KEY POINTS:
Who: Roy Howat, piano recital, Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Silver Rd, tonight at 8pm
Also playing: Auckland Philharmonia Lion Foundation Orchestral Summer School, Clouston Hall, St Cuthbert's, Market Rd, Sunday 11am & 2pm
Few pianists with Roy Howat's international credentials would give so generously of themselves as the British pianist is doing around town this week.
Howat is the top-of-the-bill guest at French Connections, the annual conference of the Institute of Registered Music Teachers, giving a keynote address, four papers and a public recital; on Sunday he is the featured soloist for the Auckland Philharmonia's Lion Foundation Orchestral Summer School, playing Faure and Gershwin with the two student orchestras.
He is an expert on French music, and Debussy in particular, and is responsible for editing the composer's piano works, with no less a colleague than Pierre Boulez.
Yet he is no dry academic. Yesterday's keynote address was titled "Winning back our audiences and their love of music". He tells me there was indeed "an era when things weren't held too sacred and music was fun. We lose that at our peril."
With hindsight, we can blame it all on the 20th century. "We spent a whole century alienating music audiences," he says. "When we got into those decades which said that all new music must be serial, we put composers off and audiences fled. So, if the pendulum has swung too far these days, at least things are moving again.
"Now, there is a younger generation out there which has to be won back and a lot of work needs to be done convincing school kids that classical music is cool."
These days, classical music has such a poor profile in some quarters that "some perceive it as class-ridden" - but Howat quickly counters any such heresies.
"How can it possibly be?" he asks. "It's music. It's just sound. Bad associations have been made and sometimes even encouraged by certain sections of society; we have to win music back for everybody."
Tonight's concert, which Howat describes as "little bits of this and that", travels from Schubert to Debussy and Ravel, with a taste of Billy Mayerl en route.
Debussy's Estampes is "absolutely archetypal Debussy" and, Howat stresses, it refutes "the idea that French music can be messed around with". The pianist is a stickler for "playing it straight off the page" but then "Debussy was so fussy with his markings that he was a bit of a control merchant".
Debussy is not the only composer to suffer such misinterpretation. Howat names Faure, too often "played in a murmur in a haze of hiding around corners".
Tonight, he is determined to let us hear "the ecstasy that is in this music. The number of times I've heard an air of rapt meditation descend upon the room as someone plays a Faure Nocturne that never rises above mezzo piano."
Yet, he adds, some passages are clearly marked by its composer as "forte".
"Bring Faure out into the light where he wants to be," is Howat's war-cry.
There are more horror stories. Schubert's G flat Impromptu was played, says Howat, "too slowly for 150 years and dying on its feet every time" because of a misprinted time signature. Tonight, the Austrian composer will be vindicated and the piece delivered "at quite a lick".
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue - on the bill with the Auckland Philharmonia on Sunday - suffered similarly and, if you play what Gershwin intended, he warns, "it fairly skates along".
Gershwin fans will doubtlessly enjoy two elegant salon jazz pieces by the British composer Billy Mayerl (1902-1959) in tonight's recital.
Howat admires Mayerl. "He's so well educated musically. There are pieces where he plays at being Borodin or Balakirev, others where he chooses Debussy or Ravel."
And, in keeping with the conference, Mayerl's French connections were always two-way, as Howat reminds. "Ravel knew Mayerl's music ... and liked it."
