Pianist? Conductor? Try Communicator

The pianist Andras Schiff appears to be the incarnation of diffidence. A small, soft man with a pink flush in his cheek and a thinning aureole of curls, Schiff could be mistaken for the bookish curate of a country church.

He speaks genteel, Hungarian-accented English, which he delivers in a series of shy sighs. As he talks, he doles out thin smiles and clutches to his lap a gray woolen lump that only later reveals itself to be a threadbare cardigan. Every once in a while he glances down, for reassurance, perhaps, at the volumes fastidiously arranged on the coffee table: biographies of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and austerely jacketed novels in German and Hungarian. Schiff exudes a certain fragility, as if he needs the plush quiet of this sunlight-colored Manhattan hotel room to protect him from the messiness of the world.

Yet he is a musician who easily hold the stage of Carnegie Hall alone, who nourishes his self-confidence not with therapeutic teaspoons of accomplishment, but with grand-scale projects. He likes to present the music of his favorite composers in comprehensive marathons--all the Schubert sonatas, all the Mozart sonatas, the Bartok concertos, the Beethoven concertos.

This week he arrives in Southern California fresh from a six-concert cycle of Bach’s major keyboard work in New York. Bach died 250 years ago this year, and to many people there seems to be something divinely ordained in the fact that his milestones are synchronized with the Western calendar’s. To Schiff, though, “every year is a Bach year,” and his concentrated immersion into the keyboard music--he plays the “Goldberg” Variations in Orange County on Monday--is an example of his deep-seated taste for comprehensiveness.

It’s a sentiment he shares with Bach himself. Schiff’s daily regimen begins with an hour or so of Bach at the piano, and his whole existence is permeated by the music’s rigorous exhilaration. “When I start the morning with Bach, the rhythm of my life is driven by Bach’s music,” the pianist said in a separate interview earlier this year. “I believe in the rhythmical life, one that has freedom but also discipline.”

His reputation rests on those twin pillars of spontaneity and structure. His style is a collection of negative virtues, a principled avoidance of extremes and idiosyncrasies. He expresses his artistic vision as a series of pointed demurrals: He does not approve of attention-getting bravura, takes a flexible approach to the pieties of historical authenticity, and has no patience for archly poetic phrasing. “There is a certain soloist’s rubato that I don’t agree with, when it isn’t organic. It has to be done with poise and very good taste. Otherwise it’s anarchistic.”

Schiff’s desire to master all the facets of a musical problem has naturally led him to take up the baton. Beginning Thursday, he conducts himself and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program that includes Bach, Haydn and Beethoven’s Fifth Concerto, the “Emperor”--even though he is not really a conductor, he says, “just a musician who communicates.”

He is, in any case, following the example of Mozart and all the soloists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who conducted concertos from the piano. It’s an approach he feels strongly about, though in explaining why, he begins, characteristically, with a reason not to do it.

“The disadvantage is that I have to remove the lid of the piano, so the audience does not get the same focused sound. But the advantages are colossal. The minute I sit face to face with the orchestra, they begin to listen and it becomes more like chamber music. I don’t want them to accompany me, I want partners.”

Conducting began to emerge as a profession during Beethoven’s lifetime, in the first quarter of the 19th century, and Schiff recognizes that he is on the edge of appropriateness in leading Beethoven’s last two concertos, Nos. 4 and 5, from the keyboard. There is, for example, the slow movement of the Fourth Piano Concerto, in which a grave, martial figure in the strings is pitted against the piano’s radiant hymn. “You cannot be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same time,” Schiff acknowledges. “But I solve that one by having the concertmaster do it, I don’t conduct at all.”

Then there is the devilishly delicate transition between the second and third movements of the Fifth Concerto. A few tolling, quiet pizzicatos in the strings usher in a long, breathless moment before a sprightly rondo tears loose. “It must have this hushed silence, this feeling that something incredible is going to happen,” Schiff says. “It’s hard even for a conductor to get it right.”

Technical difficulty aside, Schiff prefers to abolish the man with the baton because doing so draws tight the relationship between soloist and orchestra. “The musicians are forced to listen rather than follow, and the pianist should ideally be prepared to conduct in any case. When I learned these concertos, I learned the second bassoon part and the horn part just as seriously as I did my own. It’s musicians who are very good at chamber music who can communicate with an orchestra [directly]. The others should probably work with a conductor.”

Two years ago, Schiff made the transition from the piano bench to the podium, at first conducting relatively small-scale works by composers whose styles he had long since mastered at the piano. Then, last month, in London, the professed non-conductor led the Philharmonia Orchestra, a passel of first-class singers and two English choirs in a rapturously reviewed performance of Bach’s cathedral-like oratorio, the “St. Matthew” Passion.

