Primal force drives French pianist Helene Grimaud

NORTH SALEM, N.Y. — Hélène Grimaud does not back down.

This has always been the case for the French pianist, who returns to Walt Disney Concert Hall for a solo recital on Wednesday, ever since she was the youngest student in her class at the Paris Conservatory and refused to perform pieces that didn’t interest her. (This rebelliousness may have rankled students and faculty, but it also landed her a recording contract during her second year, at age 15.)

Since then, she has persevered criticism (a prominent French critic, in particular, who once described her as “a little goat with no taste”), defied New York City laws by keeping a wolf as a pet in a downtown apartment (“Remember, it was a young pup,” she says, “so it really doesn’t count”), and clashed with famous conductors (Daniel Barenboim when she was 17, Claudio Abbado just last year over the matter of a Mozart cadenza, when he wanted to use the original and she preferred one written in the 20th century).

“It’s true, I’ve had this impatient, impulsive side,” Grimaud says, sitting at the dining room of her new Westchester County home with a giant German shepherd named Chico at her feet, “but I’m usually driven by the big picture.”

Grimaud’s defiance was put to the test in Los Angeles five years ago. In April 2006, she was scheduled to play Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but had to cancel just days before due to pneumonia. The following January, she canceled a solo recital at Disney Hall citing back problems.

These physical setbacks hit the pianist particular hard: “I played with the orchestra regularly when Esa-Pekka Salonen was music director, I was there pretty often.” (In her 1993 debut at the Hollywood Bowl, Times critic Martin Bernheimer praised the then-23-year-old Grimaud as the rare wunderkind who “really seems to know what she’s doing.”)

Her January recital was rescheduled for Disney Hall that June, and as it neared Grimaud felt in good health. “I had a couple of treatments, I was on medication. So I thought, OK, it should be fine,” she recalls. “The first piece of the program was the Bach Chaconne. It’s a pretty athletic piece of music. It’s 17 minutes, and I was so happy out there. I felt great playing it, and I thought, ‘This is going to be a great evening.’ And then it happened.”

Grimaud suffered an episode of heart arrhythmia on stage. “I felt my entire being sort of sinking,” she says, “But I thought, ‘OK, I have to keep it together.’ The piece was my lifeboat.”

“For a while, nothing seemed amiss,” wrote Times reviewer Rick Schultz, adding that Grimaud “managed to hold the musical line, and the spell cast on the audience seemed largely unbroken.”

Grimaud refused to quit: “I had to finish until the end. I was hoping maybe by the end it will be better. But, no, it wasn’t getting any better. So that was that.”

The rest of the concert was canceled, and that began a long period of rest and recuperation for Grimaud. Tuesday’s recital marks her return to the Disney Hall stage.

Of the last five years, she says: “A lot has happened. It’s probably been the phase in my musical existence, not to say personal existence … where I’ve done the most growing, the most evolving.”

There are stories of the young Grimaud spending hours rearranging furniture in hotel rooms, and during the years she lived in New York City, she was infamous for changing apartments every three months. But Grimaud has settled down this year (after what she calls “27 years spent on the road in gypsy mode”) buying a home here in the sleepy but posh hamlet north of New York City.

“I mean I probably describe it as this phase of life where you finally catch up with who you really are,” she says in perfect English with only a hint of a French accent. “Things happen that make you realize — and health-related things always make you realize — and it’s a terrible cliché, but — life is too short to be bothered with things that aren’t you, exchanges which aren’t genuine, or any of that stuff. And it does make a big difference.”

It’s no coincidence that her home is near the 6-acre Wolf Center, which she opened in 1999. (Google “Helene Grimaud” and one of the first words that comes up after her name is “wolves.”) In her 2003 autobiography, “Wild Harmonies” (which has a picture of the pianist being licked by three white wolves as its jacket cover), she writes of an incident with a wolf in Florida that inspired her to open the center devoted to the education and conservation of the endangered species canus lupus: “She came up to my hand and sniffed it. I merely stretched out my fingers, and all by herself, she slid her head and shoulders under my palm. I felt a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body … which awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force.”

In her music, as in her prose, Grimaud does not shy away from grand gestures. As David Zinman — who conducted two of Grimaud’s early recordings — recounted by phone from Switzerland: “Hélène is a free spirit, and her playing is completely abandoned…. She’s one of my favorite pianists to work with because she’s a very spontaneous artist.”

Brahms is the composer who often brings out the best in Grimaud’s personal, unrestrained style, yet at Wednesday’s recital (which will feature the four pieces Grimaud recorded for her 2011 DG album, “Resonances”), it’s the way she passionately attacks Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata No. 1 that will likely make many listeners warm to what can sound like a chilly, 20th century piece.

One can find critiques of her playing that range from “cold” to “indulgent,” but as Sol Gabetta, the Argentine cellist whom Grimaud teamed up with on her most recent album, “Duo,” says: “She is as she is, she doesn’t bring extra emotion to romantic music, she just brings herself. And the emotion comes naturally.”

In the difficult parts of her life, Grimaud credits two things with “saving her”: music and wolves. She also admits that her passion for wolves has been problematic for her career and her personal life (in her book she describes how men have come to her with crazy fantasies when they read that she “lives with wolves”). But mostly she feels that her two passions have helped her become the artist she is today: “It’s very humbling, contact with a wild animal is something that teaches you about listening, about stillness, about respect, about penetrating another world’s secrets — and in that sense, it’s not totally dissimilar to the work you have to do when you face a new piece of music.”

“I think it’s a good way to go back to that more primal, with all the positive connotation that I mean when I say that, the more primal part of ourselves,” she adds. “I don’t think you can survive as an artist if you’re not in touch with that part of yourself.”

Grimaud and her boyfriend of six years were thinking of moving to California recently, but they decided on suburban New York because it allows her to be closer to Europe (where she still tours extensively) and the wolves: “In that sense they are truly an inspiration, just like nature has always been an inspiration to poets, writers, composers or painters. Anyone in the world of the art has always searched for inspiration in nature, that’s always been the greatest muse, and it’s no different for me.”

When asked how to best describe how the Hélène Grimaud of 2012 is different from her younger, more restless self, she says: “I can’t literally put words on it, that’s the thing; but hopefully if you hear the music, you will know.”

She hopes that her playing and interpretations are “more radical, more uncompromising.” Grimaud says that having her own “home base” as she calls it, plus good health and, of course, her wolves “all makes you feel anchored, it makes you feel like you belong somehow to the greater picture. It also makes you feel more alive.”

calendar@latimes.com

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