The 38-year-old concert pianist Leif Ove Andsnes doesn't usually get dizzy when he plays. But last year he had good reason to when he performed the Ballade in G Minor by Edvard Grieg on a mountain cliff near the Hardanger Fjord in his native Norway. A grand piano was choppered in and set down against a glorious vista of snowy peaks and blue skies. "It looked like a sculpture coming down from heaven," Andsnes says with a smile. It was music that Jon Krakauer would surely have loved, part of a sequence for a recent documentary called Ballad for Edvard Grieg. Grandeur notwithstanding, Andsnes confides it was a "horrible piano" that he wanted to shove off the edge of the cliff.
Whether he's atop a mountain or in a concert hall, Andsnes is one of the greatest pianists of his generation. The dashing musician delights audiences with the elegant sincerity of his playing (as well as the fluent lines of his Issey Miyake suits). The Grieg Ballade will be the centerpiece of his solo recital tour across Europe and America this spring, with performances in six U.S. cities, beginning April 19. The tour — which stops at Carnegie Hall — will also feature works by Bach, Debussy, and Schubert.
Andsnes credits his sound — critics have praised its "porcelain beauty," "spring-water clarity," and "lyrical grace" — to his hands, which are slim and, he notes with characteristic modesty, "rather flexible." When I caught up with him not long ago, they were holding a cup of Earl Grey at the restaurant Nougatine on Central Park West. A few days before this, they had been more fittingly employed performing Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Philadelphia Orchestra — a feat that can also induce musical vertigo.
Of course, his hands will be busy again with Grieg's Ballade, which Andsnes hopes will leave audiences just a little bit windswept. "It was his attempt to write a big, epic piano piece," says Andsnes, who speaks precise English at tempo andante, with the lightest of Norwegian accents.
The romantic-sublime image of the solitary artist surrounded by untamed nature isn't all that far from the truth for Andsnes. Like Grieg before him, he adores the mountains of his homeland: He loves hiking, skiing, and the occasional chilly dip in a mountain stream. But most of all it's the quiet that draws him. "I think it's important for a pianist to just get away and to be in the silence of nature," Andsnes says, his steady green-eyed gaze suggesting a cool unflappability. "It's good for the ear."
Andsnes started his career at 18, playing Grieg's well-known Piano Concerto at Norway's Bergen Festival, and around the same time took second place in a Eurovision piano competition. An international career beckoned, followed by a recording contract. These days, Andsnes spends 230 days a year on the road, but he keeps a house in the mountains and apartments in Bergen and Copenhagen, all the better to stay in touch with his parents and his girlfriend, Ragnhild Lothe, a French horn player in the Bergen Philharmonic.
In playing Grieg, he brings along on this tour a little bit of Norway, though he is quick to excuse himself, and the composer, from any hint of provincialism. "I think there is a universal feeling in the music," he says. There's a beat in the conversation, a time for silence, a sip of tea, and then: "I don't have any ambitions for this piece to be a Norwegian tourist brochure."
