. It's wood and it's steel and it's iron and it's screws, you know. And it's drinks and every temperature that goes up one degree or two changes the piano. It changes those. Yeah, the piano is a society in a way. And that society is not a staple, and no society is a staple, or should it be? It's very living. So, yeah, if the humidity goes up 5%, I feel it in the piano and that comes through in my music making and the choices I make on stage. Do you think the energy in the audience goes beyond what you hear? You describe two different audiences, one's noisy, one's silent. If you took the sound equation out of it, being in the room with those different groups of people, would it feel different in the room? Yeah, don't you think so? I think so, but I want to know what you think. Yeah, but we're having a dialogue. Well, yeah, I think so inevitably. But I'm more and more interested now also just in the every room as an instrument. I was just reading about Carnegie, I was wondering why do I love it so much? And I found this book, someone sent me a page from a book that is like, I think it must be about, you know, 100 years old, this book. But it did sound measurements, sound duration for different pitches. Turns out that the duration of both the low frequencies and the higher frequencies and everything that are in between in Carnegie Hall is remarkably even. So that the room really resonates basically all over as it does on the stage, you know, close to the instruments, which is so beautiful because most rooms with lower frequencies, they cancel out the smaller birds. Have you played a Disney Hall before? Yeah, many, many times. And how's that experience? It's beautiful, it's completely different because it's a vineyard kind of a setting where you have audience, you know, everywhere around you. So it's beautiful, it's not Carnegie Hall, but it's such a good atmosphere. And how is it different playing Bach in Germany, in Leipzig versus playing it in New York or playing it in Iceland? It's a good question. I think sometimes when you have that much tradition, I sometimes wonder how is it to come from the country or Bach and Beethoven? Bach and Beethoven and Wagner and all of them. When you have that much tradition, I wonder if you bring with yourself slightly more baggage to the occasion. I don't know. I feel like the response, they love the music so dearly in Germany and they're so proud of it. And it's such an amazing crowd I have there. They're so serious about it that perhaps they lose some of their freedom and response to it because it has such a history. It's wonderful sometimes to play for some of my audience like in Vienna, actually, where you do have that history, but I played two nights and on the second night, because the first one sold out quite fast. And then you had all these young people and the Vienna press wrote about what are all those genes doing in our concert hall? Because they were all young people and I thought that was a great response and you felt the difference. I think it can be wonderful not to have too much history. That's why perhaps being a performer or pianist from Iceland in a way the first Icelandic touring pianist, I guess, was solos. It gives me a bit of freedom because I don't have the whole Russian piano school behind me as some of the Russians do. And I don't have the French piano school to worry about. There is no piano school. Do you surprise yourself when you're playing? Yeah. Sometimes you have this moment where you're just sort of observing it from you. I guess you could call it, I don't want to say it, but like almost you go out of yourself. I'm not going to say out of body experience because you're very much in the act of doing it, but sometimes it's almost as if you zone up a few meters and you just sort of observe it. When you fly, I think so many people who do this know that feeling and it's thankfully rare because it then means something when it happens. But there can be also just these moments when the music also takes you in a difficult direction yourself in your own thought process with your memory and your own past experiences and sometimes solos, tragedies. So sometimes when I play parts of the Goldberg variations, I feel like getting a glimpse to what it must feel like to be at the end of your life. And sometimes it brings back pain from my past, of course. I think we all go through that on stage one way or another if we are sincere enough about it and open up to it. But like the Goldberg variations, they can so easily be read like a life cycle if you wish. You can also completely oppose that, but you can see the most, you know, the beautiful area which is like owed to life, birth of something magnificent, precious fragile. And then you have the first 14 variations which all have one thing in common that just used the same chord structure as the area, just this beautiful, simple, G major structure. And they're like 14 different faces in a happy childhood. It doesn't know shadow, you know, doesn't know pain. And then variation 15, quite deep into the piece, hits you in G minor and he sort of goes into the negative light becomes shadow. And we have this sort of unbearable suffering and it's a little bit like in life when we first encounter that. When we first encounter human loss, someone in our family, whatever that is, different for each and every one of us, nothing prepares you for it. And it can feel very much like that in the Goldberg variations, variation 15, just exactly in the middle of the piece. And then you have a break and variation 16 is an overture, like the beginning of something new again. And we have to bounce back, but we are different. We've gone through the tragedy once. And then you have the same thing happening in 21 and 25. And really in variation 25, he does something that is so magnificent that really hard to justify talking about it almost. But he expands time in a way that he sowns in on the courts and what usually a two-minute variation turns into something like a ten-minute variation. And he goes into the most excruciatingly painful process.
chromatic musical language, he goes to the sort of brink of what you can express and how much you can open up that compartment in your soul. So it's a dark compartment. It's so painful. And I think about Bach and I think about the fact that he had lost ten out of twenty children, I think at this point, and he had lost his first wife from, I think she was giving birth. And he had had so much difficulty and in a way modest success. And there he was, I think, his three greatest, not just musician, but perhaps just artists, you know. I don't know if anyone can really match this. And he's all alone, but he bounces back in variation twenty-six, seven, eight, nine, thirty. He sort of goes in a flurry and it just sort of like, you go back and you hold on to it and it becomes this celebration and this sort of, I am going to, you know, emerge from this victorious no matter what, like we think in life. But then the surprising thing happens in the masterstroke where he brings the area back. And it's the exact same notes as in the beginning, but they've taken on a completely different meaning and those same chord structures now reflect those thirty different periods in our lives, these thirty different chapters. And when this piece comes to an end, that's actually, it's strange to say, because we are just in G major and it's just sort of like, goes into the sunset. And it is one of the most tragic moments I know in all of music. And it's tragic sort of on a personal level because you don't want the music to end, you don't want that area to end, you want to hold on to it, just like you want to hold on to life. And you have the feeling when the area comes back that it's just on a mixer board and you sort of like, taking it down and you sort of like, it's been playing, they're all along, it's eternal, it is sort of the foundation of the world in this piece. And you feel your own end is coming, but the area will go on. Just like life goes on, but we do not go on. That's how it can very often feel when you're playing, you go to that place in yourself, you go to that place of personal experience. It's strange things to do with music that somebody else wrote, but while you're in the act of playing the Goldberg Variations, you merge with them in a way that you become them. I think when you play King Lear, you become Lear. And the audience gets to experience just like you do. It's like the power is in the music. Yeah, it's incredible. And you have all these people in the room. And paradoxically, they are absolutely sort of communal together in a collective. And it's the most beautiful thing and human sort of brother and sisterhood you can imagine. At the same time, it's the most individualistic thing in the world because everyone is in their own place. And they're all very often somewhere in their own life story and Bach who reflects that very easily in this piece and in much of his music. He invites you to discover yourself. When you play Beethoven, whom I love almost equally, you're a guest in his world and he invites you to explore different facets of him. But Bach, he becomes your mirror, you know. But it's that thing at the end of the Goldberg Variation when people, everybody wants to hold onto it, which is why the silence is tragic. Did you feel obligated to get into the Goldberg Variations, to record it and to play it? It's a funny thing because it's such a monumental piece and it means so much. But there are a lot of great pieces. And tell me about the decision to do it. Why you chose to do it, why you chose to do it, when you chose to do it. And if you feel any sense of obligation. It's a big question. You know, to give an honest answer to a gift, to sort of go back quite a few years. Yeah. When I first heard this music, I changed the way I thought about not just Bach, but about all music and about recordings. And I think I was 14. I heard the recording of Glenn Gould's on "Columbia" the early one first. And I just remember my hat and my heart sort of exploding. I was 14. It's a great year to hear the Goldberg Variations for the first time. It's just the right time, I think. And up until that point, I had played a lot of Bach, but he was used in my musical upbringing very much to teach good musical manners. How to play even rhythm, control everything, not too much pedal, and know how to do this kind of trick here and that kind of trill there. So Bach was all about his complex music. It was mathematical. I was structural. It wasn't poetic yet to me. Just that connection hadn't been made in my head. And then I heard the Goldberg Variations, Gould's. And I realized that indeed Bach is a free country and that he can be so many things at the same time. And sure, he can be strict, he can be academic, and he can be your stern teacher. That's fine. But he can also be an entertainer. He can just be almost like a carefree virtuoso who wants to just sort of thrill you with his skill. He can be the deep, the most tragic poet and he can be the most brilliant philosopher. And he