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34 CHOPIN_POLONIA
You worked with György Cziffra and Lazar Berman, two pianists who
were Lisztians but who also tackled Chopin. What did they teach you
about the composer of the Polonaises?
With Cziffra you were carried away first and foremost by a flood of emotions. He
didn’t say much in his classes, so we listened to him and even imitated him, which
is actually a very good thing when you’re a child, because you take everything on
board and then you gradually jettison things. There were no constraints on our
freedom,we had the feelingof beingpermeatedwithChopinas Cziffrahimselfwas.
This method of teaching, which was very far removed from anything I was getting
at the same time from the Conservatoire, and so was especially complementary,
proved to be essential to me. Everything was always possible. We worked in a
certainway one day and the next daywewould do things very differently;we placed
our trust in intuition, in the present moment, which meant the works yielded up
their full complexity, their richness – the music was never identical.
With Lazar Berman it was something else again. I studied very little with him, just
for a single course. I remember he spoke a lot about sound, about the depth and
momentum of sonority; he detested those pianists who always play
mezzo forte
.
He wanted contrasts, life; that helped me get beyond the image of an excessively
measured Chopin. His recording of the Polonaises has almost orchestral qualities.