Interview with Helene Grimaud
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credit: Mat Hennek)

Hélène Grimaud is this week’s Preview! guest. The world-class pianist recently released Silent Songs, a collection of Valentin Silvestrov’s vocal and piano pieces, recorded with baritone Konstantin Krimmel. Rob Kennedy speaks with her about the recording process, as well as what she enjoys about Silvestrov’s music.

KENNEDY: Hélène Grimaud, what was the inspiration for your new recording?

GRIMAUD: The inspiration was my introduction to his music nearly two decades ago. I was given the recording of his Silent Songs as a gift, and it was a wonderful gift because 18 years later I’m still at it. It took a long time to make this project come to life, but I became fascinated with Valentin Silvestrov’s world right there and then and started to look into the repertoire and started to program them in concert. So for me it’s been a long relationship, but to be able to play that original repertoire which made me fall in love with his music is extra special. 

KENNEDY: Hélène, tell our listeners about this Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov, who’s unfamiliar to most of us. Can you tell us where he fits in and what attracted you to his music? 

GRIMAUD: What attracted me to his music is the purity of the language, the simplicity, and at the same time, the sophistication of it, its nearly infinite variety of colors and textures. There is a beautiful transparency to the music. It is emotional music. And if music is not emotional, I believe that we don’t really need it. It can be impressive, it can be intriguing, it can be intellectually stimulating, but at the end of the day, it is probably the most primal art form and needs to speak to the human heart. Silvestrov’s music emanates from the soul; it is both very fragile and very intense at the same time. It’s utterly poetic. For all those reasons, I’m really grateful that I get to be an ambassador for it. 

KENNEDY: And we’re grateful for your artistry with it. I was particularly taken with Silvestrov’s “Two Dialogues”. What were the challenges you faced while playing them? 

GRIMAUD: Probably finding the right variation in touch and the art of rubato. I mean, of course, this is something that pianists become familiar with from a very early age with Chopin, but the art of rubato is really something quite magical because it’s very elusive. Time gets suspended. You go off course, you steal it, you give it back. So you have to have this shared freedom with your partners. You have to breathe as one, because there is nothing can be contrived or rehearsed about it. You spend the time in rehearsal to get to that place where you become one organism, but it has to be absolutely natural and you have to find this transparency of color so that the sound of the other instruments can shimmer through the piano texture and vice versa. So the challenge is finding the right degree of intimacy, while still being able to project. It’s a reconciliation of opposites. 

KENNEDY: I noticed that, especially in the bagatelles, the intimacy there just shone through. It’s a quite remarkable performance. Can you tell us about the bagatelles? Were they early or late works? 

GRIMAUD: If you look at the totality of the cycle, you could say it’s both. It belongs to his later repertoire, which is almost more avant-garde than what he was doing in the early years. In the Silent Songs, when the singer has the phrase the piano plays the melody underneath the same melody. And Silvestrov told us about how he was criticized for doing that and was told that was not acceptable in terms of compositional technique. And he told us, with a beautiful sparkle in his eye, that he responded by saying that the art of writing melody was such an endangered species that he felt it was important to write it twice rather than just once. There is some similarity to that in the bagatelle. By definition, the form of the bagatelle is something very unassuming. But the result is something that remains with you. You have these miniatures, but regarding the essence of the expression, there’s so much humanity within it that it has much more of an impact than you realize while listening to it. 

KENNEDY: They have a poignant quality that is so endearing. As somebody who schedules music here at the radio station, I thought immediately of which day-part I would put them in. They’re just beautiful. One last question about Silvestrov. He’s a pianist, so what was it like to play the pianist’s music? 

GRIMAUD: It’s always intimidating, of course. But at the same time, it’s wonderful because you always want to have the chance to ask composers questions. It is so important when the composer can play the instrument himself, because I believe that it guides the writing. You have to be able to exploit the expressive capabilities of the instrument, and it really takes that personal connection. I had been listening to his recordings, so I was familiar with his playing. It’s both intimidating and at the same time wonderful because it carries you somehow. And of course, we walked out there hoping to not disappoint, to make him proud, to make him happy. And we certainly gave it all. It’s been wonderful to see the audience connect with this music. It’s very fulfilling, and I think he was happy. I hope he was himself astonished by how sublime his music is. 

KENNEDY: I know our listeners are going to be very impressed with the sublime quality of his music and the incredibly artful performance that you gave on this marvelous new recording. 

Join us at 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 11th, to hear Hélène Grimaud’s interview! Listen online on TheClassicalStation.org, tune your radio to 89.7 FM, or download our app!