When I was five, I fell in love with the piano. As I began learning how to play on my mother’s old upright, I looked to recordings for inspiration, dreaming that one day I would be able to recreate the magic that poured from the speakers. In the liner notes of a compilation album I often listened to on repeat, I discovered that both the Mozart and Schubert pieces that had immediately captured my heart were performed by the same pianist: Maria João Pires. In the decades since I first heard her play, my admiration for the supremely elegant Pires has only grown (and I eventually learned how to pronounce, at least approximately, her Portuguese name). An artist with no pretense or ego, Pires always seems concerned only with letting the music speak for itself, helping it shine as brightly as possible — and this 2014 performance of Robert Schumann’s free-flowing, idiosyncratic Piano Concerto sparkles like a rare diamond, with Pires bringing out nuances often lost in other recordings.
After a fiery introduction, the winds perform a plaintive theme that will recur throughout the concerto, and the pianist takes it up in a totally exposed solo that sets the tone for the rest of the performance. So much rides on this moment, and we know immediately that we are in excellent hands: Pires makes the melody sing, giving it enough room to breathe but without excessive rubato (rhythmic fluctuation), hitting that first high A with piercing, bell-like clarity. The Schumann concerto has no breaks between its three movements, and we sense immediately how deeply she understands the overall architecture of this piece: we can simply relax and let her take us through it.
The third movement requires extraordinary patience and precision, qualities that Pires possesses in spades. Listen to the light, airy legato (smoothly connected notes) of these arpeggiated passages, growing almost imperceptibly in intensity until the rush of major-minor cascades unleashed with whitewater simplicity about twenty seconds into this excerpt, one of my favorite moments in all of music (which recurs, to my great delight, several more times in this movement). From first to last note, Pires remains minutely attuned to every gesture of her impeccable scene partners, the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir John Eliot Gardiner — who make this whole program an all-timer for me with two of Mendelssohn’s greatest works. I can’t even think of the haunting Hebrides Overture without getting goosebumps, as if riding a stormy sea into Fingal’s Cave; and the “Scottish” Symphony No. 3 reminds me of exploring foggy peaks in the Highlands. Though I have been a fan of Pires for decades, Schumann was not a composer I easily warmed to when I was younger. Over the years, thanks to performances like this one, he has become one of my favorites to play and to listen to. To paraphrase my colleague Étienne, a fellow Pires admirer: when some pianists play, you hear the pianist more than the music; when Pires plays Schumann, you hear Schumann.
