LDV80

20 BEETHOVEN_PIANO SONATAS NO.21 & NO.29 playing constantly. You don’t realise the fact, but you can go much further in terms of dynamic range, for example, especially in the piani . There’s a lot of room for manoeuvre. I learnt to play more quietly, at a lower dynamic level. It’s useless to play ‘too much’; the sound comes out . . . I almost said ‘by itself’. Recording is also a mirror for rhythm. You perceive musical time in a totally different way. For that reason, I preferred to recordwith the score: I needed to be close to the text, in every sense of the word. Did you annotate your score especially for the recording? Not all that much, actually. In any case, when I’ve written too much on the score I like to buy a new copy. But I do keep all my older copies for the fingerings and so on. What Beethoven wrote can be sufficient: everything depends on the way you do it afterwards, of course. A note is sacred, and you don’t have the right to forget one . . . Apparently, when I playedwith the score in front of me, everybody could hear a real difference. Did you arrive in a state of stress? I had been particularly uncompromising with myself in the days leading up to the sessions. Everyone knows that the microphone is unforgiving. So you have to reopen everything in your interpretation, call everything into question, and hunt out all your mistakes. Little notes that get overlooked, dynamics that you forget or that, on the contrary, you do rather too automatically. If you let the inspiration sag, it can be heard. I think we did a good job! It was a process of continuous intensification. Especially for the fugue. Quite a feeling of liberationwhen you have a satisfactory take