Expatriate Pianist Home for a Visit

A couple of hours off the plane from London, Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich seems perfectly sincere when he says: “If I had to do it all over again, I would devote my life to three things--tennis, conducting and the piano. In that order.”

Can he be serious? Can a pianist as highly regarded and outwardly successful as the 48-year-old Bishop-Kovacevich really long for other lives, in other fields? Or, perhaps, is it his very achievement in one area that makes it possible for him to fantasize about others?

“I can’t be sure about that,” the pianist says, earnestly and firmly.

The fact is, Bishop-Kovacevich explains, “I love tennis, and I have loved it for many years.” He says he plays the game at every opportunity, too, despite the danger of injury.

Indeed, right after checking into a downtown hotel, five days before his next local appearance at Hollywood Bowl tonight, the soft-spoken American musician asked first for information about watching the matches from Wimbledon. He was distressed to find that this hotel does not subscribe to the cable network that carried the tournament preliminaries.

The pianist’s other obsession--conducting--is being satisfied, he reports.

In the past two years, Bishop-Kovacevich, who was born in Los Angeles and trained in San Francisco, has continued his steady relationship with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, visiting there annually. He recently recorded all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos with that orchestra, conducting from the keyboard. (No date for release of the recording has been set, he says.)

“I like the Australians,” Bishop-Kovacevich says. “They’re relaxed, enthusiastic and unpompous. And they seem to like me.”

At home in Britain--”I still consider myself a Californian,” he says--he has been engaged as a conductor more and more frequently (he has lived in London since 1959, when he arrived there to study with Dame Myra Hess).

“During next season, I will conduct the orchestras of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham,” he says, listing the programs he will lead in each city.

He looks forward to an agenda of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto (conducting from the keyboard) and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, with the City of Birmingham Symphony, the orchestra led by his friend and colleague Simon Rattle.

“No, I have not come to the point where I will have to choose between conducting and the piano,” says Bishop-Kovacevich.

“But I am beginning to feel the pressure of trying to do both things well, all the time. Conducting takes hours and hours of study, and those hours can take away from the other parts of one’s life.”

At the same time, he is happy to be able to say that the old thrills of playing the piano have not left him.

“It still can happen that a particular performance, for whatever combination of reasons, catches fire, or reaches its mark. That’s when we know we’re in the right business.”

Bishop-Kovacevich, through whatever means, has escaped the trap of type-casting in the world of piano. Considered by many to belong among the elite pianists of his generation, he continues to play a wide repertory successfully.

This weekend he will play Mozart--the Concerto in C, K. 503, for which he has written his own cadenzas. But his other Bowl appearances have seen him in contrasting works; in 1974 and 1980, for instance, he played the same Brahms concerto, the D-minor. And his local recitals have been devoted to eclectic programs.

Despite the fact that he has played a number of premiere performances of new works, he does confess that he finds “not a lot of worthwhile ideas” in the music being written by his contemporaries.

The pianist reiterates a complaint long familiar: To a touring musician, artistic matters are often of least importance. Mere survival in getting to one’s destination can overshadow all other considerations. Though many deny they suffer from jet lag, Bishop-Kovacevich readily admits his discomfort upon arriving.

“It takes me a week to adjust,” he says. “I don’t know how people arrive one day, rehearse the next, and play the third. At that point, I’m still figuring out where I am.

“But this trip”--he has arrived in Los Angeles on a Tuesday, scheduled to perform on Saturday--”is nothing like the next time I come here, in November.

“At that time, I will be coming off an eight-week tour, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a tour covering New Zealand and Australia. That should be some jet lag.”