Kristian Bezuidenhout: A Particular Passion

The classical world has been primed for a lot of great music from Kristian Bezuindenhout. His very first album, made when he was just 21, was called “the most impressive and provocative debut recording in years” by American Record Guide.

[Mar. 16, 2011] - Garrulous, articulate, and full of energy, with an intensely expressive face and a marked tendency to yank on his hair when speaking about a particularly interesting topic, this fortepianist, harpsichordist and pianist (whose last name is pronounced bih-ZAY-den-hoat, by the way) is finally well on his way to being a fixed part of the early music firmament. Recent recording and live-concert collaborations with artists including tenor Mark Padmore and violinists Viktoria Mullova and Daniel Hope have been rapturously received. Moreover, he’s recently released a tremendous second volume in a Mozart solo series for Harmonia Mundi that has been just as warmly welcomed; in their 2011 Classical Music Guide, Gramophone was nothing short of effusive in their praise of his first volume, which they dubbed "interpretations of today."

Born in South Africa in 1979 and raised in Australia, Bezuidenhout studied in England before making his way to Rochester, New York to study at the Eastman School of Music. He says he simply fell into the early music community at Eastman, and that almost chance encounter determined the course of his professional life.

“ I was studying on a Steinway at the Eastman School of Music as a 17-year-old,” he recounts, “and somehow I started thinking to myself, ‘Shall I practice for nine hours a day and hope that one day I’ll have a massive career as a solo artist, or is it worth exploring other fields?’ People don’t necessarily sit you down when you’re that age and ask, ‘Have you thought about doing this instead?’ And then somehow, you meet these great, crazy early music people like Paul O’Dette or Malcolm Bilson, and you see that they’ve devoted the best parts of their lives not just to old music but to the instruments of that time, and they have these massive careers and are just hugely successful. And you go back to your dorm room and you think to yourself, ‘What am I doing here? Should I follow a pseudo-path of becoming a great big piano virtuoso, or is this sort of thing much more interesting?’” he muses.

This much more gripping arena became Bezuidenhout’s focal point, so much so that by age 21 he won both the first and audience prize at the Bruges Fortepiano Competition. But lest anyone get the wrong idea of Bezuidenhout’s intentions, he hastens to clarify what he means. “I don’t mean any of this from the perspective of thinking that this is some kind of easy way to get a career going,” he adds quickly, “but this combination of investigation and learning, and the kind of deep concern for text and early performances, as well as having a finger on the pulse of what people might be interested in, was just irresistible to me. People don’t want to go to their five millionth piano recital! Maybe they’re more interested in hearing Mozart’s music from the 1780s on a fortepiano, or Dowland’s music on lute. That was really attractive to me, that combination of worlds.”

So he just happened to fall into this epicenter of early music? “Yes,” Bezuidenhout says, grinning broadly. “Completely by accident. In my freshman year, I realized that there was this unbelievable facility there, largely untapped. I think the early music stuff that happens at Eastman is still a bit marginalized in some ways. But being there at such a young age was a really good thing for me—early music still feels a little secret and dangerous, and so as a result you feel like you’re not doing the normal, expected thing. I was really lucky that my primary piano teacher, Rebecca Penneys, was very understanding, supportive, and encouraging. She could really have put her foot down about it, and she didn’t. I was really tremendously lucky.”

The idea of early music as a super-secret, under-the-radar, and even indie-minded passion took a deep hold on Bezuidenhout. “Malcolm Bilson, John Eliot Gardiner, Nikolaus Harnoncourt—these were really first-generation artists," he notes. "They figured all of this out for themselves, by themselves. When you have this secret other life—it recreates a little feeling of danger, of the forbidden. And I think having that feeling is really important within early music.”

There’s still a sense of staking one’s claim to largely unmapped territory, I venture to the instrumentalist. “Absolutely,” he affirms. “This is one of those interesting things in which something that’s become rather mainstream in Europe—solo fortepiano recitals, in this case—has taken quite a long time to become mainstream in the US. Singers doing concerts with Baroque orchestras; that’s become very mainstream and even trendy, right? Every singer seems to have a Handel disc with a Baroque orchestra. But this sort of thing—keyboard music of Mozart and Beethoven—it’s taken a long time for that to catch on. There have been these mini-struggles on every level, but I think audiences are really ready to hear things like Dichterliebe performed on a piano from the 1830s, and not just another modern performance of the same repertoire. We need a bit of adventurousness, or else audience is just going to go crazy.”

The transition from a modern instrument to what Bezuidenhout fondly dubs “the old pianos” was illuminating. “In the first few years,” he recounts, “what I found quite shocking was how responsive these old pianos are, the level of detail they project. All this stuff that happens at the keyboard is so immediately there. On a modern piano like a Steinway, for example, there’s just a lot more breathing room—the sound is deeper, and heavier, and there’s just so much more space and freedom. These pianos are just so minute! For example, you’ll have a passage worked out on a Steinway that you think is pretty secure, you bring it over to the fortepiano, and you realize that it’s just a complete mess, and that there’s a wrong note every two bars. You’re not only dealing with a shallow action, and a light action, but with thinner and shorter keys. Moreover, you have to learn a new physicality. You can’t bear down with your upper body as a way to sink in to the notes; the old pianos just don’t respond to that. So you refine the way you move your fingers, your hands, your forearms—and that’s a very hard thing to do, I can tell you. But what all that does do is that it unlocks a level of responsiveness in your fingers and hands that you don’t need on a Steinway or another modern instrument—there’s no point in flailing your body about, because it won’t have any effect whatsoever.”

He says that the very specific kind of physicality the fortepiano and harpsichord require are perfectly suited to the music written during the same era. “I think the kind of performance style that composers like Mozart and others of his time were after extraordinary levels of detail, care for every note, lots of detail not only within longer phrases but even between beats,” Bezuidenhout says. “While these old pianos don’t necessarily offer a huge, voluptuous sound that extends to the back of a 3,000-seat hall, they do provide maximum detail. You don’t see these composers writing about the long line, or the projection, or a big, fat sound; they talk about character, detail, and articulation. And that’s exactly what I’m after.”

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Ariama asked Bezuidenhout which recordings have had the biggest impact on him. His responses:

"Growing up in Australia, the biggest thing for me was discovering the work of John Eliot Gardiner. A lot of his big projects came out in the 1990s, and there was such a sense of hot-off-the-shelf excitement for me. I’ll never forget buying his recording of the St. Matthew Passion; it was for me the first time I’d heard the piece, and hearing that first chorus…it was earth-shattering. Lots of detail and very finely sculptured, but so energetic and full of passion. All the best early music stuff of the ‘90s combined perfection with deep energy and passion. John Eliot continues to do that now in the best possible way."

"I then started getting interested in people like the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra pretty obsessively, from about 1993 onwards—it’s again this amazing sound world that these people created from scratch. They have this deep, rich, German string sound that is just so different than what the English Baroque Soloists were doing. And now I’m recording with them, which is just such a great honor."

"I didn’t really listen to a lot of keyboardists while I was growing up, but there’s an Australian artist, Geoffrey Lancaster, who’s just amazing. The piano world in Australia just went ballistic when he released his recordings, because they were so different and so new—he recorded on a five-octave replica at low pitch with an extreme temperament, played with lots of ornaments, very beautiful ornaments, but lots of them! The piano teachers in Australia were just scandalized! (laughs) It was one of those situations in which the Biblical elements of the texts, so to speak, were just upended."

"Getting the boxed set of Malcolm Bilson's Mozart was huge. Actually, just getting used to the sound of the old piano was huge for me; at first it does have this strangely earthy quality that takes some getting used to. But the attention to detail, especially in the orchestral accompaniment, is still unmatched, I think. As shiny and beautiful as the recordings with Murray Perahia and the English Chamber Orchestra are, or Mitsuko Uchida with Jeffrey Tate are, there just isn’t this sense, particularly in the winds, as if they’re playing like their lives depended on it. Those recordings changed the surface of the musical world forever. Malcolm’s told me what those sessions were like—the wind players spent at first just hours and hours perfecting their tuning, especially with all those dissonances that come right before the resolution to the tonic at the ends of the second movements, for example. By the end of the project, which was six years later, such perfection was routine, but they spent tremendous effort and energy getting there—it was a whole new world, and it’s still mind-blowing."