Hélène Grimaud on Her Comeback and Her Easter Recital in Lucerne

There was a keen sense of disappointment last summer when French piano star Hélène Grimaud was forced to cancel her LUCERNE FESTIVAL recital—which had been sold out long in advance—following surgery. But at last she will perform the previously scheduled concert as part of the Easter Festival. Grimaud shares her thoughts on the program she has chosen.

Even when it comes to life’s crises and difficult moments, Hélène Grimaud is able to find something positive: “Every break is a good break, no matter how much pain, doubt, hardship, and disruption may also be connected with it,” she observes as she looks back over the past year, when she was forced to stop concertizing for several months. “I learned that there’s nothing more I need to prove, whether to the audience, the profession, the critics, or myself. Whoever has endured such a crisis knows that, in the end, you’re left all on your own. It leads to a serenity that is liberating. I hope I can hold onto this insight.”

It was music that rekindled her spirits. The first new project she undertook was a CD recording of the very program that she will now perform on 10 April in Lucerne, which includes sonatas by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Alban Berg, and Franz Liszt, as well as Béla Bartók’s “Romanian Folk Dances.” Says Grimaud: “All of these pieces display an enormous breathlessness and intensity. The core of the program centers on Alban Berg’s Sonata Op. 1, whose intimacy and decadence set the tone for everything. Flanked by Liszt’s magnificent theatricality and Bartók’s snapshots, the Sonata resembles open-heart surgery, a vital process of decay. Mozart comes first in this kaleidoscope, for he knows about such things. He knows that the world will always be too big and too small to fit into a 20-minute piano sonata.”