can be all those things in one piece and almost at the same time. It's unreal when you sort of just realize that these structures are poems. And that they so easily can reflect the human condition in me and you. That happened when I was 14 with the Goldberg Variations. And I started to learn them and I didn't play them public until 16 years later when I was 30. It was out of respect. I just knew that I wasn't ready with them. And I played a lot of other Bach but not the Goldberg Variations in public. Played them when I was 30. And they became a calling card, you know, sort of my career really started in my early 30s. And this was a really important piece. The piece that Universal Budsica was on her to me playing a tiny little concert in Berlin, et cetera. Really? It started that whole chapter in my life. Or those chapters, I should say. But then I took a break from it because something about this piece, the fact that I see it as some childish, but I think of it as the greatest keyboard work of all time. And perhaps the greatest musical work I know of all time. Because of that kind of like burden of association. It almost becomes a trial where you are sort of the prosecutor and the judge and the defendant. You know, you put yourself on the line with the Goldberg Variations. And I thought, I want to do something special for my 40th birthday year. And I want to take a break from the sort of big industry, all this infinite orchestra and this kind of normal seasons. I just want to be alone with my suitcase with Bach. With myself, with the studio, with my family, but take a break from it. Play this one piece on a pilgrimage, just like a workaholics year of our workaholics sabbatical. Playing 100 concerts, but that's how I saw it. And I thought, now I'll record it. I'll face my trial. I'll see where I stand with this material. But once you have recorded it and started the tour, of course, you change your mind infinitely many times about how the music should actually go. So I'm actually thinking about jumping into the studio at the end of the tour now in June. And just recording them again. Yes, great idea. Why not? Great idea. I know there will be different. For sure. They can't help but be different. Maybe you should just come to Iceland then and be a part of that. That sounds like it's a good reason to come to Iceland. Yeah, I can see it. We can have fun with microphones together. How far in advance did you decide 40 years old, global variations? Did it happen quickly or over years had you been thinking about it? You know, I was thinking about it over the years and sort of leading to this point in time for five years. I've been talking about this sort of privately to my team for five years. Yes. I love thinking in those kinds of blocks and trying to understand the different chapters of my own life even we can't. I think it's important to at least show interest in the different chapters and not just do things on automatic. And I've been thinking about turning 40 and looking around in my profession of music but of classical music. And I see very often and also in any music actually. And you see so often people have these creative periods very often in the 20s and sometimes in the 30s. Beyond 40, it certainly happens and you can see incredible creative growth after 40. But very often it's not the case. Very often people settle into a kind of mode of themselves where they have defined themselves perhaps too much. And they don't challenge that definition. And life styles become slightly nicer, you know, everything becomes a little bit more luxurious. And big bands sign contracts not to go too far away from proven success. It's a deal with the devil. But I think about this all the time. And I think about it. How many composers, performers, bands, musicians, colleagues. Do I see that I really look up to in a creative sense in this early stage?
middle age, if we call it like that. How many people manage that? Because I think the tendency is that you become like a luxury handbag, like a Gucci that's being sold by managers to promoters and everybody is very happy about it because the leather is so fine. And the seams are so seamless and it's a gorgeous little thing, you know, but it's a handbag. It doesn't. And the bag is empty. The bag is empty. Exactly. So I think, you know, the artists that we all loved, you know, are the ideological artists, people like in my realm, people like Languld, you know, there's no one greater in that sense from defining the performers creative and sometimes compositional, basically, role in music. And the composer sense, certainly, of course, he owns the bus stand back, but also Wolfgang Amitus Mozart, who was a late bloomer and not very much a prodigy in my mind, you know. And you have people like Igor Stravinsky, you have Ludwig von Beethoven, who seems to, with every work, challenge the foundation of his whole musical worldview. Can we do that in 2024? I don't know, but I think we have to push in that direction. I think it's definitely possible. I think part of it has to do with dedication. One of the things that I see with artists as they get more successful and grow up, their life becomes more complicated and music is no longer the most important thing in their lives. It's a thing they do full-time, but their home life, and it makes sense, you know, you want your home life to be fruitful and important and the center of your life. But that's also at the expense of the obsession with the work that you had when you were younger. Yeah. But I think wisdom comes through experience, and there's an energy in youth that can't be recreated, but there's something that comes from wisdom that's, I'll say, equally magnificent. It's just different. Yeah. But I think also the dedication aspect of it is absolutely key. If you don't treat it as the most important thing, it won't be, and it will diminish. Yes. Maybe it's okay to have a nice home, but you, so many other things, you can get rid of. Yeah. I think when you know that when you're doing music, you're really doing music. Yeah. You know, you're not one foot is in home and one foot is in the music, and you really can be there when you're there. It's really about being present, you know, being in the moment, getting rid of your smartphone, I think. So, a good idea. A hard thing to do. No, I'm trying to sort of think about my next 10 years from 40 to 50, you know, what should happen, what I want to do. I keep going back to my beginning, you know, to composing music, to opening up to the Aftam Summit, of course, but I used to do quite a lot of that when I was just a kid. That's perhaps why I turned so much to Bach as well, because I feel that is sort of like a compositional outlet. In the comfort zone of somebody else's notes, you know, protected environment. How do you think composing impacts your playing? I think, from composing, yes, which is a scary thing to do, because you have an empty page and everybody knows that. I think when you have to make that journey from point A to point B to see, you then start to think differently about the music of all the people that you play. And you start to automatically deconstruct it and think about how it might fantasize, how it might have been written, which is a fantastic thing. When you look at, for instance, Beethoven sketches and you see some of his processes, there's a clumpsy at the beginning. And he starts with these kind of super clumpsy ideas, and then he just works and works and works until he's happy with what he's doing. And sometimes I like that sort of to decompose the music and try to imagine what if I don't know the next note, or the Goldberg variations, what note should come next. And then that note, of course, takes on and adds a significance once you then play it and understand it in that context as opposed to recreate what you heard in a recording from Glenn Gould when you were 14. That's a very important part of looking at it from my perspective. But there are different schools of thought about that. And many people in classical music, they think it's almost frivolous to allow yourself that perspective and to almost think and feel almost like a composer when you're working in the music of others. Because they think that there was a very 20th century idea that the performer in classical music is humble, dedicated, servant to the great master, the composer who died a hundred years ago. But I think to those people, I say, have you tried working with living composers in some of the best living composers in the world, because they changed their minds about tempos, about narratives, about notes, about everything. Of course they do from day to day. It's not. As a working with the living composer certainly makes that that composer is much more flexible. I think it's a beautiful thing then to open the Bach Goldberg variations or Beethoven's sonatas, having just come from a session with John Adams or whoever, you know, Phil Blossard or something. You know, so I think my favorite performers in history, many of them died before 1950, because at that point in history in the early 20th century and certainly in the 19th century, the performer was almost a composer as well. It was just part of your musical foundation. You wrote music and then you could become a famous pianist by playing the musical of others. When Rachmaninoff plays the musical of Chopin, it's amongst authentic Chopin playing, I know, and it's certainly my favorite. Sometimes he takes things of tourist's upside down and a forte becomes a piano, so loud becomes soft and he really takes a lot of beautiful composers in the liberty. He makes the music his own. It really becomes a meeting and a dialogue between Sargeraichmaninoff, the pianist and Chopin, the composer. But it's so authentic. And so, you know, and look at a lot of your horror, it's, you know, at the end of his life, he said he had won the grant which was not to have composed more, because he always played the piano like a composer. That's what people forget, not just like I've played for a show, so he played like a composer. And that's I think what so many of the really big communicators in classical music, I'd rather call them almost communicators than performers, because performers are such a boring word. Communicators, I think more what it's about. Why they've so often had that dimension of composers' perspective. Would you say the composer brings something less technical to the picture? Is the pianist the technical adaptor? Like the craftsman, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I think the composer goes beyond that, because composers don't care about the craftsman's ship, you know, of playing an instrument while most of the time when they're in the act of writing. Of course, you have to write in such a way that it's possible to play it, but yeah, you go beyond that. You go beyond the act of executing a skill to the source of inspiration and the root of the music perhaps. So yeah, I'd say so. Tell me a little bit about the history of recorded classical music. Yeah. Well, it's. I should have prepared before I came