Alexandre Tharaud laughs out loud when I ask him what it’s like, being a superstar pianist. “I have a healthy relationship with fame,” he tells me. “Firstly because fame as a classical pianist, ça va, it’s no big deal. And also because the first ten years of my career weren’t actually much of a career.” Musically speaking, he describes a rags-to-riches trajectory that gave him the space to figure out what he wanted. “I had very few concerts, I recorded albums with small record labels, with almost no feedback.”
“I was in almost total isolation, wondering what I was going to do, because what I wanted to experience was the stage. I didn’t care about being on a big international stage, what I wanted was to be on stage, even a little cabaret – whatever – and in fact I did this, I played in restaurants, I often played for free.”
He speaks of his gratitude for this period, which gave him a sense of distance from the success that came afterwards – “the frenetic rhythm of the concerts, the relationship with the audience, the critics, the constant feedback, all of it: if I hadn’t been through this period of extreme doubt and precarity, I couldn’t have the life I have now.” In fact, he tells me he almost pities the musicians who get their career off to a flying start right off the bat, who end up in the spotlight in their early 20s with an agent, a big record label, international prizes: “It can be punishing. What comes afterwards can be really difficult. In a life – any kind of life – you need grey areas, you need tunnels, especially at the start.”
Now, the tables have turned for Tharaud, and it’s time offstage which is hard to find. “Life as a soloist is a perpetual tour, during which you sometimes have to fight for space to breathe.” He means it. Speaking from his hotel room over video call, he tells me he’s blocked off four weeks of free time this spring, and plans to take several months off in the coming years. “I’ve grabbed the bull by the horns, so that I can truly stop from time to time.”
He believes in the importance of these breathing spaces. “Young musicians starting off their careers are exhilarated by the rhythm, but they don’t realise that if they don’t take time for holidays or rest they’re going to pay a high price for it later. That goes for everyone, there are no exceptions.” Meanwhile, an iron sense of discipline is necessary to survive the intense rhythm on the road. “Life on tour is a lot of travel, ferocious jet lag, a schedule you have to keep on a tight leash: for instance, I don’t generally do after-concert dinners. I go back to my hotel.”
Alexandre Tharaud has never been afraid of switching things up, changing the rules of the game. Why, for instance, he wonders, haven’t piano recitals becoming something different by now? He describes his job as being “mired in extremely rigid principles which came into being two centuries ago”. Just as our relationship to sound, performance, the stage has evolved, he believes the ritual of the recital should be allowed to evolve. “What would changing the rules look like? In my case, that meant using sheet music onstage. I wasn’t the first, but it was noticed all the same. It earned me a certain amount of sarcasm, for instance.”
Nevertheless, many pianists followed in his footsteps, and thanked him for the candour of the gesture. “It gave them the courage to do it, because they saw me doing it.” Endearingly, he launches into a list of his weaknesses: “It’s also a way of saying, OK, I don’t have everything you need to be a pianist, I don’t have the memory, I don’t have the body – my arms are too long, too thin, I’m an insomniac… I mean, I’m the living proof that you can manage to do what you want to do for a living without having it all.”
What has that looked like for Tharaud? A concert career that needs no introduction, and quickly made him a household name. Two published books. A small role in a Haneke film. And two dozen solo albums, with early releases starting in 1992 celebrating French composers including Milhaud, Poulenc and Reynaldo Hahn. “I was born into French music: my mother was a choreographer, my father a stage director.”
In Lugano this April, Tharaud plays his own transcription of Paul Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which he created when he was just 23 and revisited last year, describing the piece as “a kind of fireworks”. “I like recitals,” he explains, “that begin piano piano, that begin in contemplation with Bach and end up somewhere else entirely.” Alongside Dukas, Tharaud performs some unusual selections from Bach and Rameau, together with extracts from Ravel’s piano suite Miroirs.
But the first French composers Tharaud encountered, he tells me, weren’t Ravel, Debussy or Dukas, but Robert Planquette, a turn-of-the-century composer of operettas and songs. “It bothers me that French music isn’t given much of an airing in concert halls, in concert series, in recitals. Debussy is less often played in recital than 20 or 30 years ago.” He’s proud of his role as a curator and defender: Rameau and Couperin in an era where they were rarely included in modern piano repertoire. Emmanuel Chabrier, who in Tharaud’s opinion set the stage for all 20th-century French piano music (he recorded his complete piano works). Massenet, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Poulenc. But this approach comes with its own frustrations. “It sometimes feels to me as if something is stuck. Even Satie is still very rarely played in concert.”
He speaks briefly of his love for the work of Les Six, and of his friendship with Darius Milhaud’s widow, Madeleine. “We used to see each other often, and she would say to me: ‘You know, the wheel is always turning.’” He gives a wry smile at the memory. “She wasn’t worried about her husband’s legacy, because she knew this.”
“There are classical composers being played today that nobody was playing 20 years ago,” Tharaud says. “Which is amazing. Shostakovich, for instance, when I was a teenager, was more or less outlawed from concert halls. In the 1920s, there were two composers you would never play in France, because nobody would show up: Mozart and Bach. 1920 is not so long ago. So I’m not worried. The wheel is turning.”
The key, for Tharaud, is to make sure that composers’ works are recorded at least once, that they are made accessible and readily available as sheet music. “These days I’m doing a lot of fighting for Jean Wiéner, whose works for piano are absolutely magnificent: four sonatas, lots of short works and two piano concertos. That’s our role too. A performer is someone who says: watch out. We are people who must keep a ceaseless vigil.” He goes on: “You have to be there. You have to be vigilant, make phone calls, write. Don’t forget about such and such composer. Write to an editor, write to a record company. In a programme where you’re playing Chopin and Beethoven, in the middle, play a piece by a composer who’s a bit less well-known.”
But this doesn’t mean he sees himself as an archivist or a scholar, a custodian in a museum of dusty works behind glass. “I don’t like museums. I get bored easily. I like works to be alive. We’re not custodians, we’re more like resuscitators. Music is the only art that must be reinvented every day, reinterpreted to the measure of what we see, what we hear, because we’re changing all the time.”
For him, that living engagement with the music of the past comes through a hands-on approach. Tharaud is pretty sure all pianists, whether they’re composers or not, should write their own transcriptions, as he has done with a number of Bach’s suites (for flute, lute, and oboe), as well as arias and choruses from the St John Passion. “No one else can make your hands sound their best.” It’s also a wonderful way of expanding the repertoire. From a very young age, he was amazed by the variety of sound and colour the piano could offer as an instrument. “During my time in conservatoire, I discovered that the piano is an imitator that can tend towards the colours of organs, lutes, harps, strings, woods, bassoons, percussion, harpsichords.”
Variety, then, as a unifying thread. In April, he’ll release a new recording of three contemporary concertos written for him by composers Thierry Pécou, Ramon Lazkano and Alex Nante. Last year, it was Nico Muhly. These projects come together easily, over a glass of wine, or over social media, through friends of friends, but their impact is something Tharaud is proud of. He speaks candidly about what he can do with his privileged position: bring lesser names onto a major label, and thus to a wider audience. “It all comes back to what I like to do best: pull strings, say ‘watch out’, pinpoint, keep vigil. Talk to listeners, be useful. That’s also our role, to push boundaries, to shake things up a bit.” The wheel is always turning.