A purist sounds off - by Vivien Schweitzer

A purist sounds off
By Vivien Schweitzer
Financial Times
September 6 2005

No one who meets Louis Lortie can be in any doubt that he prefers to go his own route. Venting his frustration with record companies and concert programmers, the 46-year-old French-Canadian pianist says artists should think for themselves, "but most organisations don't allow that. Soloists end up collaborating with conductors they don't know. There is no musical logic when two artist agencies decide their musicians should work together just because they can make more money."Lortie is not alone in feeling constrained by the rigidity of the music industry, but such outspokenness is rare - and may explain why less gifted pianists have had faster careers. The child of unmusical parents, he grew up in suburban Montreal, where his musical curiosity was piqued at the age of seven after hearing his grandmother play. For Lortie, the advantage of this unremarkable, un-Bohemian childhood was that "I came from scratch and had to form my own musical ideas". As he explains in his New York hotel on the eve of a recent Mozart concerto performance at Lincoln Center, these ideas often clash with the robotic schedules and artistic restrictions imposed by a fast-paced, marketing-driven world."Mozart concertos," he continues in his lightly accented English, "were never written to be played with a conductor; it's almost an absurdity. At least if they put people together they should put people together who they know will fit together, otherwise the stakes are very high. You just don't play magical Mozart if you don't rehearse enough. It's not like a big Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich that every orchestra member has played and the conductor can just pull along. All music needs time, but particularly Mozart. A missed note is more of a catastrophe than with other composers."While it seems fair to describe Lortie as a perfectionist, he prefers the (sometimes imperfect) spontaneity of live recordings, which "give a more exact image of who I am as a musician".Lortie has made more than 30 recordings on the Chandos label, but fell out with them over differences in recording techniques. He will soon be working with a new label, which he avoids identifying, except to venture that it's one where he will enjoy "total freedom".His first release on the new label is to be the complete Beethoven sonatas, which he believes will be the first live cycle ever recorded. Lortie finds the constraints of studio recording "very frustrating". Most labels have their own sound, he explains, and want their artists to record in certain halls with certain microphones. "Even as a youngster I could listen to recordings and recognise the Decca sound, then figure out who was playing by remembering who was on that label. And that's terrible! It's more interesting for the audience to hear you with the acoustics of a small wooden hall than a huge hall. It's like they're travelling with you."Having no control over which piano he performs on is another irritant. "Thank God there are still several recording companies on the market, but you still have one piano brand [Steinway] that is in 99 per cent of concert halls. Imagine if you had only one brand of car to ride in! It's a communist idea and it doesn't work in a free society. I always ask what pianos are available, but [staff] don't like to bother as it's too much trouble with unions to move pianos around. I have discovered sometimes after the concert that there were other pianos in the hall. I think this is really repulsive; it's treating us like machines and I have no mercy for this kind of attitude."One composer Lortie shies away from is Bach. "I love his music," he says, "but I have a problem with Bach at the piano. I learned the harpsichord as a teenager, and if you give me Bach and there is a piano and a harpsichord I will sit at the harpsichord." In support of his Canadian colleague Angela Hewitt, who is due to give a Bach-on-the-piano recital later that evening, he diplomatically assures me, however, that he doesn't have any "pre-conceived ideas" about other people playing Bach on the instrument. On the contemporary side, Lortie has a particular affinity for Thomas Adès, whom he calls "a great genius. Many composers can flick a baton, but Adès can really perform," he adds.In the taxi over to Lincoln Center to hear Hewitt, Lortie can't find his ticket and jokes that he is jetlagged from the trip down from Montreal, where he has spent several weeks swimming, biking and enjoying the mountains at his country house.He frets about the dirty air in New York, describing himself as "a little bit of a freak. I do so much travelling through dirty and unhealthy cities that I'm obsessed with pure air and food." But perhaps it is this obsession with purity that has earned Lortie critical praise for his freshness of interpretation, insight and individuality.Louis Lortie plays with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra on September 17 and 18, the Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) on September 28, 29 and 30, and the Dallas Symphony on October 20, 21, 22 and 23