here. All right, let me just walk me through as you know it. Walk me through. Well, it starts with Vox Silenters, doesn't it? You know? Well, I think there's a general attitude in the beginning, you know, in the late. The Dautogramophone, my record label is actually, I believe, the oldest record label. I believe it is. In the world, I believe it is. How old is it now? Well, it keeps getting older, doesn't it? But it's. In 28 years, something like this. It's a lot. 0.5 probably on the. You know, they're always counting, you know. But yeah, it's. It's in any case, I think it's maybe 1898. That's going to be my guess. It'll really at the end tail end of the 19th century. And it's beautiful to listen to those recordings. It's almost like shouting like, "Can you hear me?" You know, there's so much noise. It's just like you're sort of in the middle of some disaster. But during that disaster, someone is making music and it's a fascinating thing. But relatively quickly, of course, things became more advanced. And we really started to see classical recordings that we can actually listen to. I'd say already in the 1920s that, you know, I have many records from that time. The problem with recording for so many decades of recording was that the performers were afraid of the microphones. They hated the microphones. And they saw it as almost like a duty-like paying taxes. You know, that you have to do it. But you don't enjoy doing it. And I think very often they felt slightly inhibited and are afraid of errors. And mistakes and wrong notes and scratches and whatever. So I think for the longest time, there was a sort of an apprehension that kind of like a lack of trust. And you think it's because in that case the performance lives on.
versus the temporal nature of doing a concert and tomorrow, that music from last night is over and now you get to do it again. I think so and I think it's because it's a very comparative art form that you're using the same text from night to night, from pianist to pianist. And so how is my Chopin Minute Worlds going to compare to that person's recording with the same piece? It's very. I don't like comparison in art like that. I think it's actually the enemy of art, but it's sort of inevitable when you're having the same score, especially when you're committing it to record. So yeah, I think the moment when this changed was actually going back to our 1955 encounter with Glangoult in the Goldberg Variations. When 22-year-old Glangoult takes this piece, there was absolutely outside of the performed wrapper to our nobody took that piece, seriously, as a concert piece. It was just seen as almost like a philosophical statement by Bach, rather than the work that it actually is. Do you know how many times he recorded the opening area of the Goldberg Variations a piece that is not. you're not going to play so many wrong notes in it, are you? I can't remember it was 19 or 21 takes of the area. He doesn't even do the repeats. So the piece is two or three minutes long. It's a serene area, but it's a change of direction in the way we see the studio and embrace the possibility of that art form and define it as its own. Art form as opposed to a byproduct of. and something you have to do on the side of playing concerts. Did he ever talk about that? Did he ever talk about the thought process? I'm not sure. He loved to talk about the studio, but he always scripted himself. It's one of your few useless things, maybe the jazz records, or things that would inspire him to do what he did. How did he come up with it? It's wonderful thing. I mean, to just. because it's not about like hitting the right notes. It's a statement about idealism of the studio and to dare to go for your ideal in that sense, you know, to have the courage. It's not purely a document of one moment. No. You can go as long as you need to go until you get the thing you want to get. Yeah, it's a creative process of the studio that you and I love, I think. But probably before that, you believe people just came in, did their thing. We're intimidated by the mic, and that was it. I think so. I think so. It was also because the editing possibilities became so vastly better in the 1950s and maybe slightly earlier, but really, that's a turning point in time. So this whole time goes hand in hand. But I think so many people like Rachmaninoff and even if his recordings are unbelievably gorgeous. I think he suffered a little bit in the studio. We're like, "Oh, play this three times now, and hopefully one take will be both glorious from a technical perspective and unbelievably inspired from a musical perspective. And it's just hard to get one take of everything you want in, you know, when you're trying to match your ideal in every millisecond, microsecond of the performance." But I mean, how to talk about the 20th century. I mean, I think this is a real turning point. And then I think we have sort of a glorious period when you're recording almost every day. Almost anything. And if you're with the right label and with the right promoter, it just turns into gold. You know, you could record almost anything in the 70s and 80s and release it on the Oedograma phone and it would just sell. And people were just doing these big symphonic cycles and one after the other and all the Wagner operas and these huge, huge releases. Such a glorious time in a sense. But in another sense, it's also a rather automatic time from an A&R perspective. Because I think the way people thought about recordings was a little bit like going to the library. You know, you go into the alphabet, you find this author and then you find all his works and there they are and they're presented like that. So if you're going to record the Chopin Nocturns, then you record all those nocturns and you always release them from Nocturn 1 to the Nocturnal Last Nocturn. And that's how you do it. And if you're going to do all the Bach inventions, these 15 inventions, you have to then do an album that's just the inventions. But people wouldn't shuffle. They wouldn't look for unexpected context. You know, they wouldn't see music history as that kind of a playground. That's a much more recent idea that started more in the 90s and then it's been a wonderful period for that in the 21st century. Because we've done all the catalog. And at this point, how many people are actually waiting for the next 32 Beethoven pianos and other cycles to be released? I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. But we're looking for the moments. We're looking for magic moments. And the idea of combining the work of composers that are sympathetic, where you learn something new about one composer by what you play next to him. Yeah. I had a discussion with a wonderful musical friend in Iceland who was talking about shuffle and how much she loves to wake up and just open one of those streaming platforms and just start one track that she wants to listen to. And then just see what the hell happens and allow that to become your day in one way. It's sort of like to take 4, 4, or 5 random tracks. I think sometimes shuffle is the most wonderful thing about modern day listening that you go into such unexpected encounters and you put music history in such new context. We forget that's a recent thing. And people did not do that in the 90s. Unless we have a really good DJ. But certainly, so I think the way I've done my albums, certainly for the gramophone has been it's like playlists that I spent a year or two just forming before I even start to work on that. I'm learning the notes. So I have many sort of playlists in my private corner here. Which I'm experimenting with. One of those was Dupesie Ramo where I sort of made Dupesie that everybody thinks is the great impressionist among composers which is like the most superficial thing you can say because he hated that term, by the way. The Dupesies roots were really in the French Baroque. So I sort of focus on the Baroque side of Dupesie. And then I put them right next to Jean-Philippe Ramo, who was the unfunterripe, I think of the French Baroque. And I focus on the futuristic and visionary sides of Ramo. And I put them in the same room together basically, you know, 200 years apart. They're having a dialogue on that album. And you know, my point was that you hardly know who's who. And Ramo in 1760's right music that is so touching and futuristic that it could have been written by Gustal Mahler at the end of the 19th century. And Dupesie, you know, with all of his unbelievable sort of spacious harmonic inventions and everything that he brings, you know, knew, he has that foundation of the Baroque, of the Tocata, of sort of motoric driving structure, you know. So I think very often we simplify history a little bit, you know. How much earlier was Ramo? Ramo was born two years before Bach, so 1683. So basically, yeah, they're far apart, you know. That's interesting. Sixth and 83. I think they're born about 180 years apart, but 180 years is nothing. You know, the older I get, 940. I actually think 180 years isn't so much. And I look back at Bach and I look back at Julius Caesar, or Jesus Christ or something. And actually, it just seems a few grandmother's away. You know? Yeah. But do you think how much music has changed over the 40 years than alive? In tense. So if you now add in tense, it's hard to understand that 180 years in music is a long time. Yeah. Is it though? I mean, sometimes I love folk songs, not like cheesy like stupid folk songs, but I love like folk songs about death and about like serious matters. Yeah. Folk songs about hunger. We have lots of those in Iceland for some reason. And so what I like about folk songs is that they can't be composed by an individual, but they are sort of the collective effort of generations of a grandmother singing to her grandchild, who then sings to their grandchild. And something about these melodies makes me feel time in a strangely sort of compressed way. I feel like the essence of maybe three or four centuries. And all of a sudden they just become like this, which is how our lives are in, you know, blink of an eye in relation to the age of the world, you know, the age of earth. So no, I actually don't think that 180 years is a long time even in music. You know? Think about all the music that we don't know. Sometimes we think that people just started like hitting sticks, you know? But what the hell do we know about what people were doing there 20,000 years ago? You know? We don't know. Why do we think they were so primitive? I don't think so. I don't think we can prove anything. You know. Imagine what if there were singing in these unbeliebable sounds together, the polyphonic calls, you know, to warn of danger. I mean, we have no way of knowing. Yeah. How many pieces did Bach write? Oof. Loads. Yeah, I mean, there's like 1100 opuses almost or, you know, they have different names, but they are opuses. All of them are recorded and made popular or no? No. But they're all pretty good. I mean, they're all basically poems. Yeah. That's a strange thing about him. Something about that structural and such.
