There are very few classical pianists who can play jazz. By that I mean someone who can rattle off a Rachmaninov concerto or a Beethoven sonata one evening and then the next evening play an equally convincing programme of improvisations on jazz standards and popular tunes. André Previn immediately springs to mind. Friedrich Gulda, maybe. Richard Rodney Bennett after a fashion. Who else? There are many gifted pianists I know who try their hand(s) at jazz but can’t ever really take off, inhibited by their classical ways, unable to swing across the bar line, as it were.

Frank Dupree, au contraire, is the real deal. In the weeks just before you read this he will have played in concerts with the trumpeter Simon Höfele (works by Gershwin, Bernstein, Weill, Antheil and Hindemith) and the percussionist Vivi Vassileva (music by Eötvös, John Psathas and Chick Corea), conducted Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto from the keyboard and appeared with his eponymous trio in works by Kapustin, Dana Suesse and Bernstein.

The reason for our meeting is to celebrate his premiere recording of Piano Concerto No 6 by the Ukraine-born composer Nikolai Kapustin. In March this year he played the UK premiere of the Fifth Piano Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia under Santtu-Matias Rouvali. He followed that with a surprise encore: an electrifying semi-improvised blast on Duke Ellington’s Caravan with double bass, drum kit, triangle, Rouvali on cowbell and Dupree swapping the keyboard halfway through for a bongo duel.

In fact, it was as a jazz percussionist that he began his career – and he began young. ‘Aged three, I played the drums,’ he tells me. ‘I saw my uncle play and I thought, “I can do this myself.” I made my own little drum set with tools from the kitchen and everything you can find, a pen, spoons …’ Dupree is speaking from his home in Rastatt, where he lives with his radio journalist wife. ‘My sister is my neighbour, with her family, with my niece and nephew, and also my parents are still living here in the town. It’s between Karlsruhe (where my friend [the late] Wolfgang Rihm lived and Brahms’s First Symphony was premiered) and Baden-Baden (Clara Schumann had a house there).’

There was always music in the house when he was growing up. His father is an amateur brass player and saxophonist. His mother started to play the violin as a child but gave up. ‘So there was absolutely no classical music in my background or family. Nobody knew who Tchaikovsky was and my playing the piano was almost by accident – when I was four, there was a little electric piano keyboard under the Christmas tree. This was the beginning of everything. I think I was the luckiest person ever because when I was five I became a student of Sontraud Speidel, my piano professor, with whom I finished aged 28. So for 23 years I had the same teacher.’ In addition, he studied conducting with the late Peter Eötvös and Hans Zender at the Karlsruhe University of Music. In 2012, he was awarded the top prize at the first International Hans von Bülow Competition in Meiningen for his dual-role performance as pianist and conductor interpreting Beethoven. He cites the first milestone in his life as being when he performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 for the first time, at the age of 13. (There is a recording on YouTube of the first movement.)

Many people assume from his name that Dupree is an American. In fact, the name has Huguenot origins. ‘I’m nothing to do with Jacqueline du Pré,’ he jokes. ‘Both my parents are from the German-speaking part of Romania. They came to Germany in 1989, just two months before the Berlin Wall came down. My sister was born in Romania. I was born here in Germany in 1991.’

During the sessions for the new Kapustin album recorded for Capriccio, with the SWR Symphony Orchestra and the SWR Big Band conducted by Dominik Beykirch (photography: Raphael Hustedt)

Whenever I see Dupree play or conduct, there is an expression of pure joy on his face; it’s somewhat like watching Carlos Kleiber conduct. ‘My parents gave me the joy of making music, the joy of listening to music, and dancing to music – I still think I have that in myself. The most important thing is support. You get that from your parents, of course, from surroundings, from family, from whoever – and especially from your teachers. What I learnt with my piano teacher when I was five or six was not just how to play the piano, but also to understand that playing the piano is work. It’s learning how to learn a piece. This is after all our job. We play pieces by different composers. I play the drums, I also had a percussion teacher, I had a composition teacher and also a conducting teacher. I played in three brass bands. I played so many concerts on the percussion instruments, and on the piano, just for fun. It was for fun,’ he emphasises. ‘This is, let’s say, the beginning of the way to a professional career. Everything before was my interest, my hobby.’ Whatever he was playing, he remembers thinking, ‘I want to get into this work. To me it didn’t matter if it was a brass band composition, The Rite of Spring, Glenn Miller, big band or rock’n’roll. I keep all these influences in my playing even now as a professional artist, meaning I also love to play jazzily. These different styles somehow come together.’

