A concert grand is a racing car

Garrick Ohlsson still makes headlines, 45 years after winning the Warsaw Chopin Competition. Photo / Pier Andrea Moroli

Tremendous energy between conductor, orchestra and Ohlsson playing Brahms First

Garrick Ohlsson's concert hall status was assured when he took top prize at the Warsaw Chopin Competition in 1970.

The American pianist, who plays the Brahms First Concerto with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra tonight, remembers being "a politically naive 22-year-old from the suburbs of New York, amazed at the difficulties of leading a daily life in Poland".

These were the years of Cold War tensions. "The Polish people, who didn't see so many westerners, may have found the fact that I was an American, a kind of exciting plus," he speculates.

For the pianist, the victory was an important validation. "When I was young, one of the few ways of having a concert career was to win a competition," he points out. "If it was in Warsaw, Moscow or Brussels, your name would be on the front pages of the world's newspapers, although below rather than above the fold."

Now that he finds himself on jury duty for such events, Ohlsson can see they still have their place. "Although there are a couple of major international pianists who didn't win a big competition, they are the exceptions to the rule."

This pianist, who once likened the difference between live performance and recordings to that between theatre and film, finds the distinction between a concerto performance and recital work simply "apples and oranges".

He sees a solo concert as being "like a soliloquy or poetry reading whereas, in a concerto, there is this give and take of tremendous energy between soloist, conductor and orchestra, especially in a splendid symphonic work like the Brahms".

Talking conductors, he has fond memories of working with the late Wolfgang Sawallisch and Klaus Tennstedt, with whom he made his magnificent 1979 recording of tonight's Brahms Concerto

Today, he only asks that conductors be well-prepared. "It may sound fundamental, but some have to do up to 18 full symphonic programmes a season, and maybe an opera or two. No pianist on earth could match that."

When it comes to pianos, he says: "A concert grand is a racing car. It's not what you go down to the shop in to buy a litre of milk. It makes no sense at all to get an expensive Hamburg Steinway and not look after it.

"If a piano hasn't been taken good care of for a while and isn't sounding too great, then it's a little like going to the dentist with bad teeth. By the time you have a problem, it's usually a huge one."

Ohlsson is philosophical about his senior status, one of the advantages being that "people treat me nicer".

"Although one does get older and is never prepared for parts of it, my experience means I can handle situations and personalities that are difficult. I have a larger variety of tactics. I also get to play all my favourite concertos," he chuckles, naming the Beethoven Fourth and Fifth and Brahms' two scores.

His description of tonight's concerto makes one impatient for the concert, as he talks of "the pianist and orchestra slugging it out in the first movement recapitulation" and "a cathartic Finale that, like Beethoven, works through from darkness to light".

The composer has long been a favourite for what Ohlsson describes as his spacious style of writing.

"When I was younger, I felt he didn't write enough notes. I don't agree with myself any more."

Performance

What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tonight at 7.30pm