Richard Morrison
Imogen Cooper’s considerable reputation has been carved by her refined, majestic interpretations of late Classical repertoire. But now, she tells Jessica Duchen, it’s time to shake things up a bit with a little help from Liszt and Wagner
Between the big-blocked estates and snaking side-streets of Maida Vale, Imogen Cooper has found a small oasis that is a solitary pianist’s dream come true. ‘Stephen Hough came house-hunting with me and said I had to get this place – it’s perfect for a musician,’ she remarks. In her fan-shaped studio, among paintings, bookshelves and a garden full of trees, she can practise to her heart’s content. ‘I’m a great sleeper, so I usually don’t carry on till 3am,’ she remarks, ‘but this part of the house is not attached to next door, so I can work late without disturbing anybody.’
Cooper is one of those rare and special musicians whose artistic stature has always been high, yet never stops growing and developing. Indeed, many of her admirers feel she is now in her prime, reaching the stratospheres in new and wonderfully inspiring ways. She is the first to admit that she has perhaps taken a ‘slow burn’ approach. For many years her listeners associated her primarily with the Viennese classics – Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert in particular – although her interpretations of, for example, Schumann and Janáωek indicated something very interesting was afoot beyond. But slow cooking can sometimes produce the tastiest results. In her sixties, Cooper has been turning at last to Chopin and Liszt, revealing a vibrant Romanticism with a powerful, personal voice. Was there a closet Romantic lying in wait all the time? ‘Definitely,’ she beams.
‘I don’t want to leave such profound, rich things untouched’
MUCH AS HER FANS love her Schubert and Mozart, some might be surprised by this change of direction. ‘I stayed with that too long,’ Cooper says. ‘I stayed partly because that repertoire was much demanded of me – and these fellows are so enormously difficult to play well that I was quite happy pushing my comfort zone within my comfort zone, going narrower and deeper – particularly with Schubert. I would never regret those years. But I wasn’t terribly pro-active in consciously pushing the envelope. I didn’t feel the need, because I was beavering away so strongly with music I loved. Now I’m rather enjoying changing the picture.’
What has made her change it now? ‘Simply the wonderfulness of the repertoire,’ Cooper smiles, ‘and the fact that you don’t want to leave such profound, fascinating and rich things untouched, particularly if you realise you’ve lost a bit of time. Maybe I feel mentally and physically more ready to go there. It seemed quite a natural path for me, even though many would have started with that and gone rather in the other direction.’ Having started with ‘pure’ music, she says, ‘I’ve enjoyed the expansion into music that is also healthy pianism rather enormously.’
She has made a new CD of Liszt and Wagner, original works and transcriptions, revealing an approach as profound, faithful and personal as that she brought to her recent, revelatory disc of Chopin. Liszt isn’t entirely new to her repertoire, of course: ‘It has been a while since I’ve played much of it, though,’ she says. ‘I think it’s proof of how certain things can stay a little closed inside you for a while, either through an innate reserve about going there, or a lack of belief that one can find a speaking enough voice to make it a viable option. Or it could simply be because life has taken you in a slightly different direction. This was quite a conscious pull-around.’
It was a challenge, too. ‘There’s still a huge amount of repertoire I haven’t done,’ she says, ‘and I wasn’t knocking it all under my belt at the age of 20. But in a way, I don’t regret that. It makes it harder to learn now, but my mind is fresher about it and I’m not tired of any of it, which I hope will give me a good few years yet.’
It was not Liszt that provided the first stimulus for the CD’S programme, but the composer’s son-in-law, Wagner – plus the Hungarian pianist and conductor Zoltán Kocsis, who died, aged 64, a few months ago. Cooper’s CD is dedicated to his memory.
‘I had been looking at Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and thinking how wonderful it was, and I came across Kocsis’s transcription of the Prelude, which is such a great piece of music. When I played it through, I thought this transcription could be as good as the Liszt. It was an obvious thing to do the two together. The Prelude is even more of a challenge than the Liebestod in which to sound like an orchestra, because the music is more sparse – but that’s the sort of challenge I love. So I went in, head first.’
