Excuse me if my cell phone rings,” Leif Ove Andsnes apologises by way of greeting. “I’m waiting to hear if my offer on a house has been accepted.” We are meeting for coffee in the echoing atrium of the London hotel he favours. Juggling a hectic international concert schedule and constant travel with making plans for the future, recordings, interviews, film documentaries and running a major music festival, I’m amazed the man has time to eat and sleep, let alone practise the piano and buy houses. On top of everything else, he has become a father for the first time. Andsnes’s private life, the subject of much speculation in the chat rooms, has always been exactly that. On June 12 his live-in partner, Norwegian horn player Ragnild Lothe, gave birth to their daughter Sigrid.

His one concession to his new role has been reluctantly to relinquish the reins as co-artistic director of the Risør Festival he helped found in 1991. Exactly two weeks after Sigrid’s birth, the proud father introduced her to an audience of over 2000 people on the island of Stangholmen before playing Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a performance he dedicated to her.

At the age of 40, Andsnes, who must surely keep a portrait of himself in the attic, is at the top of his game – which is where you have to be to tackle two of the most demanding concertos in the repertoire: Rachmaninov’s Third and Fourth. This will be his second recording of No 3. His first was in 1995 for Virgin Classics with the Oslo Philharmonic and Paavo Berglund. It was not until 2005 that he recorded Nos 1 and 2. For these he was partnered by Antonio Pappano in his first concerto recording for EMI. It won rave reviews and that year’s Gramophone Award for Best Concerto Recording. The partnership is revived for Nos 3 and 4. “I do enjoy working with him,” Andsnes enthuses. “One talks about wonderful accompanists and wonderful conductors – the one usually goes hand in hand with the other – but Tony is so used to accompanying singers, he breathes with you. He knows where you are going. He has an organic feeling for tempi and a singing quality that are very special. I don’t know if it’s because he’s an opera conductor or if it’s just his natural talent. He can come with suggestions, especially in the melodic, singing phrases, and where the tension should be on a particular chord. I feel extremely free with him in a difficult concerto like the Fourth. I hardly looked at him [during a performance at London’s Barbican] because we now have such an understanding between us.”

The daunting D minor was the first Rachmaninov concerto Andsnes studied. “Why not start with the most difficult?! And I’m so happy I did it because, as other pianists have said, it’s a piece you have to learn when you’re young. I was only 21 and I studied it for one and a half years before playing it with orchestra. It helps to have it in your blood because it’s a gigantic work with so many challenges, full of places where you have to find solutions. You have to live with it. I hate to separate music and technique because everything is one – technique is know-how and know-how is something you gain with time – but simply to have lived with it for years helps with such a piece. And also to have studied it when you have the courage to go ahead with it! What happens with a work like this is when you play it for the first time – I remember, like everybody, I was nervous – you concentrate on every episode. You’re into everything because you have thought so much about it, you’re afraid of the memory going because it’s such a gigantic thing to memorise. But what you really don’t have is this feeling of being above it, of having an objective perspective on it at the same time as seeing all the details – the whole thing of breathing the piece which comes with the experience of playing it and living with it.”

Rachmaninov wrote the work as a vehicle for himself for his 1909/10 visit to America. It is a notoriously challenging work requiring great stamina. It is also considerably more sophisticated as a composition than the more popular Second Concerto, not surprising when you see the list of other works that separate the two, among them the Chopin Variations, the Preludes, Op 23, Francesca da Rimini, Symphony No 2 and The Isle of the Dead. “The Second Concerto is such a perfect work – the sunset of the Romantic classical concerto – and then the Third comes along which is so original, with its undercurrents of passion and restlessness and something tough which is not there in the same way in No 2,” says Andsnes. “I love all these pieces. I never want to say one is greater than the other. But you can’t get away from the fact that the Third is so extraordinary, unique – and so memorable. I remember the first time I heard a recording of it when I was a student – I had never heard it played live. Van Cliburn. And then Horowitz, obviously.”

Surely, I suggest, it must act as a tremendous spur when you’re a student and you hear these great pianists play a work like Rach Three. You think “Yes! I want that. I want to have that experience”. “You’re right, because it is an experience to play this piece. A physical and emotional experience. It’s very tiring. I remember some concerts when, after the first movement, you think ‘oh my God, it already feels like I’ve played a whole concerto’. But it’s a pianist’s piece – it’s a sensual pleasure to play.”

