Piers Lane at the ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre

By WILLIAM DART

Piers Lane must have one of the most infectious laughs around.

Although the English claim him as one of them, the pianist insists he's Australian: "I was born in London and came out here when I was 5 months old. I grew up in Brisbane."

It is the land of the koala which gives him his "openness, fair-mindedness and a love of adventuring".

Lane spins me such wild adventure stories that New Zealand must seem positively tame. One involves a village concert in the hills of Ecuador, the journey there and the libations that followed.

"It was the most thrilling plane trip," he explains. "We flew in between two spurs of the mountains and then corkscrewed down.

"The whole town turned out for the concert and we got drunk afterwards on the national drink, rum and Coca-Cola."

Then there was a "wonderful" recital in Zimbabwe, "with a piano so bad that you wondered whether it had any hope of surviving Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. There were only 65 people in the audience, but some had come from as far away as 200 miles."

Special buses will be bringing audiences from Howick and the Hibiscus Coast to the city tomorrow night to hear Lane play the Schumann Concerto although it's unlikely the town hall Steinway won't be sturdy enough to cope with it all.

"This concerto doesn't come up that often on concert programmes, which is a pity," Lane adds.

"It's such a glorious love story with all the Schumann codes woven into it."

He goes on to mention the two personae of the composer, the dreamy Eusebius and the fiery Florestan.

Singing the opening theme, Lane points out that the first two notes correspond with the two initials of these characters.

Schumann is relatively mainstream alongside some other composers whom Lane pursues.

For a man who admits he is "greedy for all music from Lully to contemporary", his latest love is Adolf Henselt (1814-1889), and a CD of Henselt's Etudes is due out soon on Hyperion Records - his 14th release on the esteemed label. It was a project that made the pianist "feel like Mendelssohn discovering Bach".

On his New Zealand tour, Lane has been playing a Bach transcription by fellow Australian William Murdoch, the first pianist to record Beethoven's Third Concerto.

"People love Murdoch's Bach," he adds, recalling his Dunedin recital last week. "It's a transcription that understands the piano and its sonorities."

He agrees that the shadow of Percy Grainger still looms over the music of his country - "an extraordinary musician and human being" - but suggests the adventurous could well investigate the music of Brett Dean.

He'll be tackling Dean's Piano Quintet in Noosa next week, a work that is "able to create a stillness very few composers can, creating eternity looking at the sky at midnight. Provocative in the best sense of the word."

Next month he's also judging the Sydney International Piano Competition although he is emphatically "not a fan of competitions as it's impossible to compare apples and pears ... but they are here to stay and it's nice, as a judge, to have an influence on them".

But just how important are they? "There are a lot more talented pianists around," he replies gingerly, "although standards are not necessarily higher at the top."

Then, with undisguised glee in his voice, he says, "Two of the biggest names today, Arcadi Volodos and Evgeny Kissin, didn't come through the competition circuit.

"And Angela Hewitt and I didn't make it out of the first round at Leeds one year."