She was reluctant to segue straight from the Prelude into the Liebestod, though: ‘On the piano, to leave out four-and-a-half hours of intervening opera is somehow not convincing,’ she says. ‘I wanted to find a bridge.’ Reading Alan Walker’s magnificent Liszt biography, she delved into Liszt’s stay with the Wagner family in Venice in 1882: among the works he began there were the two Lugubre Gondola pieces, resulting from a bizarre premonition that Wagner would die and that his body would be transported up the Grand Canal on a funeral gondola. Three months later, the vision came true. ‘This mixture of darkness and love and death that links Wagner and Liszt, with thematic material that is Tristanlike, seemed the perfect bridge between the Prelude and the Liebestod.’
Cooper has supplemented this with sparsely written, unsettling, late Liszt pieces including Nuages gris and the Bagatelle sans tonalité; for
contrast she added pieces from the Italian book of the Années de pélérinages, and the
Valse oubliée No. 2 (‘It’s like a completely different composer’). A friend alerted her to Wagner’s brief Elegie – which apparently had been written out by hand, whether by Wagner or someone else, on an old copy of Chopin’s Etudes in the possession of Russian pianistsviatoslav Richter, who occasionally performed it. Finally, there is Liszt’s own transcription of the Gretchen movement from his Faust Symphony, which Cooper says she came across thanks to the Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska: ‘These two men, Wagner and Liszt, so linked, gave me all the material to get quite an interesting disc together.’
Cooper was born in London, just ten minutes away from where she now lives (‘It’s rather wonderful to come back after 50-plus years,’ she remarks). Her father was the musicologist and critic Martin Cooper. The youngest of four musical siblings, the small Imogen emerged as prodigiously gifted; plans had to be made for a suitable musical education. In those days, she recalls, the UK’S specialist music schools had not yet started up; to concentrate seriously on the piano, she had to go to one of the few institutions that accepted students at that young age. That meant Moscow or Paris.
Paris was earmarked, unsurprisingly as the more suitable destination. She left home aged 12 and moved there on her own – a choice that might amaze us today, but that she enjoyed for the precocious independence and the inspiration of studies at the Conservatoire
with Jacques Février, Lucette Descaves and Yvonne Lefébure. The difficult part, she says, was coming home again.
It was a very different pianist, though, who changed her life. In London, her father received for review some recordings of a 30-something pianist named Alfred Brendel. She heard them and was blown away, deciding at once that this was the musician with whom she most wanted to study. Soon afterwards, her father coincidentally met Brendel on a competition jury panel. ‘It was the only time my connection to my father really helped me,’ Cooper says, ‘because he said to Alfred Brendel, “I think my daughter would like to play to you”.’ She went to a concert Brendel gave at the Austrian Institute and approached him afterwards with the words: ‘I have to work with you, or I’ll die!’ Brendel suggested that she should live, and come to Vienna. She remained his student for several years and, in the long term, his disciple.
Brendel, though legendary in the
Viennese classics, was a remarkable Lisztian, particularly at the time Cooper was his pupil. His example could have prompted her to take a Liszt plunge too, but the opposite happened. ‘I should have jumped in, perhaps,’ she says, ‘but it was so completely awe-inspiring that instead I took a step back.’
His deeply serious interpretations and rejection of the superficial showmanship accusations often levelled at Liszt nevertheless made a lasting impact on her. ‘Even now people say, “Oh, Liszt, too many notes, empty, means nothing…”. That’s complete rubbish.’ Her advice to anyone who doesn’t ‘get’ Liszt is: ‘Start by reading Alan Walker and then listen to great Liszt players – of whom Brendel would probably be the greatest.’
Perhaps the image of Liszt as virtuoso superstar – the dashing heart-throb whose adoring fans stole his washing water from hotel rooms – creates a ‘macho’ aura around his music that could put off some female performers. ‘Of my generation and the one after, that’s possible,’ Cooper ponders.