Rachmaninov set out for America on October 15, 1909, with the manuscript of the concerto in his luggage. He was 36. There had been no time for the score or orchestral parts to be printed (the concerto was played from manuscript throughout his tour) and, in order to get the difficult solo part under his fingers in time, he famously resorted to a dummy keyboard on the voyage over. “Of course the Americans were fascinated by this,” Andsnes laughs. “What a pianist he was!” The tour began with a recital on November 4, 1909, in Northampton, Massachusetts – remarkably, the first solo piano recital Rachmaninov had ever given – before the world premiere of the Third Concerto with the New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch (repeated two days later), followed by a third performance under the baton of Gustav Mahler on January 16, 1910.

For our interview, I had brought the scores of both concertos with me. Andsnes eagerly thumbed through the pages. “The opening can’t be too slow. It has to have a calm quality to it but it has to flow. It has to have an alla breve two-in-the-bar feeling. It’s like a Gregorian chant in a way, with a flowing tempo. Everybody emphasises the melancholy and nostalgic quality in Rachmaninov’s music – the longing for Mother Russia (though this was written in Russia, so he couldn’t be longing for it) – but I think this is such a happy piece. The last movement of this concerto I think is really happy. This image of Rachmaninov – ‘a six-and-a-half-foot scowl’ as Stravinsky described him – is a one-dimensional view. His friends said he was a merry man. When you see the short films of his private life with his family, he is smiling, humorous, mischievous.” 

Which of the two cadenzas does Andsnes use for the recording? “Oh, for me there is no question. I have to play the big one. I think the movement needs it. The other one has wonderful pianistic qualities, the kind he was developing in the Fourth Concerto and the revision of the First Concerto. It’s amazingly fluently written for the hand. The big one is not as pianistic but I think it is so rich and becomes the peak of the movement. This is where the pianist conquers the movement in a big way.”

You could never accuse Andsnes of sitting on his laurels. Last year saw him touring his “Pictures Reframed” programme (Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with video and stills accompaniment by Andsnes’s friend, South African artist Robin Rhode). In January he recorded, for exclusive online release, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Janá∂ek’s In the Mists in the Apple Store, Manhattan, becoming the first classical pianist to record in one of Apple’s retail outlets. Another CD, “Shadows of Silence”, features new works by Danish composer Bent Sørensen and Frenchman Marc-André Dalbavie, Lutosawski’s Piano Concerto and solo works by Kurtág. There were performances of Mozart (chamber works and the A major Piano Concerto, K488, conducted from the keyboard) and the completion of his recordings of the complete Schumann piano trios with Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff (to be released in 2011).

If Andsnes likes to stretch himself and challenge his audiences with the unexpected, he is also a passionate advocate for the music he chooses to play. Take the Cinderella of the concerto quartet, No 4 in G minor. Since November 1918, America had been Rachmaninov’s home. After seven full seasons, he felt the need for a new concerto vehicle and set about composing his Fourth Piano Concerto, a work for which he had made sketches possibly as early as 1914. Begun in New York in January 1926, it was completed in Dresden by the end of August. It is a very different Rachmaninov to the one familiar from the earlier concertos. Listeners were puzzled. Where were the long, soaring tunes, where was the heart-on-sleeve emotion? Discouraged by its reception, Rachmaninov made a number of cuts before it was published. He made further revisions in 1941, reducing its length still further (the original has 1016 bars, the third and final version 824).

