Love affair with Liszt

Cyprien Katsaris is not a man for half measures.

Cyprien Katsaris admits he is "extremely rigorous" when it comes to practice and this week in Auckland he is "practising nearly all the time because I'm there for work".

As the recipient of such honours as a French Knighthood of the Order of Arts and Letters, the French-Cypriot pianist is just the celebrity to launch the Auckland Philharmonia's Vero series tomorrow.

His CD catalogue has more than 20 titles and he can bask in the plaudits of the composer Olivier Messiaen and the pianist Cziffra.

Katsaris missed my first call, so intently was he practising. But later he is on the line - while at the keyboard, fingers poised to illustrate any musical issues that might come up.

Liszt is the featured composer on tomorrow night's programme, a figure Katsaris admires for his "fantastic universality".

"It is amazing that the same man who was able to compose Liebestraum and the Hungarian Rhapsodies also wrote all that avant-garde music at the end of his life."

First up is an arrangement of the Fifth Hungarian Rhapsody. It's a rarity, and Katsaris is the only pianist in the world who plays it.

The major work is the Second Concerto and Katsaris' initial response is on the piano, playing the languid opening melody down the phone line ("this is the theme Liszt uses in so many styles, with such emotional richness"). He proceeds to storm through some "a la Bartok passages, written well before Bartok, of course".

Katsaris' 1980s recordings of Liszt's transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies were a revelation to many and these arrangements must have been heaven-sent for a young boy in the Cameroons who fell in love with the Pastoral.

Without warning, Katsaris is at the piano again, demonstrating how Liszt fudged a fiendish repeated note passage in the Seventh Symphony. "Liszt's solution was not satisfactory and I wanted to do it as Beethoven wrote it, but what I ended up with was so tough that my fingers were bleeding."

Katsaris does not accept half measures and he has no time for "the academic way of playing, which has been dominant for the past 60 years. It's not my cup of tea. It's too metronomical and without any real fantasy or creativity."

Instead, Katsaris looks to earlier pianists, such as Cziffra, Horovitz, Friedmann and Rosenthal, and feels many of the younger pianists of today are doing likewise, searching for the same sense of freedom.

"After all, music is like a spiritual love act between the composer and the artist. The resulting interpretation is like a child which the interpreter then offers to the audience."

He has no patience with those who create false legends about a line of teachers emanating from Liszt.

"Nobody can claim to have a truth about interpretation. You will have nothing but a distorted message if it has been relayed from person to person."

Katsaris is fond of the 17th-century miniatures of Lully and Rameau and is bringing out a series of Bach performances on his own label, Piano 21. But his first love is the Romantic repertoire.

"There is just so much 19th-century piano music that deserves to be performed and brought back to life.

"And time is going so quickly. Pianists only play about 2 per cent of what was written in this period. I would need 375 years to learn all the music I need to learn."

Performance

* Who: Pianist Cyprien Katsaris, with the Auckland Philharmonia

* Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow, 8pm