The Tchaikovsky aside, Dupree has an extensive concerto repertoire, a hinterland of which I confess I knew nothing before this interview. ‘My very first was the Haydn D major Concerto, then the Mozart Rondo in D, K382. After that, there was Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy, Rhapsody in Blue, Grieg – all when I was about 14. Then we have Rach 2, Rach Pag, Schumann, Brahms 2 (which I’m practising at the moment because I’m playing it next week), Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, Second Rhapsody and I Got Rhythm Variations, Liszt 1, Ravel G major, the first concerto by Wolfgang Rihm, and I’ve also played the HK Gruber Piano Concerto.’ Perhaps most remarkably, he has played and conducted all the Beethoven concertos (‘except the Choral Fantasy’) from the keyboard, including the Triple Concerto. ‘You cannot play Kapustin if you haven’t played all of that repertoire,’ says Dupree, ‘because Kapustin really is so hard. You can spend weeks working on a little jazz étude of one and half minutes, while a Rachmaninov piece of the same length and the same amount of notes is much easier. Kapustin is more comparable to the Ligeti études.’

And it is with the music of Kapustin that Dupree is now indelibly associated, as reflected in these pages, though his first appearance in them was in 2017 in a review of his recording of music by Antheil. A little later, a One to Watch profile remarked, ‘His incisive rhythmic flair and control come into their own in the music of Kapustin, where his fleet fingers and flamboyant brilliance are harnessed by his evident affinity for the idiom’ (10/21). In the 2021 Awards issue I gave an enthusiastic welcome to his astonishing account of Kapustin’s Fourth Concerto, and there was also a Q&A in which he discussed his approach to playing Kapustin. In that year’s December issue, in the Critics’ Choice section, two of his albums appear on the same page almost side by side (the same Kapustin concerto album for the Capriccio label, and ‘A Poet’s Love’, on which he partnered Timothy Ridout’s viola in transcriptions of music by Prokofiev and Schumann on Harmonia Mundi). The Capriccio disc was a runner-up in the 2022 Gramophone Awards. In March 2022 came more Kapustin, this time played by the Frank Dupree Trio – another (albeit qualified) triumph. That was followed in 2023 by the first of his Kapustin collaborations with the young conductor Dominik Beykirch – another Capriccio album devoted entirely to the composer’s music, including the Fifth Piano Concerto (Editor’s Choice, 4/23). In February this year, Rob Cowan’s review of Ridout’s ‘A Lionel Tertis Celebration’, on which Dupree shared piano duties with James Baillieu, led to an Editor’s Choice and another placing as runner-up in the Gramophone Awards.

So now that he has found a peg on which to hang his hat, is he worried that people will associate him with just one composer? ‘A little bit. Yes. But Kapustin is perhaps the open door I can go through, because all the other piano concertos I have mentioned are played by more or less everybody. Of course, there are many unknown concertos that you come across, but the Kapustin is absolutely my thing. It is territory that no one has ever touched before. I am lucky and also proud that I have discovered this, let’s say, niche – this niche of six piano concertos. Right now, I feel I could play Kapustin for the next 10 years, but what I also love doing is playing a Brahms or a Beethoven or a Tchaikovsky in between. This is also like playing jazz. This is me. The mix is me. I don’t want to stop conducting or directing from the keyboard or playing jazz. I like to have a little bit of this, a little bit of that. This is what makes my life much richer. I don’t want to be pigeonholed. To make a career, first find your music or the thing that you do to open doors. And then someone like Antonio Pappano says, “Frank, let’s do Kapustin 4” – because I’m the only one who plays Kapustin 4! No one else! And who knows, if it works well, maybe then he’ll say, “Let’s do a Brahms,” or a whatever. Lenny Bernstein conducted and composed and played the piano and presented on stage and everything. Now, after all these years, we know who he is! But in the beginning he was just this guy who conducted the New York Phil and composed West Side Story. So what is he?’

