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Pianist Till Fellner, conductor Bernard Haitink at BSO

Classical Notes

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

April 20, 2012|By David Weininger

Till Fellner to play Mozarts Piano Concerto K.482. (FRAN KAUFMAN )

The Austrian pianist Till Fellner had planned to spend all of 2012 on sabbatical, forgoing public performance altogether in order to devote himself to pursuits musical and nonmusical. Yet when an invitation to perform with Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony was extended, “I decided to make an exception,” says Fellner from his home in Vienna. They will collaborate next week in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, K.482, renowned among the composer’s concertos for its colorful wind writing.

Haitink and Fellner first worked together in 2010, when the pianist filled in for an indisposed Maurizio Pollini in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the orchestra that Haitink led for 27 years and still works with regularly. Fellner calls the conductor “a very noble man and musician,” and says that working with him “was quite moving, because he was so warm and concentrated, and so interested, curious.”

He also marveled at Haitink’s ability to communicate, almost wordlessly, with the orchestra. “He doesn’t talk too much. But everybody understands what he wants, because he is so precise” with his hands. “He’s a wonderful accompanist, if I may put it like this — he can really listen to a soloist and follow and anticipate.”

Apart from the BSO concerts, and engagements in January in Paris and Chicago, Fellner is devoting much of his time to learning new music. Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” and “Symphonic Etudes,” some Mozart and Haydn sonatas, and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major are pieces that he looks forward to playing publicly in coming years. He is also taking private lessons in composition — not because he wants to become a composer but rather “because I want to deepen my understanding of the music I’m playing.”

Fellner, 40, is also making an intense study of the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which he played years earlier but now wants to explore much more thoroughly. This should cheer anyone who’s heard his marvelous 2004 recording of Book I on ECM Records. Fellner’s reading was ear-opening: Here was Bach played not with the austere, linear counterpoint that has been Glenn Gould’s legacy for pianists of the last few decades, but with warmth, lyricism, and a quietly beautiful touch. If his performances of Book II — he plans to play sections of it in concert but not the whole thing — are similar, his approach should do wonders for its preludes and fugues, which are somehow more mysterious and enigmatic than those in Book I.