Interview with pianist Ivo Kahánek
At the Rudolfinum on 9 February the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra will perform at a season-ticket holder’s concert with pianist Ivo Kahánek. Recently he has also been involved in another important assignment with the orchestra. In February they recorded together Bohuslav Martinů’s 5th Piano Concerto as part of a noteworthy project in which the PRSO, conductor Tomáš Brauner and various Czech soloists are recording all of the composer’s piano concertos. Ivo Kahánek had his choice of which opus to record.
Why then did you decide on the 5th Concerto?
The 5th Piano Concerto represents, by contrast with the mystical and dark Incantations (4th Piano Concerto), a different side of the composer, one directed toward light and catharsis. I have beautiful memories of the piece – I played it ages ago in Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and at the Moravian Autumn festival in Brno. I also chose this piece in particular in view of the fact I had already recorded Incantations several times.
I couldn’t remain on the subject of Incantations without recalling November of last year, when you performed the piece with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle. That wonderful evening at the Municipal House unquestionably represented one of the peaks of your career. How do you look back on it after an interval of a few months?
Very gladly, of course. It was – along with a Berlin performance a week previously – one of the few concerts that I identify with a certain period of my life. The most beautiful aspect is the sense of enormous energy and “intensity of living” that one feels on stage with such a conductor and orchestra. What’s more, such a feeling doesn’t succumb to the ravages of time but remains a permanent enrichment of the soul.
Which other recent projects do you rank among those moments that for you have been valuable and rewarding?
Two moments in particular occur to me: a performance with the Pavel Haas Quartet at London’s beautiful Wigmore Hall, and a New Year’s concert with the Brno Philharmonic and Jakub Hrůša. With people like Jakub or the members of the Haas Quartet it isn’t just the concert itself that has a higher value as an artistic and human experience – so do rehearsals, or even time spent at some restaurant…
And if I ask about a few more non-musical experiences, will you divulge some? (I sense that we’ll find ourselves somewhere in the surrounds of nature, you see…)
You sense right… This time it wasn’t anything exotic but rather I’m reminded of a Christmas Day trip to the highest peak of my native Beskydy, Mount Lysá. Such beauty and solitude, enhanced, what’s more, by the atmosphere of Christmas, is rare. I’m immensely grateful for such moments.
This time you’re going to perform Schumann’s Concerto in A minor, which was written in the 1840s for the composer’s young spouse Klara. For you, where do its strengths lie?
I think more than anything it’s the whole piece’s expressive complexity and consistency – in it we find passion, depth and a marked listener-focused effect, and all of this in remarkably sophisticated unity. At the same time, as by the way the dedication suggests, it is, despite the large nature of the piano concerto format, a work of remarkably intimate inner content.
Do you indulge in any musician’s dream that the PRSO ought to be aware of? If so, try articulating it (perhaps it will be noted…)
I indulge in several musical dreams – for instance the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff or Béla Bartók, Schubert’s Winter Journey at some leading venue, but in the sense of your question I would probably mention Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Concerto.
We’re looking forward to it – and we thank you for the interview.