“The ‘St. Matthew’ Passion was a great event in my life,” says Schiff, whose modesty extends to his avoidance of the pronoun “I.” It gives you a sense of self-esteem, of having done something very big. It’s almost like there is life before it and life after it. It’s a feeling like having climbed Mt. Everest.”

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Born in Budapest in 1953 and brought up in Hungary’s highly competitive musical hothouse, Schiff came to the U.S. in 1979 in pursuit of an international career. But his continual traveling made him ineligible for citizenship, and in the end, it was Austria that offered him a haven and a passport, an act that made him grateful at the time and now makes him profoundly uncomfortable. In February, when the ultra-nationalist Freedom Party won a place in Austria’s government, Schiff abruptly canceled an appearance at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The party’s ideology rests on the rejection of immigrants, and its leader at the time, Joerg Haider, had made incendiary remarks about the Holocaust that many, including Schiff, considered anti-Semitic. Schiff, who is Jewish, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors, who grew up speaking Hungarian, and who now speaks German to his Japanese wife in their home in Florence and English in daily professional life-- Schiff, the ultimate cosmopolitan--scrapped all his engagements in Austria in 2000. (He has agreed to play at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in January, but only on condition that the program include a note dedicating the concert to “internationalism and humanism and against racism and xenophobia.”)

Schiff’s has been a lonely protest. Hardly any of his colleagues, no matter how sympathetic to the pianist’s position, were willing to boycott a country that lies at the core of the Classical tradition-- and that offers some of the world’s most prestigious engagements. “I’ve talked to my colleagues. They say that I am only punishing the innocent public,” Schiff says. “To which I reply that the public is not so innocent.”

It is that refusal to let the Austrian people off the hook, rather than merely criticize a policy or a specific government official, that is the heart of Schiff’s position. Austrians should know better than to vote for a xenophobic demagogue, he believes. And, by the same token, artists should realize that history will judge them for playing ostrich.

Schiff cites the case of Wilhelm Furtwangler, the German conductor who remained at the head of the Berlin Philharmonic through the Nazi years, insisting that music transcended politics. “Musically, he is one of my heroes,” Schiff says sadly. “But there is that photograph of him conducting beneath a huge swastika, with Hitler and Goebbels in the front row. You can’t erase that.

“We are not just entertainers,” he continues. “Musicians have a public, social and moral responsibility. It would be terribly easy just to go on playing in Austria and collecting my fees. Because the dangers of this situation are not personal dangers. “

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Schiff’s decision to boycott Austria came at the same time that he was preparing to conduct Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion. The Passion--the story of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection--contains what many regard as Christianity’s kernel of anti-Semitism: the words “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” which Matthew attributed to the Jewish mob that sent Jesus to his death. Christian zealots through the ages have taken the imprecation literally and visited its curse upon the Jewish people.

Schiff sees no particular irony, however, in a secular Jewish musician leading a protest against anti-Semitism while immersing himself in the liturgy of the Passion. “The important thing about the message of Bach’s music is the love of mankind in the noblest sense. It’s not about Christianity, it’s about people. Everyone in the ‘St. Matthew’ Passion is a Jew, except for the Romans: Jesus is a Jew, Judas is a Jew, the Evangelist is a Jew. And you have these basic concepts, like love and hate and the manipulation of the masses. The whole psychology is so clearly delineated by Bach. If you turn away from this and say it’s anti-Semitic, you miss the whole point.”

Schiff says that conducting the “St. Matthew” Passion, with its epic, theatrical sweep, has clarified for him the spiritual force of Bach’s instrumental music. Schiff slips onto the bench in front of the rented Steinway that fills the sitting room of his hotel suite and plays, first an apocalyptic episode from the “St. Matthew” Passion (“Open your fiery pit, o hell,” the chorus shouts), then the French Overture in B Minor for solo keyboard. The music is startlingly similar: same tempo, same fury, same contour, same shuddering counterpoint.

“I never saw that piece as something sacred before,” he says. “But now it grows in dimensions. You have the confidence to play it very dramatically.” There is a trace of trumpet in his piano tone, and suddenly the cozy, golden sconce of a room seems to have grown much too small to contain such expansive fervor.

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ANDRAS SCHIFF, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Monday, 8 p.m. Prices: $65. (Sold out) Phone: (949) 553-2422. Also: Thursday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2:30 p.m., at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A., $10-$70. Also: Friday, 8 p.m. at Copley Symphony Hall, San Diego, $25-$125, (858) 459-3728.