She’s alone together at the piano

Last May, after whisking onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19, Mitsuko Uchida sat down at the bench and, with a fierce focus on the orchestra’s opening bars, enveloped herself in a tight bear hug, as if to collect and hold on to every fiber of awareness. She swayed with the music leading to the soloist’s entrance and, throughout the performance, never lost an intense connection to her fellow musicians.

“I needed to get closer to the wind players,” she recalled recently by phone from her home in London. “Because Mozart is all about dialogue: the relationships between people -- nice ones, unpleasant ones, tender or angry ones -- and the exquisite subtlety of transit between them.”

The Tokyo-born Uchida -- widely considered a peer of Alfred Brendel and the late Rudolf Serkin as an interpreter of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert -- should know. Her renown began in 1982 when she took on all the Mozart sonatas in five programs at London’s Wigmore Hall. Now she is in town to undertake another such challenge with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen: all five Beethoven concertos. The seven-concert series, which began Thursday night at Disney Hall, continues through Jan. 16.

Uchida lives in intimate relationships with these composers. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say they are her world. “The great ones cause obsession,” she proclaimed, as if declaring that two plus two equals four. “It is a fact of life.

“And Beethoven is the most profound of them all,” she said, her crisp British vowels not masking an unmistakable Japanese accent. “With him, there is confrontation, battle. The huge struggle of being alive, of life as such. The life of a human being.

“Yes, life is hard and then you die. But people try not to die. Beethoven is someone in hell, dreaming of heaven, fighting for freedom and human dignity. He wages it right there in the music, in the forceful resistance between piano and orchestra.”

Now 55, Uchida wages a resistance to the outside world -- lest it intrude on her sanctum sanctorum. She limits her performances to 50 a year, in contrast to the many soloists who typically accept up to 200 dates, and says that arranging these Los Angeles programs was “a scheduling nightmare.”

Everything in her life is circumscribed: the wine she prefers (1961 Hermitage La Chapelle), the tea she drinks (estate-quality Darjeeling), the poetry she reads (Gerard Manley Hopkins), the few friends she has (among them Annie Leibovitz and the late Susan Sontag), the few collaborations she maintains (including with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Vermont’s Marlboro Music Festival, which she co-directs with Richard Goode) and the quiet sabbaticals she takes after every few years of concertizing. Misery, for her, is being at a party with loud music -- and enduring the rounds of concert halls, hotels rooms and airports that mark the existence of a starry international figure.

During her hiatuses (“the only way to survive”), she luxuriates in researching new scores and restudying familiar ones, “because I’m always looking for the soul of each piece and can only understand it one day at a time.”

She also plays for her own pleasure, “mistakes be damned.” And unlike Serkin, for instance, who believed that a musician should not stay cloistered practicing but must get out and live life, she revivifies herself with these sabbaticals. She already has the next one planned for May 2007 through January 2008 and, she says, has so far not noticed any resulting slippage in her popularity or invitations.

Has this enforced solitude come at a sacrifice? Of marriage? Or children?

“Zero,” she replied. “I do not and did not want a child. If the desire had been there, I would have acted on it. There was never any inclination,” notwithstanding her 20-year relationship with a British diplomat who lives in his own home next door.

She strives so that audiences, instead of savoring the perfect note-spinning expected of pianistic paragons, “can get the music’s powerful feelings: its warmth, its sorrow, its conflict, its humanity.” With her luminous playing, critics concur, comes a forging of head and heart, a poetic refinement that allows all manner of nuance to emerge.

Had Uchida’s father, a Japanese diplomat, not been sent with his family to Vienna when she was 12, however, it’s quite possible she would have had a life apart from music. In Tokyo, she took the prescribed piano lessons. But as taught, she said, the pursuit was dutiful rather than born of love or deep interest.

In a revealing segment of the DVD “Uchida EPK Impromptus,” made in 1997, she remembers glimpsing Schubert’s C-minor impromptu in a book. “But I was dismayed that the teacher didn’t allow me to play it, this tragic and poignant music from a composer whose loneliness touched me, even then. Schubert always spoke to my heart.”

Almost in a stream of consciousness, she mentions that the piece was “completely” outside her parents’ comprehension, breaking the word “completely” into syllables and stretching her voice up an octave higher.

“Schubert has his own way,” she goes on. “There are those wonderful melodies. But they alone don’t do it.” Rather, she says, the composer’s power stems from the unconventional and extraordinary step of his harmonic modulations. “He shifts you to a new place, where you’re dislocated and not supposed to be. It’s as though he lifts the clouds and you find yourself floating off the ground. For that moment, there’s the illusion of seeing heaven, perhaps eternity.”

New vistas were very much the point in Vienna, not only a city alive with the tradition of music as high art but one that supplied the painfully shy young Uchida with outlets for self-expression. It was in the Austrian capital that she learned German and English, studied piano seriously and gained the independence, at 16, to remain alone when her parents relocated to West Germany. Next came a series of prestigious competition victories and her decision at 22 to reside in London.

“I wanted to get out of the German-speaking countries ... because of the sense that they ‘owned’ all the great music, but I also wanted to stay in Europe,” she said on the phone. “England made a nice no man’s land, a place where they did not know how the music must be. Beethoven and Mozart both wanted very much to come. Haydn made a great deal of money in London.”

There was another, perhaps more philosophical reason, for her choice. At the end of World War II, prior to her birth, Uchida’s father was taken from his Berlin post by the American military and held for three months in a U.S. internment camp. She knows, painfully, about injustice.

“Here,” she said, of England and her home, “there’s a mixture of intellectual liberalism and, most of all, a human tolerance. It’s still alive. And that’s a comfort, although the world is becoming harder.”

A good enough reason to find refuge in music.

*

Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Jan. 13-15, 2 p.m. Jan. 16

Price: $15 to $125

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.org