side of Bach that opens, maybe we see them as poems because we reflect our own ideas onto the music as well, you know. But I think about him and I think about the fact that he had no audience. He wrote this music like Goldberg Variations for nobody. You know, Goldberg was 14-year-old kid. Really? Yeah. He wasn't the guy who paid for the variations. Well. Goldberg, I think Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, I think I'm saying it is correct. He was a 14-year-old very gifted student of Bach's hapsichordists or instrumentalists. And the Goldberg variations were written for a guy whose name was Kaiser Link. And he was a count, sort of an aristocratic man, some sort of a diplomat I think, who had, in some way, I couldn't fall asleep. And he commissioned Bach to write him variations to sort of Suces sleepless nights. And this little Goldberg, as a story goes, had to take a room next to the count and whenever the count for just sort of like, grow like, "Oh, I can't sleep." You would play with your music. Play with variations 13 or whatever. For a little 14-year-old Goldberg would have to sort of go then and sort of during the night play this for the count to fall asleep. But I think what I love the story on many levels, but what I really love about it is that the variations are not called the Kaiser Link variations, which would be a horrible name anyway, but they're called the Goldberg variations because they are the performers piece. You have to take sort of ownership of it. They become Goldberg's rather than Kaiser Link's. But think about it, Bach is there and he only has four books of music published in his whole lifetime. I think I'm saying this correctly. Meanwhile, you have the big superstar and almost equally wonderful composer, Handel, you know, Georg Friedrich Handel, living in London, I think the biggest name in music, you know, the Taylor Swift of his time or whatever. And basically having that kind of glorious show business life that Bach never had. Bach was always stuck in Leipzig, you know, I think it was the third choice to become the organist of the Thomas Church, you know. People really didn't know who was there, he knew who was there, people didn't. And he had to do so many things. He had to teach Latin, he had to teach violin, hapsichord, conduct the choir, blah blah blah, I had to do million things. And then he also had to write like a big cantata like a piece for like choir and little orchestra, sometimes every one every week for every Sunday and like write out all these parts and you just can't understand. And the man who had, yeah, 20 children and 10 of them died and just the kind of drama of this guy. And meanwhile, from the 21st century perspective, it's to me impossible to understand just from sort of a human eco perspective. There you are, you are that creator, you are that musician, you're Johann Sebastian Bach, you're that man in history. How lonely must it feel to write the Galberg variations for a 14 year old kid and the guy who wants to fall asleep? Can we even comprehend that? And the fact that he writes it not so far away, you know, from the end of his own life and get nine more years to live on his health, was stuck into deteriorate, old music didn't exist as performing music, you know, you wouldn't have concert music with anything that was written older than one or two years, mostly something that was written for the occasion. It was just all new music. And there you are, you have created these whatever, 1100 pieces or more indeed, there of that level. And you're at the end of your life and you have no idea whether anyone will ever know anything about this. Yeah. Well, if we just take it on a human level, of course, our own lives, however famous we might become during our lifetimes, they're a bit like this because we're all going to be forgotten in, you know, just a few years. But how does it feel still for Bach to look around and to see the success and the fame of perhaps lesser composers? Yeah. Well, he writes at the end of every score, SDG, Soulytale, Gloria, you know, Gloria to God. You know, it was a ritual, a religious thing for him to, but I think, well, I think he was very deviled Christian, but I also think he needed that even more because of what he was creating for no audience. And this piece, the Goldberg Variation, obviously he was creating it for an audience because what he wrote at the end, it was devotional. Yeah, that's right. But you know, I just sometimes think you spoke about the modernity of this and about Bach. And I think that it's a letter to the future. Yeah. It's a letter that he actually puts in a bottle and he floats it on the ocean and it finds us all these years later. And I was, you know, talking with John Adams, we were by coincidence in Barcelona together in November. And John, from a very sort of composer's perspective, he said to me, how many times are you playing the Goldberg Variations this year? And I was like, well, you know, 96 times or whatever it is, you know. And then John just looked at me and said, I just wish Bach got some of the royalties. Which I love that, right? But he's right. And I just think like if you're on the bus, the Bach knew what kind of a role his music plays in the lives of people in the year 2024. Yeah. I was just discussing with my friends at Universal Music. I think Bach is the biggest composer on the streaming platforms. But there's a reason for it. It's because his music works equally well almost, whether you go into very deep intense listening to only that. But the incredible thing about the kind of structure of Bach is that it also allows you to do something else and sort of elevate the environment, meanwhile. And then you can sown back in and you can get so much from it. But somehow it gives you freedom to lead your life in another direction. I still have him be a part of it. So I think that is key to him. But I often think about him. And I feel kind of brotherhood with him. And I feel for him. Hearing the story about Glen Gould at 22, finding the Goldberg variations a more obscure work. And it becoming the Goldberg variations that we think of as the mountaintop. And if there is as much Bach material as there is, might you find your mountaintop in that music that becomes the twin mountaintop that doesn't yet exist. Second Goldberg variations. Well, it's not the second Goldberg variations, but I know what you mean. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, can you find what of importance is unheard in Bach's work? And can you create the performance of it that sets the standard of this is one of the great works of all time? So then your thoughts, because if you go there, I think my early middle age, you know, ego takes over and you start to define yourself and hope for your place in the canon like all white men think about at some point in your life. I'm saying it as a for Bach though, not for you. Are you thinking for him that he could? No, I'm saying if you do that, that's the greatest gift you can give to Bach. Yeah, I think you can do it. But you can only do it, what I'm trying to say is you can only do it by not thinking like that, because once you think like that in such a canonic way, I think your subconsciousness and your creativity is going to get stifled. Yes, it can be undermined. I'm actually convinced about that. It's too big of a goal. Yeah, because that's the mind-trame of the young man, I think, or the young woman, young artist. They want to go there in history and you want to, that's why it's impossible to sort of do the Goldberg variations and I waited until I was 40 because it becomes that trial. But it's nice to have done it once so you can do it again and then forget about the trial. But yeah, I think it's absolutely possible to redefine this work, but while you're doing it, you're probably more aware of other things than the fact you're doing it. You know, you're probably deeper into the music than that. But it's a very interesting thought, actually. And again, I'm not thinking of it in terms of the canon or in terms of competition. I'm thinking it in terms of the legacy of Bach. Absolutely. And the fact that if there are lost beautiful moments that the only reason that people don't know them is because no one is shining light on them. But for sure, for sure, there's a lot of those things because it has to be. Absolutely. It has to be. Absolutely. I'd never would have had this thought if you didn't tell me the story of Glenn Gould doing the work and it wasn't the position that we think of it now. I know, I completely agree, but I think that basically when you play the Gould beg variations, when I recorded them, I felt like the ink had just dried on the page. I felt the music was so new to me, you know, how do other people feel about it? I don't really care, you know. But that's how it was in my mind. And so if that is your feeling, you can hope that more people might feel like that or the might not. But that's a good feeling to have for yourself. It's a good point in the creative process to find yourself in. But yeah, it's
