Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1969, Hélène Grimaud grew up as a child obsessed with music. She said later that "my parents always thought I had a surplus of physical energy, but it really was mental energy, and the piano took care of that." In her early teens she studied with Pierre Barbizet in Marseilles and travelled each week from Aix for lessons at the Paris Conservatoire with Jacques Rouvier. Grimaud demonstrated prodigious talent but also a rebellious streak: the only way she would comply with the official Conservatoire requirement to learn prescribed études for the piano exam was by playing the three obligatory pieces as encores after performing a Chopin concerto. A tape of that concert earned Grimaud a contract with Denon and she made her first record when she was fifteen. This was a Rachmaninov recital including the Second Sonata, which she learned in three weeks. Though this recording won the Grand Prix du Disque, Grimaud soon became unhappy with it, telling the New York Times in 2005 that "it took me four years - four years of purgatory - before I returned to Rachmaninov." Grimaud was no ordinary prodigy: at the same time as pursuing her piano studies, she read voraciously and also took a degree in animal behaviour, an area of interest that was later to prove decisive. In 1987, still in her teens, Grimaud was invited to play Liszt's Piano Concerto no. 1 with Daniel Barenboim and the Orchestre de Paris, but her subsequent career was anything but predictable. A move to the United States in 1991 led to an extraordinary encounter with a wolf while walking a friend's dog one night in northern Florida. Grimaud recalled that "she came up to my left hand ... she slid her head and then her shoulders under my palm. I felt a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body. [It] awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force."
Grimaud's fascination with animals and her particular interest in wolves led to her to co-found the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in South Salem, New York State, in 1999. For a time, her playing activities were restricted as a result of commitments to the WCC - which thrives to this day - but in 2004 she released Credo, her first recording for Deutsche Grammophon, a programme of Beethoven, Pärt and Corigliano. Her second recording for DG was the present disc of Chopin and Rachmaninov, made in Berlin in December 2004 and issued the following year.
Grimaud has spoken about the pianists she admires: "There was Glenn Gould, there was Rudolf Serkin, Gilels, Richter ... I never had one that I idolized ... but different artistic temperaments for their different facets really." It was another pianist, Maurizio Pollini, who inspired Grimaud to return to Chopin, and specifically to the B flat minor Sonata, after she heard him play it in a recital in Tokyo: "There was something so compelling about the way he performed, specifically the Sonate funèbre, the Second Sonata ... there was such a beautiful urgency in his playing ... so I left that hall determined to go back to Chopin immediately."
Chopin's Sonata no. 2 was completed in 1839, and at the time its unusual structure drew a puzzled reaction even from his admirers - Schumann famously described it as "four of Chopin's maddest children under the same roof". One of its greatest early recordings was made in 1930 by Sergei Rachmaninov, who also played the work in what was to be his last recital, at Knoxville, Tennessee, in February 1943. In Rachmaninov's own Second Sonata - in the same key of B flat minor as Chopin's - Grimaud follows the example of Vladimir Horowitz by performing a version of the Second Sonata that includes elements of both the composer's published editions (the first, issued by Gutheil in Moscow, from 1914 and the considerably shorter revision from 1931). Rachmaninov composed the sonata while he was also working on The Bells and gave its première in Moscow in December 1913, three days after conducting the first performance of that choral symphony - the pealing of bells also found its way into the piano work's opening movement. Grimaud's earlier recording has a thrilling, youthful impetuosity, but returning to the sonata two decades later, she reveals an even stronger sense of the work's architecture and a rugged conviction that comes from the experience of performing it in live concerts. Interestingly, it wasn't the shared key of the Chopin and Rachmaninov sonatas that led Hélène Grimaud to pair them but their similar emotional world. She sees both as meditations on death: their composers, says the pianist, "convert anguish into hope, transfigure our vision of sorrow, and offer us the chance of reconciliation."
Nigel Simeone
