We met to talk about Verbier. We ended up talking about why he’d rather someone dislike his concerts than feel indifferent, and why the greatest tribute to Beethoven might not be to perfectly reproduce his score, but to create music of your own.
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When the Verbier Festival invited you to open the festival alongside Esa-Pekka Salonen, what was your first thought?
I felt super excited and very privileged. Martin Engstroem called me himself and asked if I’d like to open Verbier with Turangalîla and Esa-Pekka Salonen. I said yes immediately.
It felt like a real musical adventure. I’d never played the piece before, and discovering it with someone like Esa-Pekka, who knows it so deeply, was an incredible opportunity.
The second reaction was, of course, a bit of nervousness. Turangalîla is an enormous work. It’s one of the most demanding pieces for piano. It’s like a concerto and a symphony at the same time. The conductor’s score is over 450 pages. It’s an immense world. And I wanted to learn it by heart.
I remember saying to Martin, thinking out loud, “I have to find a chance to play it before Verbier.” He replied, “That’s not my problem.” (laughs)
In the end, I didn’t get that chance, so Verbier will be the first performance. I’ve lived with this piece for months. I honestly don’t think I’ve worked this much on a piece since the Tchaikovsky Competition.
Messiaen described Turangalîla as “a love song, a hymn to joy,” while Esa-Pekka Salonen once compared it to going to nirvana and coming back. It has also been associated with words such as ecstatic, crazy, sometimes erotic.
Which words would you use to describe this piece?
I actually agree with Esa-Pekka’s description. It really does feel like that.
There’s something deeply mystical about the piece, but unlike many of Messiaen’s other works, Turangalîla doesn’t feel specifically Christian to me. It feels much more pagan, almost Dionysian.
It contains extraordinary contrasts. Some moments are incredibly peaceful and sensual, while others are almost violent. You hear Balinese gamelan, echoes of jazz, strange mechanical birds, massive brass chorales, even passages that remind you of Schoenberg.
What fascinates me is that Messiaen somehow gathered everything that was living in his musical imagination into one work. At first, I found parts of it almost chaotic. Some sections felt like several orchestras playing different music at once.
Only after living with the piece did I realize that this apparent chaos is part of its meaning. Nature isn’t orderly. Different forces exist simultaneously, sometimes in conflict. Turangalîla reflects all of that.
As the opening concert approaches, what’s happening emotionally?
I’m excited, and I’m scared. But I think fear is essential. The day I stop being scared is probably the day I should stop performing.
People often think fear is something negative that has to disappear. I don’t. Fear belongs to art. It belongs to the unknown.
An eighty-minute piece like Turangalîla always contains the unexpected. That’s what makes it alive.
I’d love it to become a beautiful moment in the festival’s history. But even more than that, I want to have fun. I want to feel free on stage. That’s the only reason I practise: to become free.
What does that freedom mean to you as a performer?
People often think everything is about respecting the score. But that’s only the surface. The score itself doesn’t make sound. The moment you transform what’s written on the page into sound, you’re already interpreting it.
For centuries, composers and performers were often the same people. We’ve almost forgotten that. Today we sometimes behave as if the score were the music itself. But it isn’t. The score is paper. Music only begins when somebody plays it.
What exactly are you creating when you perform a written score?
I wouldn’t even say that the performer creates the music. I’d rather say that music creates itself through the performer.
Music is something that appears in time. That’s why Husserl used music as an example when writing On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.¹ A melody only exists because our memory holds the previous note while already expecting the next one.
In that sense, the performer creates it, but so does the listener. The listener’s memory is also part of the process.
That’s why I don’t believe music exists in itself somewhere before it’s played. The score exists. The composer’s idea exists. But music itself only appears when someone starts playing.
As an interpreter, you also get transformed by the process. You don’t simply perform a piece, you are changed by it. I have no idea what Turangalîla will do to me, to my mind or my body. And I can’t tell you what it will do to the audience or to Esa-Pekka either. That’s something that belongs only to the moment when it’s actually played.
Many people will discover Turangalîla for the first time at this concert. If you could whisper one sentence to them before the first note, what would it be?
I’d simply say: Let go. Open your ears. Be curious.
Alongside the opening concert, Lucas will also give a solo recital in Verbier, including his own Variations on George Gershwin’s Summertime.
What’s the best thing that could happen to someone during one of your concerts?
There are many possible answers to that. I love when someone thinks they know a piece, and suddenly realizes they didn’t know it so well after all. Or when music brings back memories, makes them travel in time, or makes them feel something unexpected.
One of the miracles of music is that a single note can contain sorrow, anger, peace and love all at once. In everyday life, we tend to separate these emotions into little boxes, as if they couldn’t exist together. Music doesn’t.
I think that’s deeply healing because life is complex. Not because it’s only difficult or full of suffering, but because it’s many different things at once. Our minds naturally try to simplify everything, to put it into little boxes. Music reminds us that reality is richer than that. It allows contradictory emotions to exist together.
And honestly, I’d rather someone strongly dislike my concert than feel indifferent. Of course I’m happy when people enjoy my concerts. But I’m almost happier if I know that someone in the hall really disliked it. You feel very alive when you dislike something. It’s much better than indifference. If as an artist you’re really taking risks, some people won’t like what you do, that’s inevitable. The moment your priority becomes pleasing everyone, you’re no longer making music.
Your recital also gives audiences a first glimpse of your upcoming album, Gershwin Variations. The album consists of Gershwin’s iconic works alongside your own compositions and variations on Gershwin’s melodies.
One thing that struck me looking at the track list: you dedicated each work to living musician-composers, Brad Mehldau, Hiromi Uehara, Jacob Collier, Fazıl Say… and others. They come from different musical worlds, but they all seem to have one thing in common: they’ve each created their own musical language instead of fitting into a category.
What is it about artists who resist categories that fascinates you so much? And do you recognize yourself in that freedom?
I consider myself an apprentice in that family of people who create their own language, do their own thing, and are happy to share it.
I want to belong to that team.
What brought me to classical music was precisely the feeling that the great composers we admire, like Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or Bach, were people who escaped categories. Today we place them all in the “classical music repertoire”, but in their own time they were groundbreakers, creating something completely new.
That’s why I believe the best way to stay faithful to these composers isn’t simply to reproduce their scores. It’s to become a creator yourself. That’s much closer to what they actually did.
These dedications are also a message to the classical music world. I don’t believe classical music can remain alive if it only preserves the past. It has to keep creating. We need interpreters, of course, but we also need people who write, improvise, invent, take risks and bring something that didn’t exist before.
Every time I hear you speak, after a few minutes we’re no longer just talking about music, but about literature, philosophy, religion or history. It seems obvious how much these things nourish your relationship with music.
Do you think an artist has to be intellectually curious? Or can great art also come from somewhere much less intellectual, from something more instinctive, almost animal?
Actually, my own relationship with music began in a completely instinctive way. It wasn’t intellectual at all. It was something very physical, almost directly connected to my nervous system.
The curiosity came afterwards.
I don’t think an artist has to be intellectual, but I don’t see how it’s possible to make music without being curious. Curiosity is what makes you explore, learn, remember and eventually create. Whether that curiosity leads you towards philosophy, literature or something else doesn’t really matter.
Even today, music is still something very physical for me. I’ve simply learned to control it a little better than when I was younger. Minimum control, though, not maximum. Because if it’s maximum, then there’s no life.
¹ Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928).
