Uchida

“I don’t understand how musicians can get bored,” pianist Mitsuko Uchida recently told the London Guardian. “But that’s probably because I don’t play that many concerts. I have time to learn new music and go back to old.”

Among the “old” composers she likes to revisit is Mozart, with whom her name is often associated. But she has a way of making the old sound new. In fact, while studying piano in Vienna, Uchida rebelled against the idea that the Viennese held the key to playing Mozart the “right way.” Twenty-six years ago, she made her name performing the complete Mozart sonatas at Wigmore Hall in London. The acclaimed performances solidified her reputation, and at the same time helped revive interest these works. Since then, she has brought her distinctive stamp to Schubert and Beethoven, both in performance and in her extensive discography.

Uchida is now so well known for tackling later composers that at the time of her two-season-long Perspectives concerts at Carnegie in 2003–04, entitled “The Second Viennese School Revisited,” she joked that the concerts should be called “Yet again Mitsuko wants to play the Second Viennese School—can’t she stick to Mozart and Schubert?”

“It is almost frightening: there is something about them”—Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Bach—“growing so big in my life that I feel I almost have to fight against them not to get completely consumed,” Uchida said in the Guardian interview.

Uchida arrives at Carnegie in May for two programs and is branching out in both directions—earlier and later—from the Classical and Romantic repertoire that she’s famous for. Her appearance in Stern/Perelman on May 9 features her beloved Schubert, as well works by two other composers that she has only recently begun to explore. The program is framed by Schubert’s Sonata in C Minor and Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes. In between, Uchida pairs short works by Bach with selections from Kurtág’s Játékok, a longtime work-in-progress that currently comprises 309 ingenious “game” pieces for piano. (She consulted Kurtág himself when choosing the works by Bach to complement the modern composer’s works.)

A week later, on May 17, she appears at Zankel Hall along with distinguished soloists to perform works by Liszt and Bartók, as well as Messiaen’s best-known chamber work, the Quartet for the End of Time, a piece the composer began in 1940 when he was interned in a German prison camp.

Uchida says that it is essential for her—both as an artist and as a performer—to diversify her repertoire. “You cannot spend your life with one composer. If I had been stuck there, my Mozart would have deteriorated by the minute and my playing of other composers would be equally bad.”

On the evening on Mitsuko Uchida’s May 9 recital,
Carnegie Hall salutes the Japan Society on the occasion of its Centennial.