Inevitably, Dupree has been asked in countless interviews how he came across the music of Kapustin. I apologise for having to ask the same question. Thankfully, he’s a genial soul (and, incidentally, a great talker with a mischievous sense of humour). ‘Don’t worry,’ he smiles. ‘I can tell this story hundreds of times. I was aged around 15, and the music teacher at my high school – a fantastic teacher and a big fan of jazz – came to me after a lesson one day and said, “Frank, I have discovered something on YouTube you really should listen to.” And this was Kapustin himself playing, I think, his Impromptu. This was the very first time I saw that man playing his own music. And I thought, “Oh my God. What is that?” I knew Gershwin, I knew Bernstein, and I’d just played Rhapsody in Blue – and then this was Kapustin. This was at a time when the YouTube algorithm was just a little bit better for research, and I found so many Kapustin videos, including one of Piano Concerto No 2. There are videos that are 50 years old or more. I discovered all this maybe four or five years after Marc-André Hamelin and Steven Osborne recorded their Kapustin discs [for Hyperion]. And the first thing I did was I went to the music shop – nothing was online at that point, there was no Amazon! – and I bought the sheet music of the études, the Variations, the Preludes and everything I could find. I can tell you it was super expensive for me as a little teenager!

‘And then more than 10 years later I got asked to record the Fourth Piano Concerto with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra, Heilbronn, which was the first recording I did. That was also by accident because we had Covid, we had the first lockdown and the orchestra could not go on tour (they had wanted to do a tour in South Korea), and they said, “Frank, we have some free time. Is there something you’d like to record?” and I said it had to be Kapustin. That was the summer of 2020. Then everything started.’ It certainly did. See above. He had just two months to learn the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Concerto for violin, piano and string orchestra, along with playing the concerts that were just starting up again. All he had to work from were Kapustin’s handwritten scores.

Now Dupree and his team are planning to do the remaining Kapustin concertos, plus everything else that Kapustin wrote for piano and orchestra, and for piano solo. November sees the release of the next instalment, featuring works for solo piano with either orchestra or big band and conducted again by Beykirch: Piano Concertos Nos 2 and 6 and world premiere recordings of the Toccata, Concert Rhapsody, Variations and Nocturne. Concerto No 3 is to be recorded in November, leaving just Concerto No 1 to do.

‘It’s one thing to do a recording, but I want to present this music on stage to an audience – and also to musicians, to orchestras,’ stresses Dupree, ‘because when I play this music, I see audiences just freak out. They know Gershwin, they know Bernstein, but when they listen to Kapustin, they say, “Why haven’t I heard this before?”’ Slowly, concert promoters are becoming a little more enthusiastic, but there’s clearly still a lot of work to do. There are managers who have heard about Kapustin because maybe they are pianists themselves. Most of them don’t know him as a symphonic composer. ‘You need a big band for half of the concertos,’ Dupree explains. ‘You need a jazz drummer. When you do Rhapsody in Blue you need three saxophones: the tickets will sell, you can take the risk. With Kapustin you need five saxophones – it’s a big band! You also need players who know how to swing, how to play with a group, and with the drums. When I play the Kapustin piano concertos, I usually play with my own drummer and sometimes also take my own double bass player, because we are a trio.’

It is a cliché to say that Kapustin often sounds like Oscar Peterson with a formal score. Kapustin himself was adamant that he was not a jazz musician. ‘I have never attempted to be a genuine jazz pianist,’ he once said, ‘although I have to slip into this role for the benefit of my compositions. I am not interested in improvisation – and what would a jazz musician be without improvisation.’ For Dupree, jazz is part of the whole deal. He warms up his fingers with jazz improvisations before playing a Brahms concerto. If he has a free hour, he tells me, he’ll play the drums. ‘Music is my profession, but it’s also my hobby.’

One final string to his bow is his espousal and exploration of contemporary music. On his official website you will find video performances of his own Piano Pulse Project. I found No 3 unexpectedly mesmerising. It’s certainly the only piece I can recall that uses an animal’s jaw. ‘I’ve played Rihm, a lot of music by Eötvös and Gruber etc. When I do contemporary music I want to do music. And for me, music is harmonies, it’s rhythm, it’s using material, motifs and emotions. This is the music I choose. And this is why to me something like Kapustin is like a gift, or let’s say a treasure. You have something sounding good, you have something swinging. Everybody can listen to it – even those who don’t have a clue about music, who realise, “Oh, this is fun!” And still, it’s difficult to perform. So it has everything I’m looking for in just one composer. This is the reason I say I am “the Kapustin pianist” and I’m fine with it. But I still do other music!’

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today