It does feel like new music in a very strange sense that the music of Mozart doesn't feel even if it's unbelievably beautiful and I have the same connection to Mozart. I never have had the same connection to Mozart. Well, I'll play you some Mozart later, you know, as I'll try to convert you there, but it's a different thing, you know, and he's not perhaps a part of our time quite in the same way that Bach becomes a part of our time. He's not the same mirror, but it's about also the idea of writing those kinds of structures as opposed to going more into the classical romantic period when the narrative is perhaps more defined by the composer. It sounds more like a time, whereas Bach sounds more, it's like math. Math is an older new. Yeah. When you see the equations, they just are. Yeah. That's how Bach strikes me. Yeah. Each the future. How did you choose glass to start with your first album with Dirt your gramophone, is Philip Glass? Yeah. Do you know Philip? I never met him. I'm a fan, obviously. Distant from a distance. Yeah. He's a wonderful man. Yeah. And I know him, but I knew him more back in those days. But he did invite me to perform with him on numerous occasions. I played with him joint concerts with more young pianists in London, in Sweden, actually in Reykjavík, Iceland. And I played the piano etudes, one of the ones I really like and connected to, not all of them. And a piece called Opening for that album, which was released five days before Philip's 80th birthday. It was a rather extravagant, I thought, birthday present. Beautiful. To him. I was back in 2017, I recorded in 2016. I like the idea of an offbeat entry into that oldest record label in the world. Yeah. I was already 32 years old at the time, so I wasn't exactly that young. And if I would have been 22 or 20 or 18 or 16, I probably would have really pushed for the goldberg variations or the shopping aids or whatever. Some of something like how people are supposed to do it. But I guess I was old enough to favor a more offbeat and perhaps slightly rescuer or choice. But I really felt with that music that I didn't agree with recordings that were on the market. Yes. I simply didn't understand them. And the music spoke very directly to me, but it also spoke to me in a somewhat compositional sense. You know, these were working with Philip was very free because I played the music so completely differently from him. Yes. I remember I played for him, H.H.I.D. No. 6, which is very fast, sort of repeated, sort of nervous, H.H.I.D. repeated notes and this kind of beautiful, a little almost a rough man of feel to it. I played probably 50% faster than his own recording or whatever. I played much faster and he said to me, somebody should give you a speeding ticket, but it's not going to be me. Which was beautiful and generous. He was saying basically, you know, you shouldn't play it that fast, but I kind of like it. I think that's kind of what he was saying. It was allowing me to be me inside the music, which is great. But he's also a performer, so he understands that you have to have that freedom to express something in music. With that whole thing of minimalism, so-called, and let's call it music based on repetitive structures, where you have like one chord and then that measure repeats for eight times, a little sequence, and then the next sequence that repeats four times, then you go back to sequence A and repeat that two times or whatever. The more I started to play that, the more it freed me a little bit from the conventional narrative of going from point A to B to C and how you see the kind of the narrative of a traditional piece of music or a movie or a book, just a storyline, you know. He doesn't go into stories like that. He creates space with these structures. And the more I started to sort of look and play this music, the more I realized that there is no such thing as repetition. It doesn't exist in music and it doesn't exist in life. And it's not a matter of playing these patterns twice the same, but rather to find a new perspective on them and to allow time to pass and to allow them to evolve. And it's more like a painter who's working perhaps with the same subject matter, but always finding a new perspective. You know? So, let change very much the way I saw it and then it became a very interesting, for me, playground of exploring sometimes the essence of ideas. You know, these eight, some of them are very simple, some of them are less simple, but he's very often exploring like one chord relationship, like two chords and how they relate to one, one another or exploring how you play three notes against two in a kind of polyrhythm, or three against four or whatever it is. But he's taking these kind of musical elements and he's sort of zooming in on them and giving us the essence of those elements. And I started to really enjoy this because it became an exploration of those musical ideas, but also of space, of the acoustic, of the instrument, of the color of the pedal and the pedal of the piano. It's not something you just press down. It has so many different variations inside, and how much you lift the down first, how you work with sound. It became an exploration and sort of H-its in musicality and improvisation almost. And you would go out, go on stage with those H-its and I'd just play them completely differently. And really, sometimes build a narrative just using those structures almost like they were just like my ingredients. And so when people listen to those recordings and then they look at the score, they're like, "What the hell is it doing?" And some people hated me for it, but others didn't. But they're like, I'm not following almost any of the dynamics, and sorry Philip, I'm not following any of the tempo markings. I'm not doing almost any of the things that he writes in there because I didn't relate to the music using them. But I related so strongly to the music in a more abstract sense. And I thought these structures and at their best are so phenomenally brilliant and beautiful and sort of so generous. And they allowed me a little bit to be myself. And the thing is that he did allow me to be myself as well. At least he never really told me off. I haven't seen him for years now. I hope he forgives me about speaking so openly about this. I mean, I love the man and I love the music. But that was an interesting thing, but I'll tell you something. You know, when I started with DG and recorded this, I was always going to do then Bach as my second album, because it's sort of like the passion of my life. But I had this interesting moment and I wanted to share it with you and I wanted to share it with any like young artist who is perhaps starting out or finding their way. The success of the Glass Album and it was quite successful. Almost became my enemy because there were very strong voices within my label, which I love my label. But at that point, early in my collaboration with him, I thought I had earned my right to do whatever I wanted to do a second album. But they said no, because the album sold seven times more than we expected and got these reviews. We realized now that you are this kind of a fantastic pianist to play American minimalistic music. And I just remember my heart sinking. And I was just like, no, no, no, no, no. This not where this conversation is going, but we had quite a debate about it. And they really wanted to sort of like not all of them, but many strong people at that point in the company wanted to place me in that context. So I was that guy for them. Yeah. How long did that last? Well, I actually threatened to leave and break up my contract if I were to get to do my second album, the way I wanted to do it, Bach Album. And by that time, I decided to do something completely different from the Goldberg Variations. I was in a different rhythm there and myself. And then, you know, when it really became, I'm leaving. I was just doing that album mon Sony or whatever. Of course, I won that battle. And then turned out that Bach, of course, the second album was, I mean, infinitely more successful than the first one. And then I had the same conversation. But then I was going to do a French album. And then I was like, actually, because we see now that Bach Album is so phenomenal. In every little song. We see the Euro Bach pianist. Well, yes. But. And I actually thought very early, like how dangerous it is to have such a strong machine tell you who you are. And almost every artist goes through that. Yes. It's a big part of my job as a producer is protecting them from those voices. Right. Seriously. Yeah. Because there's something bigger at play than it worked last time. So let's do the same thing again. That's almost never the best idea. No. It's usually the worst. I remember the very first album I ever produced, rock album was a group called The Cult from England. They played me some songs. And like, this is going to be our first single. And so how do you know that? We haven't even recorded them yet. And he's like, well, it's got the same chords as our last single. And that was a hit. And I said, well, if it's got the same chords as the last single, it can't even be on the album. Oh my god. It can't be the next single. It can't even be on the album. Oh. It's not depressing. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I almost get nervous from hearing something like that. Like, yeah, you're going to screw your career in life. Yeah. And you're going to screw your career in life.
