A Matter of Choice

LONDON — One cannot choose where to be born, only where to be born again. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida began life in a nonmusical family in Tokyo, where she was offered piano lessons because playing an instrument was an acceptable hobby for a young girl. Just shy of her 12th birthday, her diplomat father was sent to Austria, and the family moved to Vienna. When they returned to Japan four years later, Uchida stayed behind to continue her studies with her teacher Richard Hauser at the Vienna Academy of Music.

But it was when she was in her early 20s that Uchida took hold of her geographical destiny, moving to London to devote her life to becoming a serious pianist. Since the mid-’80s, when she performed--and subsequently recorded--the series of Mozart concertos and sonatas that made her famous, Uchida, 49, has become one of the world’s most celebrated pianists. She has said many times that had she spent the last quarter-century in her native Japan, she never would have become a pianist at all.

“I was very lucky that at a given point I was able to choose the country I live in, the languages I speak--that’s an enormous advantage,” she says in the English she learned--her third language, after Japanese and German--when she chose London.

She is poised in the sitting room of her Notting Hill flat, looking every bit the urban classical music legend she has become. Thick eyebrows frame her soulful eyes, her layered wavy hair spills about her shoulders, and her tall body is an austere black silhouette, upset only by the addition of cowboy boots.

It is a few weeks before Southern California audiences will have a chance to hear her perform a range of works in the 52nd annual Ojai Festival, taking place Friday through next Sunday, for which she is also the guest music director.

“The Germans and the Viennese think they own all the great music,” she says. “Ownership has all the advantages of tradition but also the disadvantages of tradition. Because Chopin lived for a long while in Paris, the French claim ownership of him. I wanted to get somewhere where they didn’t own much, and in England--apart from Purcell and Elgar--there is not that much the English can claim.”

Uchida says she now realizes that the blank slate of a new culture and language gave her the freedom to forge her own musical identity. “I came from a part of the world which has nothing to do with most of the music that I play. For a long time I thought, why wasn’t I born in a musical family in Germany or somewhere like that, where ever since I was saying ‘ba ba’ there was music in the house?” she asks. “No, no, it was none of that. I was a middle-class Japanese who had a lot of records, [but my family] never sat down and listened to music. If I picked it up, it was not regarded as a crime, but they would have preferred me to be studying mathematics. I thought it was a huge handicap.”

But she has grown more philosophical over the years. “It has given me the freedom not to be burdened with all of the information from the childhood. England gave me room, space around me, and it’s an ever so slightly more tolerant society. Nobody wants to tell me, that is correct. I came from nowhere, from a music point of view, into everywhere,” she says. “When I left Vienna I thought: Do I need a teacher or not? After probably the age of 24, I simply decided to make my own damn mistakes, not somebody else’s damn mistakes.”

That Uchida gives just 50 concerts a year, half of what a concert pianist of her stature and popularity might perform, and at the moment is recording just one new disc per year, means that she makes very few of those mistakes in the public eye.

It also makes her appearances much-anticipated musical events. Uchida is known for brilliant musicianship (music critics have crowned her variously “Mozart’s high priestess,” “the leading Schubertian of our time,” and “the greatest classical pianist of the present day”); an intriguing stage presence (the New York Times called her performances “rock concerts for the intelligentsia”); and her vigilantly self-directed career and lifestyle.

“When I was taking quite a long time off or if I didn’t record for a year people would say, oh the public will forget you, that’s it. No,” she says, closing her eyes firmly and shaking her head. “Provided I produce something good. I control the number of concerts per year. That is for me a straightforward attitude and decision that I make in my life, that I seem to play better when I play less.”

She also avoids allowing herself to be packaged into a commodity. “One should never be known for anything but the music,” she says. “Wrong people come to the concerts, because they want to see you as the glamorous whatever. I want people to come to listen to my music and that should be quite clear from the start. I can see to it that I don’t invite a misunderstanding, and for that you have to choose what to do but also what not to do. Life is all a series of decision-making.”

Her decisions seem to come into vivid relief when you watch her buzz about the kitchen in her modest flat, or follow her as she bounds across the courtyard to her studio--which is immodest only in the height of its ceilings and its ability to house three pianos, a luxurious amount of space by London standards. Everything appears rigorously designed to facilitate the incalculable demands of her work.

She has been in a relationship with the same man for 20 years, but she lives alone. “Having seen my parents’ marriage and a lot of marriages, most marriages are a real problem,” she says crisply, then her wise, rambunctious, hiccuping laughter escapes.

“And the children, that was very simple. There was no even thinking of it, because music takes so much time. My life is so short,” she says, “and if I produced a child I owe the child to give it my time.”

Uchida says that being a pianist is “the only thing” she ever wanted to do. “I go with [pianist Artur] Schnabel who said ‘I only play music that I could never play well enough.’ So I am dealing with some of the most wonderful pieces of music,” she says.

Uchida admits that it is an arduous process. “We all get nervous. For me personally, exposure is very difficult. I cannot take it. So that’s why I go into hiding and work on my own.”

When she retreats, she does not listen to other people’s recordings of the music, she says, but reads the score, probably what amounts to thousands of times. And then she begins a process of “playing, playing, playing, playing, practicing, and thinking, and dreaming.”