“I actually looked at the different versions when I was at the Library of Congress in Washington a couple of years ago,” Andsnes reveals. “I really wanted to see [the manuscript] because I was very intrigued by the first version and wanted to compare them, and see how they developed. There are some wonderful passages and I would love to play the original version one day but decided on the final one for now. It’s so understandable to see why he made the cuts: he made things so much more practical. One of the reasons why No 4 is not as popular as the others is not only the lack of big tunes for the audience but because it’s so hard to perform, especially between the pianist and orchestra. It’s really hard for the conductor. Really very hard. In the first version it’s incredibly hard! The final version is much more practical but the conductor really has to know the score. One of the problems is that so many orchestras are unfamiliar with [this concerto]. It so happened that when I rehearsed it with the LSO a few days ago, they said ‘Oh, we recorded all four of them with a pianist two or three months ago’. I said how wonderful that was because we started on a level where they knew the music, they had it in their fingers – and they are such a quick orchestra anyway. It’s amazing how quickly they understand things and both Tony and me were like “Wow!” So we had fun, because we have done it before together. I’ve played it now so many times. I know how much rehearsal time it needs – much more than for other standard repertoire concertos.

“The second movement is no problem. It’s basically in one mood. It’s the first and third movements. The whole first movement is one big transition. It has so many episodes and is very restless as it goes from one to the other. That’s one thing. Then the last movement is extremely fast and rhythmically complex. And it’s very hard for the conductor because there’s a lot in three, in a tempo which is a little bit too fast to beat in three and too slow and not clear enough for one-in-the-bar. I also did it with Dudamel this season and he was saying ‘Oh, it’s so hard, it’s so hard, it’s so hard!’ And to hear him say that! – I mean he can do anything! – and of course he did do it, no problem, but…! I did it with Tony in Rome in October [2009] and now, coming back to it, he decided to do much longer beats, which was fantastic. But by then we were more familiar with each other and the kind of tempi we went for. Also the orchestra having played it before, knowing it, being so fast, allowed [Pappano] to do it like that. (In many situations you couldn’t. You’d need to show [the orchestra] every beat.) That gave it such a freedom, it made it fly. I hope that’s captured on the recording – especially the last part of the last movement which is extremely difficult in that respect.”

Has he been influenced in his approach by the composer’s own recording? “I’ve listened a lot recently to Rachmaninov himself playing it. You can learn so much. You know, young pianists today are quite ignorant of recordings like that because of the ‘old sound’. You really have to listen to discover the qualities. Rachmaninov-playing today has developed into something very heavy and solid and vertical. In his playing it’s all about wind and water. For me, the second subject of the first movement of the Fourth is one of the absolute jewels in all his recordings – listen to how he shapes it, how he can take so much time and then pick up the tempo – he never gets stuck. You never feel the bar-line. It’s just magic.”

As to the slow movement (Stephen Hough told me it always moves him to tears whenever he plays it), it’s an old chestnut but one I had to put to Andsnes: did he not think it slightly unfortunate that the Largo’s theme so closely resembles “Three Blind Mice”? “Well, I don’t know it,” is Andsnes’s rejoinder. “Being Norwegian I’ve never known ‘Three Blind Mice’.” “You don’t have that nursery rhyme in Norway?” “No, and when someone sang it to me, I said ‘Well, that’s Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto!’” Touché. “But look,” he continues, turning the pages of the score and alighting on various passages, “this is a tremendous development from the other concertos. Rachmaninov must have been influenced by all the new music he was hearing. He was always criticising it, like all the others – Schoenberg, Bartók, Hindemith – but he listened to it. He was at the first performance of Rhapsody in Blue which he warmed to more than Schoenberg. All these influences must have done something to him. And I must point out something that sounds so American to me: the last six bars of the first movement where the piano has syncopated chords against the orchestra. It could be Copland. Very strange – the strangest part of the concerto. It’s very urban. For me it’s like skyscrapers. Very New York. Then – pad-am! – it’s finished. You don’t need more than that. No emotion. Who would have thought this was Rachmaninov?

“You see the Fourth Concerto is a 20th-century concerto. Something changes between the Third, which hangs on to the 19th century, and the Fourth. And I think that is what people don’t expect when they go to hear ‘a Rachmaninov concerto’. You have to be attentive to the changes like you would in a piece by Lutosawski or Berg or a Debussy orchestral work. But I’m sure it will only be a decade or so before the Fourth becomes standard repertoire. It has such quality. It just needs to be performed really well.”

Andsnes looks at his watch. “Oh my goodness, I have to go. My car is waiting.” I walk with him to the hotel entrance. As he waves at his driver, his cell phone rings. “The house!” he mouths as he dives into the back seat and disappears into the hell of London traffic. 

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