The motivation for young pianists to tackle Chopin’s
etudes, pieces that are monuments of technical razzle dazzle, is
youthful vanity. The motivation for 40-year-old Louis Lortie to do
the same is less obvious.
“It’s a very old motivation, a youthful motivation,
and now it’s a wishful motivation to stay young,”
Lortie said.
Lortie’s fountain of youth is 27 pieces of treacherous
piano music, Chopin’s etudes, to be performed Sunday night in
Schoenberg Hall. “˜Etude’ means study, and each piece
revolves around a specific technical challenge. Unlike dull piano
exercises, Chopin’s are imbued with the same lyrical grace
and sweeping romanticism of his best pieces.
While pianists might sprinkle their recitals with etudes as a
demonstration of skill, Lortie finds they can be an entire
concert.
“They make sense played together with the key
relationships and the way they connect to each other,” Lortie
said. “There’s a dramaturgical sense to play them
together.”
Lortie had learned all the pieces by the age 20, inspired by the
14- year-olds he met in Vienna who had already mastered them.
“It was a big shock for me,” Lortie said.
“When I was studying, I used to see kids play two or three of
them and the teacher was very impressed. (The kids who played all
of them) definitely live on a different planet. It seemed to give
them wings.”
If anything, learning the pieces allows a performer to play
Chopin’s works, which center around using the skills the
etudes develop. While Chopin was a great pianist, he wrote the
pieces as a self-improvement exercise and envied his friend,
pianist Franz Lizst.
Originally scheduled for Royce Hall, the concert’s change
to the smaller venue in Schoenberg better serves the intimate
music.
“Chopin is better in a smaller hall,” Lortie said.
“The worst was I had to play for 3000 people in San Diego at
the opera house. It was so dry and so huge I had to really do
things that worked form a distance, but on stage it was
strange.”
Additionally, Lortie is very selective about which piano he
plays on.
“There is nothing worse than playing this program on a
piano that is so-so,” Lortie said.
The etudes are Lortie’s signature program and for good
reason: the pieces are crowd favorites because of flying hands and
great tunes. But it remains a conservative program, and Lortie
hopes to diversify his repertoire and audiences with modern
composers and more university appearances.
“It’s always exciting to play for a university
audience, hoping that the audience is really a university
audience,” Lortie said. “Sometimes you get universities
and the audience is not really from the university, but older
people from the community.”
Despite efforts to play youthful pieces, the Canadian continues
to age against his will. Luckily, Lortie recognizes that he must
maintain his health beyond just finger exercises.
“I’m going to the gym,” Lortie said. “I
hope that that will keep me doing something other than sitting on a
piano chair. Other parts of my body would like to exercise as
well.”