Acting out every note

In January 2000 I was sitting in the fourth row of Taipei's National Concert Hall listening to Vladimir Ashkenazy conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in a rehearsal of Brahms's frequently boisterous First Symphony. Watching the famous man, I whispered to myself under my breath, "He's acting out every note!" To my utter amazement, Ashkenazy turned round and looked at me. His acute musician's hearing had detected my presence, and possibly even heard every word.

Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia's return visit to Taipei this coming Monday and Tuesday is a major musical event by any standard. London's Philharmonia is the world's most recorded orchestra, and Ashkenazy himself is a giant both as pianist and conductor. This is despite his relatively diminutive stature -- legend has it that he has always avoided playing Liszt because his hands were simply not big enough.

He conducts more than he plays these days -- he conducted over 100 concerts last year, for example. Nevertheless, his recording of Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues for solo piano won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Soloist in 1999, this despite his saying he has the beginnings of arthritis in the middle finger of his right hand.

Ashkenazy defected from his native Russia in 1963 at the age of 26. By then he had already married his Icelandic-born wife, Thorunn, a music student in the USSR, and found the extra suspicion that having a Western spouse aroused only added to the pressure from the ever-paranoid Soviet authorities.

He took Icelandic citizenship in 1972, but the couple now have their main home in Switzerland. Thorunn Ashkenazy, and their two sons Vovka and Dimitri, are all also recorded classical musicians in their own right.

Pride of place in Monday's concert goes to Mahler's Fifth Symphony, with its famous Adagietto, used to such great effect in Visconti's 1970 film Death in Venice. To hear this long symphony -- it lasts an hour and a quarter -- played live by the Philharmonia will be an experience indeed.

Before the symphony will be Elgar's Enigma Variations, a nostalgic work very popular in the UK but rather less well-known elsewhere. Ashkenazy, however, spends much of his year in London, and has expressed his affection for the English musical scene. When asked, for instance, to comment on Simon Rattle's move from the UK to Berlin last year, he replied that he thought that, contrary to popular belief, there was more genuine enthusiasm for the classics in England than there was in Germany, despite the latter's lavishly-subsidized orchestras and opera houses.

Tuesday's concert will open with Mozart's Piano Concerto No:17 in G, K.453, with Ashkenazy at the keyboard. He has recorded extensively among Mozart's mature piano concertos, some 16 works, but this is clearly a personal favorite as it's the same one he played when he was in Taipei in 2000.

It's particularly interesting that Ashkenazy will be conducting Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, the other item in Tuesday's concert, on this visit. This has been the most discussed of all the composer's 15 symphonies. Some of them have been judged simply as examples of a musical poster art, but rarely the monumental and titanic 10th.

It was premiered in December 1953, following Stalin's death the previous March, and was immediately the subject of an impassioned ideological debate. What was it about? Was it the work of a composer isolated from political events? Or was it, as had been expected, a tribute to the late, great leader?