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The Passion of Mitsuko Uchida : * Music: The acclaimed pianist, who makes her Music Center debut tonight, favors instinct over perfection.

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

So, you would like a one-word explanation for pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s stunning career surge--five Lincoln Center Mozart recitals sold out in a single day; rapturous praise from critics around the world; profiles in national magazines; presenters being turned down because she won’t budge from her 50-performance-per-season limit?

Try love .

“I never do anything in music that is not motivated by love,” says the Japanese-born keyboard artist, who makes her Music Center debut tonight with Kurt Sanderling leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“To expand oneself merely to get ahead? To gain technique just to compete for prizes?

“These cannot justify passion,” Uchida says in her almost-crisp British accent (the language she prefers to Japanese and German, in which she is equally fluent). “I practice--and perform privately--out of love, not duty.”

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For proof of this impossibly idealistic stance one need only know that next year, while at the peak of her career, the 42-year-old Londoner will take off six months “to play for myself, to read and study scores.”

Furthermore, she refutes the notion of having catapulted to fame: “My real work, the interpretive part, came in slow and steady increments. Fame is such a loose, vague term.”

But it was her 1982 cycle of the complete Mozart sonatas at Wigmore Hall that a London critic called legendary. With those performances and the subsequent recordings, Uchida captured a lot of attention.

“Some people warned me against Mozart as a specialty,” she says. “My conclusion? Do not believe it.”

Her way with Mozart, regarded as revolutionary, is a course that accepts “all the bumps in transit from one feeling of exquisite subtlety to another.” Just as her view of Beethoven (she plays the Concerto No. 3 tonight) reflects the composer “in hell dreaming of heaven, of concepts like freedom and human dignity.”

However, all these ideas would be a moot point, Uchida says, if her diplomat father had not been sent with his family to Vienna when she was 12. Until then, she had taken piano lessons and regarded herself as average. More to the point, she says going to concerts “was boring.”

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“I look back on it all with horror,” she says. “So you see, if I had stayed in Tokyo (my) life would not have centered around music--and also it was unthinkable for women to be professionals.

“By chance, by accident my world changed. Listening recently to a tape of a Beethoven piece I played in Vienna at age 13, I could tell everything was there. Ultimately (a gift) depends on instinct.”

But Uchida’s painful shyness as a young girl was also her impetus to find an outlet for self-expression. She talks about having lacked the command of language and thus being locked inside herself at a certain phase.

“Learning to read gave me the only freedom I knew in childhood. And it caused an initial attachment to Japanese. Interestingly, both America and Japan are small islands,” she says, “very isolated from the rest of the world.”

Once she was launched, Uchida took a fiercely independent path. At 16, the pianist did not move on with her family to West Germany but remained alone in Vienna, pursued her career and won several competitions.

Indeed, she found the means to self-expression as well as self-revelation. It takes time, though, she says, to discover one’s universe and what is right for that universe.

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When presented with Artur Rubinstein’s dictum--that artistry feeds on the fullest life experience, both joy and sorrow (the fabled pianist nearly committed suicide after a failed affair and later made a fetish out of fine wine, fine cigars and beautiful women)--Uchida retorts:

“Rubinstein had panache. I do not have panache. But I love good wine.” The pianist chuckles.

What she has, say the critics, is a power to revivify the music’s spirit. Her own goal rests on finding “a certain sound,” along with that spirit.

“If I could describe the sound to you, I wouldn’t bother to play anymore,” she says with a laugh. “But as far as tonight’s Beethoven is concerned, think in terms of rough edges.”

Those rough edges apply personally to Uchida somewhat, as well, for she admits to performance nervousness.

“It’s a huge responsibility to play for an audience. Not something to take lightly or as routine. But I feel no compunction for this anxiety. All good musicians have it. Pablo Casals, even at 85, came onstage with his knees clacking.

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“The quest is not for perfection. Even in recordings I will often prefer the instinctive take to the note-perfect one. As for the precise voicing or phrasing, that’s another matter. Subtleties cannot be vague.”

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