music is just about to die. No, but I think that you know you have to for the longest time in a way make sure you are always ahead of everybody else about who you are and where you're going, but but you also have to escape a little bit success, you know early on at least you know you have to and maybe always to move away. Well you don't aim at it, you aim at what's good and usually the reason you become successful is because you're making something really good. Yeah and if you focus on making something really good and continuing to make really good things it usually works out. Can you imagine that it becomes like this horrible like fast and the furious eight or fast and the furious nine or whatever I mean I saw they are plenty as they're like they've actually gotten to what 10 or something but what a horrible concept it wasn't even good in the first place but but it's like if you imagine like Beethoven writing like the fifth symphony like using the same chords. Oh my god it's very funny. Yeah, no but I think at the same time I just want to say like I long my label it's like it really has become like like a family to me you know. One of the things about Deutsche Gramophone that's so impressive is I don't know very much about classical music I love listening to it but I know very little and if I hear a piece of music I like and I want to go back to the past and find a great version of a piece if I see the Deutsche Gramophone logo on anything I know it's a good place to start. I don't know if it'll be the best version but it will definitely be one of the best versions. There's something about it. Yeah. This is the yellow label. Yeah. It's got great power. It has something. And I think it's the only well in a modern way ECM also has this for me like ECM records have a sound. I love them. They feel like they're not just part of everything else. I love that. It's a lot of. Yeah but I think those are the only two that I know of in the classical world where it really matters. Some people are going to cry at Sony right now or Warner. No they're great people everywhere. Come on. They're great labels as well. Absolutely. Absolutely but there's something about the history. You know there's something you can feel that history. Yeah. It is. It is. Well what surprised me when I came there first was how young the people are were working there and you know you don't join them because of the history. You don't join them because of Horowitz or something like that. No. You don't do anything because of the past. You do it because of what's happening now in the present but it does still have this aura. Oh absolutely. And it's in the same way that yes Carnegie Hall sounds great. Yeah. But if there was another theater that sounded as good in New Jersey an hour away it wouldn't be Carnegie Hall. There's something about the ghosts of these places. They didn't screw that. I think they tried to rebuild some of those houses somewhere in East Asia or something. I mean or was it in Japan. I think they tried to take like the music for I and this legendary hall in Vienna. Yeah. I think they rebuilt it somewhere and it sounds completely different. Yeah. Even if everything is the same. Well thank God. No it's magic. The reason I asked about Disney Hall is that's one of the concert halls that was built based on computer renderings and and in recording studios the ones built on computer renderings of what's best for sound don't necessarily sound as good as the old studios that were built with a different understanding of acoustics. Yeah. But also wood and concrete and everything that goes into a house. Yeah. You can't escape time and you can't buy time. You can't skip time. No. Things change. The old pianos, the old violence. Yes. You can't buy it. Yes. I remember hearing that James Brown said he would only record in a studio that's on the ground floor. Oh really? If the studio wasn't touching the ground he didn't believe that the music could come through in the same way. If you recorded it on another floor. Interesting. Probably right. It's interesting to consider. Yeah. Yeah. Check my mind out. Wait a little bit. Yeah. No. Absolutely. I'm just thinking I'm recording on the second floor. Shit. Time for studio. Thank you. I'm actually on the ground floor. Is the studio you're building going to be on the ground? Yeah. Under my house. With natural light blowing in, you know, from basically like the grasses here and you have these windows and then I've really gone deep. Oh great. Yeah. It's going to be really cool. Maybe underground's even better. We don't know. They'll find out. We'll find out. We'll find out. Yeah. I'm very excited about it. But it's also just yeah, it's a new chapter of changing the ratio in my life between the concerts and the recording. So I want to find much more time with microphone. I suggested the Bach idea and you said it was a dangerous idea. As soon as you said it was a dangerous idea, I knew it was a good idea. If the first word that comes to mind is dangerous, yeah. It's a good sign. It's a good sign. When making something. It's a good sign. The idea is dangerous. It's worth looking at. I want to play you something. We spoke about it, but I don't think you know it. [Music] [Music] [Music] Where did you go with this? It took me away. It was very beautiful. What I was thinking about was what was going on in your head and I was wondering what's your internal conversation. What I wanted to play for you is music that was composed collectively. It's a folk song from Iceland. I love it. It's so beautiful. It is called "We're Life and Death for Me It Well." It's basically the lyrics are the old farmer who's sowing seeds into the ground and contemplating with that when the seeds will have grown, he himself will be into that ground. It's so beautiful. This idea of folk songs being composed generation after generation after generation and the fact that in Iceland it's such a dark place, you know, in difficult place especially in those times. The fact that people would be singing in the half the songs are about death and the other half is about famine. You know it's fantastic. There's something about that the melody, you know, can't compose it. You know it's it's a thought. Hostess. But you're kind of stuck and he goes back. It's kind of you know out of time in time and out of time. Music that nobody knows, you know, is just a farmer somewhere in Iceland, sowing the stilettry children, sowing it to their children. And then at some point in the 20th century these people went from farm to farm to farm. It's like really sort of basic, I don't even know what kind of recording equipment that they recorded these farmers singing. And these things, these 2000 recordings of 2000 songs, they exist there in the archives in Iceland. It's where this comes from, you know. Yeah, I love it. Do you ever listen to the Gurgif De Hartman pieces? I don't really. I will play you some recordings but it's interesting about it. Let me just play you pieces of something. Just to uh, I'll play some soothing chords while you're searching. Okay.
(gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) - You get the ideas. So, but he says it's the same. (gentle piano music) - It's the same idea. And it feels like this is rooted in old folk music. When I hear this, I hear old folk music. - He's completely understand the association. - Yeah. - Because you're stuck. You can't get out. You're stuck in the emotion and that's the power of it. - Mm-hmm. - And that's amazing. - It's one guy. - Gurgif is a spiritual teacher. - Yes, I know. - And the Hartman is the composer who was his friend and Gurgif would sing the melodies to the Hartman. And this is the Hartman playing the melodies that was sung to him. - There's something about the way he plays. (gentle piano music) (laughs) - The drama. - The drama and the, how should we say it, the freedom and the incorrectness of it. Because you can't place the notes. You can't calculate them and you can't, you don't know when they're gonna hear it. - No time, yes. - Because he's in the act of something else. He's doing so, he's not in that game. - Yes, it's a different game. - Yes. - No matter what. - It's a good game. Yeah, listen to this. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) - I play this because of the birds. I don't know if you can hear that on the recording, but I hope so. - That's another folk song written, not written, I created it, it's a collection by Hungarian people. It's a summer deep in, or I guess Romania now. - No. - But it's the same thing, you know. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) - How unexpected, right? It's so far away from, you know. (gentle piano music) - Yeah, the structure, I love the structure. - Of course. - But that's why sometimes go into this music, it's just like to open up. - Yeah, I'm excited for your album, a folk music as well. - Oh, that's another added to the list. - Yeah, right. - At some point, I mean, now that you're 50/50, you're gonna make more albums. - And anymore. - Yeah. - It's true. I mean. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) - Sometimes we go by variations, that opening of it. Sometimes it's nice to go into that folk song mood and then go to go back to structure. - Yes. - You know, it's very interesting. - Yeah. - It opens it up. - Yeah. For instance, I. (gentle piano music) How do you. (gentle piano music) What I was thinking recently is the kind of like. (gentle piano music) It's the relationship of just every two bars, you know. So then. The tension and the release. Again. (gentle piano music) At the octave. And then. Release, but goes on. (gentle piano music) And those are my three actors, you know. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) You understand what I'm talking about? I'm talking about feeling like a theater director almost. You know, the polyphony and the kind of transparency of it. - Yes. - It's interesting if you take the next variation, which is using the same. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music) But going into. (gentle piano music) So you're going into basically, you know. (gentle piano music) So you're basically going into exactly the same course, but you're doing something so different in the next variation. (gentle piano music) And the chords remain the same through the whole cycle. - Absolutely. And you can take this variation. (gentle piano music) Do it that slowly. (gentle piano music) And it's just a different, different thing, you know. - Really different. - In the writing, does it say, this next one is faster than the last one? - No. - It's just nothing about it. - Open. - It just has variation too. - Yeah. - I mean, this is just to take sort of an extreme example here. You know, and you could do this. (gentle piano music) You could do it. (gentle piano music) You could do that, you know. Who is to say what you can't do, you know? But that's especially to give sort of extreme examples of how open that is. - And you said 15 is the one where it turns dark. What's 15? - Yeah, so beautiful. It goes into, it's funny to play it here in the sand with the birds and everything, I know. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music)
It goes on. Yeah, it goes on. Yeah, it goes on. But you could also, you know, that thing, you could also do it. It goes on. Yeah. And then that process, the voicing changes. And then all of a sudden your bass character comes out and just the music takes on another dimension. But those are just like, there's these very basic examples and you can go into full mode and really explore within each tempo. Yes. A kind of variance. For sure you have to record it again. For sure. I mean, the greatest moment in the Goldberg Variations is this variation 25. That's where he sort of expands time, you know, because they're all two or three minutes. And then all of a sudden you have 10-minute long variation. So where we began with the Aria. Here is variation 25. [Music] It's a tempo. It's incredible that this is indeed the same chord progression just taking into the negative and expanded, you know, almost three times in time. That is, you know. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Wayne, have you heard lonely or music? And the way he plays with dissonance, you know, you know, he makes these sevens and he just puts a knife in your heart and then he, you know, rotates it. Amazing. It's unbelievable, but that moment in the piece, I should sometimes think about how is it in the world premiere, if there was such a thing indeed. You don't know what's coming. What if you don't know what's coming in the whole big variation. You have the Aria and then you have variation one and then you have 14 variations and they're all in G-Mage and everybody's happy. It's great. And then you have the big shock of the 15th variation and you bounce back. And there you are, you know, an hour into the piece. Variation 24 is done. And then this hits you. And all of a sudden you have a 10-minute long variation at that point in the structure. What are like structural, old, masterstroke, really bold, right? Change is what this piece is about, you know. And then you have the concluding variations and the great surprise of the Aria at the end. And it sort of fades in like on the mixed reports, like I said. It's always there. And is that what's just here? That it's like it's coming around again and is the ending, the beginning. Do you know what I mean? Like are we starting over essentially? The thing is that I want you to finish it. And everybody is sort of with you after 80 minutes and then they applaud. And then you come back on stage and then again and again and again. And then they're like, is there no encore? And then you're like, well, the only encore you can play after this solar system of pieces to go back into variation one. But then you have to play variation two. And then I don't know how long your parking is. And then you go into this kind of infinity sort of cycle. But to me, it feels like you can't add to this in the act of playing it. You know, it's a solar system. You know, it's the Aria and the third planet. And so, yeah, but the only thing you can do is to then take another cycle. But then maybe you go from LA to suffer a Cisco. Yeah. Tell me about your relationship to Debussy. Oh, yeah. I mean, complex because he was a complex thorny man. You know, but I don't know anything about him. Ah, he came from the outside, which is always, I think, good and bad, you know, but good mostly. But he was an auto-direct, which he basically wanted to push the music world away from the kind of governing power of Germany, which had Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven and all of them. And he wanted to find what is French, which is a very nationalistic guy. I think he was amazing, but with thorny, you know. And the music, you know, is not exactly thorny. [Music] [Music] Very often with him, you know, like at the beginning. [Music] And something about this represents a change. You know, you just have a composer who sits down and he goes into. [Music] He goes into the chord and explores it. You know, sometimes it's almost sonority for the sake of sonority space. Yeah. Instead of that driving narrative, of course it does that narrative, but he's. It's got a gentleness. It comes in with a gentleness and like a curiosity. Yeah, but listen to the other guy on my French album, "J'un fili paramo". This is music that he wrote when Mozart was just a boy. And listen to this. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
Can you believe like 1762? Unbelievable, right? So beautiful. That's an arrangement I made from his last opera. Just this great music that people don't really know. Yeah. I called it the Arts and the Hours. It's just an English-type like. It's so beautiful. You know, it wasn't I think premiered until, in this full version, until 1963. Three? It was only like that, like 200 years later. But that's what I like. I like Anacronisum. I like composers who don't go with the tides of their times. So interesting. It's like Richard Strauss and Sergey Rakhmanov. And Bach, in a way, was considered extremely old-fashioned when he was writing the music of the future, the Goldberg Variations. He was considered old-news. Nobody cared for that kind of baroque structures. They wanted the light classical, you know. Some crap like this. That's what the general public was after. But of course, he just did what he wanted. But those composers, you know, it's like Karlo Gessoeldo with his "Matric Al" something in the 16th century that they're like so futuristic that even Richard Wagner couldn't write something on that scale of sort of wild harmony. You know, it's so nice to look back on the music history now and realize that it's not quite as linear as we sometimes think of it as. What was do you remember the first piece you ever played in front of people when you were a child? Oh, God. It was. no, I don't actually, but I imagine there was something like this. (laughs) Something in that region. But I do remember one of the first pieces I composed. Yes, and I was eight, I think. It goes like, I have not played this for years. (piano music) That was like a. Yeah, it's like an ancient. It's like an Eastern European melody. Yeah, so. (piano music) I like. Yeah. I like that one. Yeah. (piano music) It could be like one of those sad, Soviet cartoons for something. You know, it could actually come from that, you know. It also has a nursery rhyme aspect to it. You know, it's very beautiful. (piano music) Yeah, it's sad. Beautiful. I had a. we had a grand piano. I'll tell you something beautiful. My parents had a sad thing happen to them in 1980, four years before I was born. My father passed away quite suddenly. And they inherited a little bit of money. And they were then studying music in West Berlin. And they had nothing. They lived in a tiny little student flat, mom studying piano, dad, composition. They decided to take a loan and to buy a Steinway grand piano. It's all their money before they had even a modest apartment. So they brought this glorious piano into their little student flat in West Berlin and then moved back home a few months before I was born. And then for the first six years of my life, we had this tiny little basement apartment where the living room basically was the piano. You know, I had a room with my two sisters. We had no space. My parents did this unbelievably irresponsible