When it comes to mastering a musical work, there is no magic formula. “Each piece is so jealous, it needs your time,” she says. “Some pieces of music need years or even decades of working out, even for technical matters. Certain pieces of music need concentrated work at a given point but then by playing everything else they also grow. People will tell you that what you haven’t got at the age of 18 you’ll never get. Rubbish. Lies, lies, lies!” she shouts, wagging her head from side to side and smiling her self-possessed smile.

“People tell you all sorts of lies when you are young. Your life is just about undoing all the lies that you have been told.”

Ojai is a long way from this tiny cul-de-sac off of Portobello Road, but Uchida says the town and the festival cast its spell when she performed there with Pierre Boulez in 1996, after playing the U.S. premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s concerto “Antiphonies” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“There’s something very rough and unready somehow, and yet it has got an extraordinary atmosphere,” she says about playing in the festival’s main venue, Libbey Bowl, in a small park off the main street. “You think to yourself, ‘God, it’s a corner of a park and bicycles are passing by, people are passing by and so on, and there is just--acoustically--obviously a not very efficient shell’ . . . and then some wonderful things happen.”

As music director (each year a musician is invited to take a programming hand in Ojai), she has been working with the festival’s new artistic director, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s just-retired general manager, Ernest Fleischmann. Uchida considers Fleischmann a good friend, and with him she decided on what she would play and who would join her at the festival, recruiting the pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn and conductor David Zinman. The Brentano String Quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will also be on the bill.

Fleischmann calls Uchida “extraordinary--an incredibly insightful interpreter of the repertoire. She has a capacity for drawing in an audience, for making an audience become part of the performance. That’s a very rare quality.” Besides, he said by phone from L.A., she clicked at the Ojai Festival two years ago. Her Schubert sonata “had everyone sitting on the edges of their seats. And she seemed to love the atmosphere. I thought that Mitsuko and Ojai, each with their own kind of spirituality, were a wonderful match.”

While this year’s festival includes such wild cards as an American musical tribute to Leonard Bernstein, Uchida will perform music by some of the composers with whom she is most often linked. There will be Schubert again--”four-hand” pieces, that she’ll perform with Solzhenitsyn--and two major concerts juxtaposing works by Mozart and Beethoven with 20th century Second Viennese School composers Berg and Webern.

“I like to mix the composers,” she says, “because it shows the conventional part of the newer music, and then the completely outrageous part of the older music. I never play just new music in one evening. For me that is too much, and also for the public.”

Of Mozart, Uchida says, that while she spent a great deal of her life devoted to his piano works--including six years altogether in the recording studio--she has in fact performed them live only sporadically in the last 15 years. “[But] I never stopped thinking of him, or listening to him.” Lately, she says, “he is really resurrected in my life. [But now] I am becoming more . . . ruthless. What I’m saying [when I play] is probably clearer. Possibly in around 2000 to 2010, it looks as if I am going to do the concertos again, directing from the keyboard, as I used to do a lot in the mid-’80s.

‘And then there is Beethoven, who I am completely mad about. He’s really becoming the center of my time at the moment, and I’m obsessed!” she says. “There is nobody more outrageous, nobody as completely otherworldly in dimension as Beethoven. Many musicians, the young ones, want to talk about emotion and think emotions are most important. The difficulty and greatness of Beethoven is not only personal emotion, it is the peculiarly intellectual aspect and philosophical element of Beethoven that gives it that extra gigantic dimension.”

Beyond such programming choices, what will really be spotlighted at Ojai is Uchida’s extraordinary ability to communicate to her audiences. While she is regarded as a spectacular performer, one British journalist noted her unusual propensity “to make that unfashionable sacrifice--to surrender her personality to the music.”

“I try to slip inside the skin of a piece of music, but I exist,” she says. “The moment I use my smile, my soul, my emotions and my body to express music, you cannot say definitively that I am giving up my personality. But I try to play actually what is written in the score. I think that is the purpose of a musical performer.

“What a peculiar thing it is to be a performer,” she muses, “playing pieces of music that other people have conceived. Why [do it]? The answer is that the composer creates something that is so strong and so wonderful that you feel drawn to it and compelled to reproduce it and share it with others. . . . A great composer can actually put the notes down in a way that you think, It’s mind-boggling that he came to that.”

Still she returns to the notion that great music is more than a miraculous arrangement of notes.

“[It] has something else. Compassion, maybe. But that’s just one thing,” she adds quickly, frustrated by the never-ending obligation to define her universe with words.

She searches her memory for a borrowed line from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which she translates from the German like this: “ ‘About what you cannot say, you should remain silent.’ I am absolutely of his opinion,” she says. “Beyond a certain analysis you cannot describe music. I don’t like talking about it; I do not wish to talk garbage.”

She offers a literary metaphor: “Poetry goes beyond what the words stand for. The greatest of music, the greatest of poets, when the words fail, they pick up. When the words fail, music starts.”

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* Ojai Music Festival, Friday through next Sunday, Libbey Bowl, Ojai, $12-$40 (single tickets); $45-$185 (series). (805) 646-2094.