KEY POINTS:
PERFORMANCE
Who: Martin Roscoe plays Beethoven.
Where and when: WEL Academy of Performing Arts, University of Waikato, tomorrow 7.30pm; Auckland Museum, Sat 8pm.
English pianist Martin Roscoe is a veteran of the concert circuit. "It's a long road to New Zealand," he says with a hearty laugh when we come together to talk about this weekend's all-Beethoven concerts in Hamilton and Auckland.
Inevitably, the main trauma for any travelling pianist is the quality of the instrument that awaits.
"I played a concert at the British Embassy in Prague," he remembers. "The invited audience included a lot of Czech musicians and the American ambassador. I flew in, had one hour to practise and found it was one of the worst pianos that I have ever had to play."
However, Prague pales alongside one of Roscoe's experiences back in England - stepping on to a Blackpool stage to rehearse the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, he found the piano pedals were disconnected from the instrument.
"But, for all this," he muses, "there is also something quite exciting about the different colours and sounds that various instruments have, providing the basic thing works."
Roscoe has gained an international reputation for his many recordings, often of relatively obscure composers, including the complete piano works of Szymanowski.
In concert, though, he is best known for more traditional repertoire. Hamilton and Auckland will hear Beethoven's Pathetique and Waldstein Sonatas, the lesser-known Opus 14 no 1 and the great A flat Sonata of Opus 110.
For Roscoe, Beethoven's 32 Sonatas are one of the "greatest testaments" for the pianist.
"It's the humanity of the works that shines through. Beethoven has the most wide-ranging emotional span. He is one of the few great composers who can give us intensity, tragedy and passion as well as joy and humour. Not many composers can sustain a whole evening of piano music but Beethoven is one of them."
I surprise him by quoting Busoni who claimed that Beethoven introduced bad temper into music. "He is absolutely right," Roscoe laughs. "And that's not a criticism."
We talk specific sonatas. He worries not that the slow movement of the Pathetique is almost too tuneful for its own good, having been rifled by Billy Joel on the song This Night and turned into a sentimental ballad.
"It remains one of Beethoven's very greatest melodies, especially set in that warm key of A flat major after the turbulence of the Sonata's first movement."
If the Pathetique delivers drama and the Waldstein has a tremendous energy, then the less familiar Opus 14 no 1 is "peaceful, lighter and airier and deserves to be heard far more often".
Last year, Michael Houstoun gave us an evening of transcendent music-making when he played Beethoven's last three Sonatas in recital.
Roscoe likens each of these pieces to a work of philosophy, putting forward a convincing argument that the Opus 110, which he will be giving us, is the finest.
"There's that pastoral, Arcadian first movement, the ridiculous scherzo with its accents and almost banal folk melody and then this incredible operatic drama in the adagio with its recitative and sorrowful song, almost plumbing the depths of despair. And Beethoven's answer to that is to use the cerebral form of the fugue to get him out of it.
"When you get to the end, the elation is almost unbearable."
Piano recitals are far from an everyday commodity on our cultural scene, and the chance to hear a top-notch international artist playing some of the greatest works ever written for his instrument, rarer still.
With Saturday's Museum concert sold out, Aucklanders might well consider a trip south on Friday to enjoy Roscoe in the superb acoustics of Waikato University's WEL Academy of Performing Art.