thing in an economic sense. You know, to spend it all on music. Yeah. And then piano was the apartment. Yes. And that's where we would gather. That's what I would play. And I sometimes think about that now and I have my piano. So I think about the root of all of this being this sort of romantic decision of my parents to, yeah, to not just spend all their money but take a loan and really put all their money into a piano and then come home and be like, "Hmm, where are we going to live? Where are we going to put this piano?" Yeah, it's not an accident that you're you. Well, the piano cost at that point basically the same as an apartment in Iceland. Yes. And I'm so grateful for their sort of ill-advised finances right now at least, you know. And then what I wanted to say as well is that we moved into a bigger apartment finally when I was seven. My parents actually got me an upright piano, very old Danish upright piano, which totally broke in. But I would have that in my bedroom. And then this would be the kind of glorious piano in the living room, but. I had my own little private piano as well, where I could play any hour of the day and just, you know, have these kind of intimate keyboard conversations with myself. And I sometimes think about that and two or three years ago, we should actually have enough right here, not just this fancy Steinway, because two or three years ago I recorded an album called "From a Far" where I actually recorded the exact same music on the ground piano like this. And then on an upright piano. Oh, beautiful. Like they want to grow up with you. You know. Tell me the difference in the playing, the experience of sitting at a grand piano versus sitting at an upright for you. You know, just the response to these big vibrations, you know, and of course the acoustic affects everything about the way in our right, the music. But the response on an upright piano, which is so much smaller and so much more immediate, it's much more like having that private conversation, you know, that very intimate conversation with the grand piano, you have to work a little bit harder to make it into that intimate creature. So I think, yeah, my bedroom piano. You know, it's just two different worlds. But I think the upright piano has a comeback. I really think so. You see, in pop, in so much music, people are going back to it now and experimenting with it and sort of taking it further. I think it's a wonderful thing. Yeah. And in a way, very democratic, because the great majority of people don't have parents to spend their money. So it'll, at least, like my parents, you know, almost all pianists in the world have simple operations on the uprights, you know. When you're playing, are you listening? And if you notice that the low notes aren't singing on this particular piano, as well as you're used to, do you make adjustments as you're going based on what you're hearing? Yeah. All the time. You're constantly, in a way, that back part of your brain is in a way in that overdrive. But hopefully it's a part of your subconsciousness and a part of your bigger listening, rather than being like, I need to, you know, one more hurts here. Yeah. But you're constantly, constantly adjusting, yeah. How much do you think of the left and right hand as two different players? Not so much. I mean, they are. But I think about like the different players in each hand. So maybe the right hand I'm thinking about the two or three different players in that hand, and then the two or three or whatever it is in the music, in that hand. But just certainly if you're doing like, maybe in this music show, because it's relatively simple. But I don't think about the hands of the physicality. I think about more in terms of inside the structure and the music as this kind of organism. Like a biological organism almost. A web. Tell me some of the things that you've done in terms of recording that are not typical for a classical pianist. Oh, I mean, many, many, many, many. I love the idea of taking, especially in my box recordings and sort of taking them a little bit into an electronic, you know, more of a, yeah, there's a different direction. We've done many things like that, both on an app or a piano and on grand pianos. But collaborating with really different musicians, you know, one who did a fantastically beautiful fantasy on one of my recordings was Sakamoto Riyoichi. Fantastic. Incredible man. And it's a little bit like reversingly creative process, you know. I usually take the music of Bach or somebody else and I'm redefined for myself. But there I actually gave, or give sometimes my recordings to artists, to my admire, and sometimes do something within myself to, you know, where I used the interpretation of old music as sort of creative material for new compositions. Yes. It's for Sakamoto, the Riyoichi. And it's been done a lot, you know. And I did a little fantasy with my A and R producer, Christian Batura, using basically Bach's most famous prelude. So I recorded this on an app or piano actually and then we sort of created, I'm not going to say much, but we created something new with it. A memory of a memory, I think. And it was a memory of, and in deep sadness in our lives, when Johann, Johann son, my compatriot Icelandic composer, I just died in Berlin back in 2017, I think it was. Did you know that?
- We were actually planning a project together, we were gonna take Beethoven and what deconstructed. And I recorded some of his music as well, but he died so suddenly, and we did a fantasy to sort of heal ourselves on this Bach prelude called it End of the Hour of Death. - Yeah. - And there's another one. - Bach, which is called. (gentle music) (gentle music) You know, we should call it. It's taking this prelude, but just using it as material for another excursion, you know. That was called for Johann. Yeah, I guess that when I think about that, because he had so much more, I had in music. But yeah, I think very often in times of like those, I and some of the other people go to Bach, but I think it's sort of a good idea whether you're feeling happier or sad. He somehow balances you in a way that. I think he's always a good idea. But certainly when I'm feeling sad, there's nothing but Bach that can sometimes bring me back and give me strength, you know. Have you recorded Sati? No, shouldn't I. Wouldn't that be nice? - I'd love Sati. (laughs) - No. Wouldn't it be nice? But he's doing something so similar to. You just wanted to go forever. - I'd say in language. - But from that French school comes our friend Philip. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) - There's one cycle. - Yeah. - And then it goes into another cycle and then the third cycle. That's called opening. That's the first track on my. - Never wanted to stop. - Right. - Unbelievable. It goes on. - It's so beautiful. - But it takes on a life of its own in a way. When you play it, you don't know when you start where it's gonna take you. (gentle music) (gentle music) - Tetragramatin is a podcast. Tetragramatin is a website. Tetragramatin is a whole world of knowledge. (gentle music) - What may fall within the sphere of Tetragramatin? - Counterculture. - Tetragramatin. - Sacred geometry. - Tetragramatin. - The Avant Garde. - Tetragramatin. - Generative art. - Tetragramatin. - The Tarot. - Tetragramatin. - Out of print music. - Tetragramatin. - Biodynamics. - Tetragramatin. - Graphic design. - Tetragramatin. - Mythology. - And magic. - Tetragramatin. - Obscure film. - Tetragramatin. - Beach culture. - Tetragramatin. - Esoteric lectures. - Tetragramatin. - Off the grid living. - Tetragramatin. - Old spirituality. - Tetragramatin. - The canon of fine objects. - Tetragramatin. - Muscle cars. - Tetragramatin. - Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath. And see where you are drawn. Tetragramatin.com.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Iceland's environment is characterized by geological instability, stark seasonal contrasts, and a sense of isolation that shaped the speaker's insulated, creatively focused childhood.
The speaker's early piano education was defined by a spiritual, joy-based approach from a first teacher who prioritized musical dialogue over technical discipline, fostering a deep, personal connection to music.
The speaker views performance as a variable, collaborative discovery with the audience, contrasting it with the intimate, confessional nature of studio recording, and seeks a better balance between touring and studio work.
Bach's music is described as a "free country"—structurally maximal yet interpretively minimal, allowing the performer to act as a co-creator and director of its polyphonic voices, with modern recording technology offering new creative possibilities.
Artistic interpretation is inherently shaped by one's time and personal experiences (e.g., exposure to diverse genres like hip-hop), making each performance unique; specificity in preparation allows for improvisatory freedom in execution.
Summary:
The speaker reflects on how Iceland's volatile, isolated environment fostered a childhood of creative focus, free from global comparisons. Their foundational piano education emphasized joy and spiritual connection over technical rigor, instilling music as a personal spirituality. They distinguish between live performance—a variable, communal experience—and the private intimacy of studio recording, expressing a desire to shift toward more studio work.
A central theme is the interpretation of Bach's music, described as a "free country" where the performer becomes a co-creator, making specific decisions that bring the timeless score into a modern context. The speaker argues that all artistic interpretation is filtered through contemporary experience and personal history, and that detailed preparation is necessary to achieve genuine, improvisatory freedom in performance, which varies greatly with each venue and audience.
FAQs
Iceland has two main seasons: a dark winter from October and a bright, brief summer from June to August. The transitions of spring and autumn are often deceptive, with unpredictable weather like snow in May.
The teacher inspired joy and a spiritual connection to music, focusing on the fundamental pleasure of playing rather than strict technical exercises. This early experience fostered a deep, celebratory relationship with the piano.
Live performances are dynamic and vary with each audience, while the studio offers intimate, confidential creative exploration. The speaker aims for a balance, valuing both the extroverted energy of concerts and the introspective freedom of studio work.
They view Bach's scores as open and minimal, allowing for personal interpretation and co-creation. Each performance involves making moment-to-moment decisions, akin to directing actors in a play, which brings a modern feel to the centuries-old music.
Growing up in Iceland's small, intense music scene encouraged versatility, from classical to rock and improvisation. This diverse exposure influences their approach, particularly in playing baroque music with a fresh, adaptable perspective.
They believe it's arrogant to claim one 'correct' historical way, as music naturally evolves with context. Embracing contemporary influences, like hip-hop rhythms, makes performances honest and specific to the present moment.
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