Classical musician with an innovative touch

There are two very different kinds of concert pianist: on the one hand there are the flashy technicians, exemplified by the Chinese phenomenon Lang Lang.

There are two very different kinds of concert pianist: on the one hand there are the flashy technicians, exemplified by the Chinese phenomenon Lang Lang, who are known for their virtuosity and showmanship perhaps rather more than their musicianship. Then on the other hand there are the intellectual poet-pianists, the Alfred Brendels of this world for whom the splashier aspects of the piano repertoire seem anathema and who instead devote their careers to the great master works.

Christian Zacharias belongs firmly to this second category. The German pianist has built a reputation as an uncompromising musician and a notable interpreter of the classical piano repertoire, particularly the works of Schubert for which he has a special affinity. Zacharias's inscrutable approach has won him many fans here in Scotland, particularly among followers of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with whom he has developed a close relationship in recent years.

Listening to Zacharias play Schubert, Mozart or Beethoven with the SCO or at the East Neuk or Edinburgh Festivals where he is also a regular visitor, it is easy to assume his studies must have been steeped in this classical piano repertoire, but the reality is quite the reverse.

"I didn't play a Schubert sonata until I was 25 years old," he explains over a cup of tea in the lounge of his Edinburgh hotel. "I had a Russian teacher and she made me learn the big piano repertoire, lots of Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninov. When I was a prizewinner at the 1969 Geneva competition it was playing Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, at the Van Cliburn competition it was with one of Prokofiev's concertos. I played all that piano repertoire and I enjoyed it too."

So what prompted Zacharias to turn his back on the warhorse piano repertoire and focus instead on the less showy works of Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven?

"I think it's a normal development for any person," he says, "the sporty side has to be in your youth. You're excited to see and hear these pianists who can play all these notes so, of course, you want to be able to play like that. And so you practise six hours a day and then you want to show off. It's only later you realise that it's exciting to show off but the content is now getting a little boring. That's when you start thinking about what is actually important to you and asking what it is you really want to do."

For Zacharias, that was where Schubert came in. "I realised that while it might not be as flashy as Rachmaninov, it has its own enormous technical challenges. This kind of music is much more rewarding to play: if I had to play the Tchaikovsky Concerto for three weeks I'd be so bored. But then you can work on the fugue of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata which is as fast and technically demanding as anything but there you won't get bored because it's also musically stimulating."

Though early in his career Zacharias had little say over the repertoire he played and the context in which it was performed ("When you start out you have to do what people ask you to do otherwise you don't get any engagements"), he has gradually developed a career playing only the music and programmes that interest him. The repertoire he describes as being "old-fashioned classical": Scarlatti - though not Bach - through to Ravel and Debussy but with the main pillars being somewhere in the middle, particularly Mozart, Schubert and Schumann alongside Haydn and Beethoven and, more recently, Brahms. It's not just the repertoire that is important, so too is the programming.

"The standard overture-concerto-symphony format - I hate it," he says, "I stopped doing it early on, especially once I could conduct and create my own programmes, then things became more interesting."

Zacharias is known as an innovative programmer: a concert with the SCO next spring will see him playing two of Schubert's late works, the monumental D major sonata the C major symphony, a pairing that promises to reveal fascinating parallels between two pieces that are not usually heard side by side. Though such programming is easily described as clever, Zacharias insists it's not an intellectual game. "There are some conceptual ideas behind my programmes, but what's important is that they work emotionally and artistically."

He illustrates this by describing how his latest recital programme has been put together. "Recently I was working on Brahms's B minor Rhapsody and I realised that the tonality of B minor was attracting me more and more so I tried playing a B minor sonata by Scarlatti after. Then all of a sudden there was my next recital programme: the Brahms Rhapsody with the same Scarlatti before and after, as a little frame, followed by Mozart's B minor Adagio and a B minor sonata by Haydn. It makes a fantastically strong half programme but one that has grown together, it's not me deciding to show the audience something clever."

Further examples of this innovative programming can be seen in Zacharias's contribution to the East Neuk Festival this weekend, his third visit to a festival that is only five years old. The three concerts see him performing with the Leopold String Trio and Leipzig String Quartet, accompanying flautist Alison Mitchell and partnering baritone Stephan Loges in Schubert lieder as well as playing solo, a combination he says is only possible in a festival where artists are involved in more than one concert so can play smaller or larger roles in several others.

Zacharias's artistic fastidiousness means his diary isn't full of one-off guest soloist engagements with multiple orchestras, particularly since he won't play a Mozart or Beethoven concerto with another conductor on the podium but insists on directing from the keyboard, "it's so frustrating to have somebody translating between you and the orchestra," he explains. Instead he has tended to build up relationships with ensembles and organisations, like the SCO, that are more of an artistic meeting of minds. There is also his parallel conducting career, which didn't begin until he was in his 40s, "lots of chamber orchestras started asking me very early on to direct from the keyboard and conduct but I waited until I thought I was ready".

For the past nine years Zacharias has been principal conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne, a position he is contracted to retain until at least 2012. Pursuing parallel careers in piano and conducting means a lot of juggling and squeezing piano practice into spare hours between orchestral rehearsals, but one of the benefits is that it has enabled Zacharias to expand beyond his core piano repertoire, even dipping his toes into the opera house. "I am much more adventurous with my conducting repertoire than I am on the piano, mainly because I don't have to learn all the notes," he says. "I've conducted programmes of 20th-century American music of Morton Feldman, John Adams and Charles Ives, though I would never play Ives on the piano - not because I don't like it but because to learn an Ives sonata would take me at least a year."