What, I wonder, drew her to late Schubert? ‘I really love this music,’ she tells me, ‘as everyone does. But I was afraid to record it. I have always felt that Schubert should be played by an established pianist, someone older with a lot of experience. Although I studied a lot of Schubert in my early 20s, I thought I wasn’t ready for this music – it wasn’t the right time. But then I went to the Chopin Competition in 2021 and I learned a lot by focusing on the work of just one composer. This helped me with lots of things. After the competition I thought about which composer I wanted to focus on next and I decided that maybe it’s a good time to work on Schubert. He wrote this music when he was around my age. He might have been more mature than me, but I wanted to work on his music when I was the same age as he was when he wrote it.’
Kobayashi is talking to me online from Paris and she is struggling with a heavy cold. She pauses regularly, partly to wipe her nose and partly to search for the right words. More than once she stops mid-sentence to say that she finds it difficult to explain something in English. But she perseveres. ‘I’ve always felt a deep connection with Schubert’s music, even when I was very young,’ she says, when I mention the video of her at the age of seven. ‘I cannot say I’m very good at playing his music, but I feel a deep connection with it. His music makes me cry – it’s too beautiful. For me anyway.’ A thread of self-deprecation – possibly of not being entirely sure why I want to ask her about her piano-playing – runs through our conversation. It’s charming, although not always revealing.
A common question one faces with Schubert concerns tempo. Kobayashi takes the second of the D935 Impromptus – marked Allegretto and usually played with a Ländler-like gait – unusually slowly, so that it assumes a hymnlike quality of calm. How did she settle on this tempo? ‘I was supposed to play it faster,’ she says openly. ‘I worked on this piece after I gave birth to my first child. This was a great experience for me, having a child and realising the love that a mum has, the relationship between a mother and her child. This piece reminds me of this love. My baby was very young and maybe I wanted to sing – this piece feels like someone is embracing you. I wanted to express this kind of love and perhaps this meant it got slower. I know some people will say it’s too slow, but for now I wanted to express this love at this tempo.’ It’s a delightful explanation, and in her hands this music takes on a meditative quality, although I suspect she is right that some will find it too slow. ‘If I play with a faster tempo,’ she continues, ‘the music becomes too easy-going for me. I wanted to express something deeper. Maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time I will play it faster.’
We talk about various aspects of Schubert’s score and Kobayashi’s response to it. I ask about her decision not to take the repeats in the first Impromptu – ‘I recorded it both ways, just in case,’ she explains. ‘With the repeat, I just felt it was too long. I felt the structure worked better without it.’ This may be a rather old-fashioned view and most pianists take the repeats (although another exception is Radu Lupu, so she’s in good company). We talk about Schumann’s description of these Impromptus as ‘a sonata in disguise’ – she can see some logic to that and certainly thinks of the set as a single work rather than a collection of individual pieces. But in truth her responses don’t invite much further discussion. Perhaps I’m not asking the right questions. Perhaps the language barrier isn’t helping. Perhaps she’s just feeling under the weather.
Posted from: https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/inside-schubert-s-four-impromptus-d935-with-aimi-kobayashi