Demidenko keyed up to perform

By WILLIAM DART

Nikolai Demidenko is the sort of pianist who encourages critics to make fast and loose with the wild images. Michael Tumelty, writing for the Glasgow Herald, described him tearing Prokofiev's First Piano Concerto apart, "before he hurled it at the audience in the fastest and most physical performance I've ever heard".

This Russian sounds a danger to himself and those around him but, in reality, he's all charm laced with offbeat humour. Just off the plane from Brisbane, he says he was "playing in a church at Noosa last night with the doors open because it was hot as hell, dying of the heat, hearing every car outside, eight-cylinder engine, four-cylinder engine, motorbikes, kookaburra laughing ... "

I quickly assure him our town hall, although not soundproof, does shield us from the outside world.

"But," he counters, finishing his Noosa tale, "what a nice experience it was."

Demidenko has lived in England for 14 years now, but admits that he's very much the product of his Russian background which has influenced him "by 200 per cent. Part of being a pianist is like exercise, part is learning and what you can't learn you have to absorb from the culture around you".

He has spoken before of the unique sound of his teacher Dmitri Bashkirov but now he says that words aren't enough: "You might as well try to describe to a blind man how the sky is blue or the tomato is red".

The mention of competitions - he made his first impact by winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1978 - has him observing that "sport and music have nothing in common, but, unfortunately, for most of us they're the only way to get to the platform.

"But then, when you do get to the stage, you practically have to forget everything you've learned and start again, if you want to make music that creates tingles on the backs of the audience."

There are tingles aplenty on Demidenko's various Hyperion CDs, especially his recordings of the music of Busoni, who he admits is his favourite pianist - "a man who was never constrained by the physical limitations of the instrument or the recording".

It was Busoni's example which led him to rethink his own approach to playing Chopin, a composer who he says must always be considered in the context of the wooden-frame instrument of his period, with its limited dynamic range.

"Busoni said he could replace every forte by piano and Chopin's music stays exactly the same but you can't replace the pianos by fortes. All that drama and storm can be expressed without going to dynamic extremes."

There is a playful side to this man.

One suspects that what he has really enjoyed from working with American dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp (in staged versions of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and Hammerklavier Sonata) was Tharp's ability to toy with the audience's expectations. Her attitude, he says, was "the slower the music, the more movement on stage. The slow variation in the Diabelli was a hurricane!"

Tomorrow night Demidenko performs Brahms, the mighty Second Concerto which, incidentally, has one of the composer's loveliest slow movements and is a work that he sees as "one of the most beautiful creations of a musical genius, full stop".

It's really a symphony with piano, he says. The main challenge is the emotional one, and he speaks of the emotional relief that comes with the work's Finale, pointing out the irony that this is one of Brahms' most difficult pieces of piano writing.

In the last count, though, chords, octaves and rippling passagework are just a means to an end.

As Demidenko puts it: "Music is an emotional communication; if not, it's mathematics."

Performance

* Who: Nikolai Demidenko with the Auckland Philharmonia

* Where: Auckland Town Hall

* When: Tomorrow, 8pm