‘But perhaps it says more about our lack of curiosity, because his scope is so large that even if you don’t want to play the high testosterone stuff, there’s a huge amount of strong, noble and passionate music that one can delve into.’
Liszt’s public image was no exaggeration. ‘He must have been devastatingly goodlooking and in his virtuoso years extremely flamboyant,’ says Cooper. ‘Then, in Weimar and the later years, he became really a different person. He was enormously prolific, almost like a musical Picasso, and besides that, he was the most extraordinary teacher. He travelled everywhere in third-class trains and coaches – imagine how cold that must have been! – and performed at the end of it. He must have been a pianist sans pareil. And he was an extraordinarily generous soul.’
Cooper is a generous soul too, and she has recently started a new charitable trust
‘Liszt must have been devastatingly good-looking’
to help support young pianists on the verge of a career. ‘I’ve never done much regular teaching,’ she admits, ‘perhaps because
I wasn’t ready for it. Then two things happened. First the Belcea Quartet made me president of their Belcea Charitable Trust, which enables them to coach young quartets over several years. They get wonderful results. I’ve heard groups at the beginning and the end of the coaching cycle, and it’s clear that once young musicians are technically, humanly and emotionally ready to be pushed that extra step, it can make all the difference.
‘Next, some close friends have a wonderful house in Provence, near St Rémy, which they’ve restored. It’s quiet and very beautiful. When I had the idea for the trust, they agreed to let me use it for a week in the spring and another week in the summer. Their generosity was astonishing and made me decide this has to go ahead. Contacting the charity commission, getting a bank account open and fundraising was a huge learning curve, but I was determined to make it work.’
The idea is simple, she adds: she gives select students her unlimited time somewhere beautiful and peaceful, to facilitate complete, profound concentration. At the end of the week she offers the public a masterclass and concert, plus a Provençal dinner al fresco. Her first sessions have involved young pianists including Lara Melda, Mishka Rushdie Momen, Samson Tsoy, Alexandra Vaduva and Pavel Kolesnikov. ‘They’ve loved it and I’ve loved it too,’ she says. ‘It’s simple, but you still have to make it happen – and it’s thanks to all these good constellations coming together that it’s been able to.’
The world at large, though, has seemed short of beneficial constellations recently. Cooper and I meet up the day before
President Trump’s inauguration and conversation over tea inevitably drifts to world events. She is determined, though, that music can offer a bridge between people that is second to none.
‘Music has never been more necessary.
I’m absolutely convinced of it,’ she declares. ‘It’s like that Heineken advert, reaching the parts that other beers cannot reach – it’s in that area of depth that we need to swim, to be of good to the people who are listening. I think it’s absolutely vital to have music to recalibrate ourselves. You’re surrounded all day long, especially if you’re a news junkie – and I am – by reports of things that range from unpleasant to dark, dangerous and scary. We have to counter that by getting back to something you might call spiritual, something that is common to us all if we dig deep enough. It’s the very centre of ourselves. I call it “it” – whatever “it” is – and we have actively to go back to “it”. And music is one of the most immediate ways to get us there. It’s up to us on the platform to do that.’
The year ahead brings plenty of excitement, despite all. Cooper picks out as highlights Lieder performances with tenor Mark Padmore and baritone Henk Neven, and three recital programmes next season combining Haydn and Beethoven with a selection of 20th- and 21st-century pieces from Schoenberg to Adès and Anderson. And in May she is playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C, K503, with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, shortly before he takes over at the London Symphony Orchestra.
‘I think he and the LSO seem to be made for each other and I’m sure it’s going to be absolutely wonderful,’ Cooper enthuses. ‘We’ve got some golden times ahead. But,’ she adds, ‘don’t ask me about that projected new hall. Of course it would be lovely if we could have something sensational, but the world is as it is. We’ll have to see…’.
Imogen Cooper’s new disc of Liszt original works and transcriptions is out in March on Chandos
‘Music has never been more necessary. I’m convinced of it’