MITSUKO UCHIDA:
Today's "high priestess of Mozart" (and Schubert) is a
risk-taker who plays the piano on her own terms.
Mitsuko Uchida: as dedicated
to Schönberg as she is to Mozart and her beloved Schubert
Neither prodigy
nor protégée, Mitsuko Uchida nevertheless made
her way to the highest firmament of classical music. Slowly
but steadfastly she won the race, so to speak...
When she began piano lessons at an early age as part of her
traditional Japanese education and even after she had shown
demonstrable talent on the keyboard, no one in the Uchida household
in Tokyo could have imagined that someday she would become the
world's " high priestess of Mozart" and be hailed
as one of the "supreme Schubert pianists" of our time.
She would have been raised as a dutiful diplomat's daughter
to become perhaps at best a model Japanese housewife, had her
uncommon love for Western music not intervened.
Today, much is made of the "Mozart Effect" on children.
It remains arguable whether or not listening to Mozart's music
enhances a child's IQ but, more than the routine piano lessons,
it must have made quite an impression in the young Uchida's
mind. In an interview with the Detroit Free press, she recalled
listening to her father's collection of classical recordings
by European composers but it was Mozart she listened to "again
and again."
The family's move to Vienna when she was 12 was a turning point
in her life. Vienna, after all, was where Mozart composed the
masterworks that ensured his immortality. And it was in Vienna
where, while continuing her musical studies under Richard Hauser
at the prestigious Vienna Academy of Music, the Japanese ambassador's
daughter could at last satisfy her boundless intellectual curiosity
about the culture of Western music. She must have impressed
her music teacher, for only two years later at age 14 she performed
her first concert at the Vienna Musikverein. In the meantime,
German became her second main language and when her father was
assigned back to Japan four years later, not surprisingly, she
decided to remain in Vienna to continue her studies. In 1969
recognition came when she won first prize at Vienna's Beethoven
Competition. The next year, she won second prize at Warsaw's
Chopin Competition.
Though fully steeped in the traditions of the Viennese school
of piano-playing, Uchida somehow felt stifled by its many restrictive
rules. So, in 1973, confident of her artistic maturity, she
flew the coop - giving up Vienna and music school to give free
rein to her creative impulses, she moved to London where musical
freedom beckoned. London is where she lives to this day. (And
English, naturally, has become her third main language.)
In
1975 she won second prize at the Leeds Competition, yet a concert
career remained elusive. Ignoring conventional wisdom and eschewing
the competition circuit and the usual paths to fame, she embarked
on her own self-directed and liberating explorations into music
- and at the time, into Mozart in particular. In the next several
years devoted herself to an intensive self-study of music. She
listened and read. Indulging her fascination with Mozart, she
studied everything about the composer, his works, and the culture
of the time until she could understand the many hidden complexities
of his music and the source of his genius. Then she played his
music - strictly on her own terms, making it her own.
Finally in 1982, she began to tell the world what Mozart had revealed
to her in the course of her virtual dialogue with the composer.
And what a revelation! First she played all of 20 piano sonatas
in a series of performances before London audiences at Wigmore
Hall, repeating the program later that year in Tokyo, astounding
critics on all occasions with her fresh, inspired and elegant
playing. It was Mozart as they had never heard him played before
- passionate, intelligent and insightful. In the 1985-86 season,
she served up twenty-one piano concertos, conducting the English
Chamber Orchestra while playing from the bench. In no time, she
became in demand all over the world, recording contracts poured
in, and fame rushed to her door.
While Mozart was her first calling card, she refused to be associated
only with Mozart to the exclusion of other composers she loved
dearly. Her concert repertoire and her discography
of many award-winning recordings will show that there are indeed
other composers close to her heart - Bach, Beethoven, Bartok,
Debussy, Schönberg, Schumann, and Schubert dearest of all!
To each composer whose works she performs or records, she devotes
the same amount of study and careful preparation that she gave
to Mozart.
Today, Mitsuko Uchida has new and continuing partnerships with
the world's distinguished musicians and orchestras. In 2002, for
example, she was Artist-in-Residence at the Cleveland Orchestra
where until 2007 she will perform the entire Mozart concerti cycle
conducting the orchestra from the piano. In 2004, she concluded
her own chamber music Perspective Series at Carnegie Hall entitled
"Mitsuko Uchida: Vienna Revisited" where she juxtaposed
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert with the composers of the Second
Viennese School (Schönberg, Berg and Webern), and which she
brings to Europe in the 2005-06 season. Her special professional
partnerships includes, among conductors: Kurt Sanderling and Jeffrey
Tate with both of whom she has made many recordings, as well as
Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sir Charles McKerras,
and Sir Colin Davis; among performers: the Brentano Quartet, violinist
Mark Steinberg, and most recently (affirming her love for Lieder)
tenor Ian Bostridge
with whom she recorded Schubert's song-cycle Die
schöne Müllerin, the only singer she
has had occasion to collaborate with.
Uchida's service to music extends beyond the concert stage. She
served for several years as the first woman Music Director of
the Ojai Music Festival in California and serves with pianist
Richard Goode as Co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music School
and Festival in Vermont which brings together aspiring young musicians
and established artists. Her commitment to the development of
young musicians extends to her support of and appointment as trustee
of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust.
