Does it make sense to say of Ido Zeev that he is one of the oldest of young pianists? Or that he is one of the youngest old pianists? He is 25 but has remarkably been playing the piano only since he was 10. His interest in the instrument came out of a passage of activity in ancient music, which seems to have coloured his approach: hard to pin down what may seem an obvious basic premise, but I came away from our sweltering afternoon refreshment at La Roque d’Anthéron sensing that here is a young man animated by judicious balance of music in a wider culture and of sheer youthful exuberance, a balance between a duty to behave and a duty to misbehave, to create, to celebrate.

Tall and slim, with long slender hands to match, there is something alert about every gesture he makes, whether in the café or at the keyboard. A highlight of his Beethoven Op 110, which he performed the day before, had been the balance between a sense of the inevitable and a thrill of nervous energy in the great accumulation of waves of sound as the piece reaches its enveloping close. He is aware – and perhaps wary – of the dazzle of new pianists in today’s firmament, but support from Martha Argerich has led to his sharing the stage with her in Lyon and Toulouse, and performing at Argerich’s festival in Hamburg. Yet despite plaudits not only from Argerich but from such luminaries as Evgeny Kissin and Nikolai Lugansky, and despite a successful Lucerne debut that featured a Chopin Ballade and Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka, he is taking his time, pacing and placing himself with care.

‘I’m living in Cologne’, he tells me. ‘I’m from Israel but I had to leave. I couldn’t do anything, not for the country, not for myself, not for music; I had to find a way to keep going.’ In this setting he was more than grateful for the invitation from festival director René Martin to play at La Roque. ‘He’s a very clever person and a very warm person – and I think this is a festival for brave people. It was a big, big challenge for me: I wouldn’t say I was terrified, but something close to that, because Mr Martin asked me to play Mozart and Beethoven. This is not my usual repertoire. I had to work a lot to to make this mine. You know, sometimes you play something but it’s not your thing, so you put on a mask, but it’s still you behind it – as Oscar Wilde says, you give a person a mask and he will show you his real face, then he will tell you the truth. So here I was growing by doing what I wouldn’t necessarily do otherwise.’

This is typical of Zeev’s concern to engage the audience. Well obviously, you might say; yet he speaks more than many pianists about his own side of the recital experience. His programme opened with Mozart’s A minor Rondo, K511: ‘It’s a very delicate beginning; I didn’t want to start immediately. You have to prepare people: they’ve come from all around, they’ve had all sorts of different conversations, some are sad, some happy, and so on – you want to make them concentrate. There are different means: some can do it with silence, they wait a long time for the right moment to start. Some, like Martha [Argerich], reach the piano and start while people are still clapping! So I made a small improvisation. I just thought it would be a good thing to prepare the audience because the Mozart is very sensitive, very intimate. You must prepare this.’

Moreover, Zeev allows himself freedom in ornamentation in Mozart. ‘Yes, I’m very inspired by Robert Levin, an amazing musician who studied with Nadia Boulanger, Clifford Curzon and Robert Casadesus, great people like that. Mozart already knew what he was going to do when he improvised the second time through but [in his concertos] he had to write it in the orchestral parts – they cannot improvise. So it’s very interesting. I’ve worked a lot on the cadenza for the D minor Concerto [No 20, K466]; we don’t have Mozart’s cadenza, so I took his cadenzas for other concertos and looked at how he wrote the ornamentation and which themes he used, and I wrote out a figured bass. I just tried to do my best. It’s fascinating, and it’s all so connected.’

For now Zeev’s immediate passion is Ravel. His encore at La Roque was his own transcription of Tzigane, an intriguing showpiece into which he has worked a great deal of writing for the left hand only. Working on it bar by bar over a year and a half has brought him ever closer to the composer. ‘It is so sad that at the end he didn’t really think he was a great composer. Of course he was, yet I think his piano music is not always well programmed.’ At this point Zeev let me in on his line of thought, skirmishing around the idea of a programme that makes something of the way Ravel references composers such as Haydn and Couperin in his own music. But I’m not allowed to tell. That’s why he’s one to watch. IP

This feature originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano