Inside Schubert’s Four Impromptus, D935, with Aimi Kobayashi
Tim Parry
Friday, November 29, 2024
Tim Parry talks to Aimi Kobayashi about late Schubert and the pressure of expectations
Perhaps in response to the work of Edward Said, it has become fashionable to think of an artist’s final works as embodying shared traits that might be characterised as ‘late style’ – whether a mastery of craft, depth of expression, or a realisation of mortality with associated aspects of sorrow or serenity. In the case of Schubert, who died at the age of 31, the idea of anything being ‘late’ feels rather melancholy, a description applied retrospectively – did Schubert know that he would not compose any more piano sonatas, another symphony, another song cycle? Whatever Schubert’s awareness of his own life expectancy, his rate of composition increased markedly in his final 12 months, when he brought to fruition an extraordinary number of masterpieces. One of these is the second set of Four Impromptus, D935, which he completed in December 1827 at the age of 30. Despite Schubert’s efforts these were unpublished when he died 11 months later, in November 1828, and they first appeared posthumously in 1839.
Aimi Kobayashi (her name is pronounced ‘Eye-mee’) has recorded this set of Impromptus on her latest album for Warner Classics – coupled with the C minor Sonata, D958, along with two of Liszt’s Schubert song transcriptions (these two tracks are on the digital album only) and the A major Rondo for piano duet, D951, performed with her husband Kyohei Sorita. Kobayashi came fourth at the last Chopin International Piano Competition, in 2021, and Sorita was placed second. They had known each other since childhood and got married after the competition.
Kobayashi is now 29, although it feels like she has been around for ages. I first became aware of her during the 2015 Chopin Competition (the first of her two appearances at this competition, the year that Seong-Jin Cho won), when she reached the concerto final, although by then she had already recorded a Beethoven album for EMI Classics Japan. She signed internationally with Warner Classics in 2018 and previous albums include programmes of Chopin and Liszt (7/18) and more Chopin (12/21). She was a child prodigy, and there are some astonishing videos on YouTube of her playing at pre-school age, and one of her aged seven playing the second Impromptu from Schubert’s first set, D899, with uncanny maturity and conviction. It is clear that Kobayashi was already a star in her native Japan before she went to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
What, I wonder, drew her to late Schubert? ‘I really love this music,’ she tells me, ‘as everyone does. But I was afraid to record it. I have always felt that Schubert should be played by an established pianist, someone older with a lot of experience. Although I studied a lot of Schubert in my early 20s, I thought I wasn’t ready for this music – it wasn’t the right time. But then I went to the Chopin Competition in 2021 and I learned a lot by focusing on the work of just one composer. This helped me with lots of things. After the competition I thought about which composer I wanted to focus on next and I decided that maybe it’s a good time to work on Schubert. He wrote this music when he was around my age. He might have been more mature than me, but I wanted to work on his music when I was the same age as he was when he wrote it.’
Kobayashi is talking to me online from Paris and she is struggling with a heavy cold. She pauses regularly, partly to wipe her nose and partly to search for the right words. More than once she stops mid-sentence to say that she finds it difficult to explain something in English. But she perseveres. ‘I’ve always felt a deep connection with Schubert’s music, even when I was very young,’ she says, when I mention the video of her at the age of seven. ‘I cannot say I’m very good at playing his music, but I feel a deep connection with it. His music makes me cry – it’s too beautiful. For me anyway.’ A thread of self-deprecation – possibly of not being entirely sure why I want to ask her about her piano-playing – runs through our conversation. It’s charming, although not always revealing.
A common question one faces with Schubert concerns tempo. Kobayashi takes the second of the D935 Impromptus – marked Allegretto and usually played with a Ländler-like gait – unusually slowly, so that it assumes a hymnlike quality of calm. How did she settle on this tempo? ‘I was supposed to play it faster,’ she says openly. ‘I worked on this piece after I gave birth to my first child. This was a great experience for me, having a child and realising the love that a mum has, the relationship between a mother and her child. This piece reminds me of this love. My baby was very young and maybe I wanted to sing – this piece feels like someone is embracing you. I wanted to express this kind of love and perhaps this meant it got slower. I know some people will say it’s too slow, but for now I wanted to express this love at this tempo.’ It’s a delightful explanation, and in her hands this music takes on a meditative quality, although I suspect she is right that some will find it too slow. ‘If I play with a faster tempo,’ she continues, ‘the music becomes too easy-going for me. I wanted to express something deeper. Maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time I will play it faster.’
We talk about various aspects of Schubert’s score and Kobayashi’s response to it. I ask about her decision not to take the repeats in the first Impromptu – ‘I recorded it both ways, just in case,’ she explains. ‘With the repeat, I just felt it was too long. I felt the structure worked better without it.’ This may be a rather old-fashioned view and most pianists take the repeats (although another exception is Radu Lupu, so she’s in good company). We talk about Schumann’s description of these Impromptus as ‘a sonata in disguise’ – she can see some logic to that and certainly thinks of the set as a single work rather than a collection of individual pieces. But in truth her responses don’t invite much further discussion. Perhaps I’m not asking the right questions. Perhaps the language barrier isn’t helping. Perhaps she’s just feeling under the weather.
So I change tack. I hadn’t intended to ask about her formative years as a prodigy, but she seemed receptive when I mentioned the video of her playing Schubert as a young girl, so I ask her whether she had any difficulty in escaping the expectations created by a precocious childhood. She smiles warmly and takes a breath. ‘I played a lot when I was very young,’ she begins, thankfully at ease with the question. ‘I gave concerts and made a recording. But when I was 17 or 18 I started to lose confidence in the meaning of why I played the piano. I went to America to study at the Curtis Institute, changing my teacher, but I still couldn’t find this meaning. I didn’t understand English and I was so lonely. I wanted to quit. My parents had helped me so much and I owe them a lot. I felt like I needed to pay them back by being a great pianist, to show gratitude for what they had done for me. But I stopped going to lessons. My teacher was worried and called my parents. My mum called me and I told her I wanted to quit the piano and go back to Japan, and she said “That’s fine. We are happy so long as you are happy. You don’t have to be a pianist. You can be whatever you want.” I had already applied for the Chopin Competition [in 2015] and I decided that I should go there and then I would quit. Then I started working intensively on the music – the competition was still two years away – and I realised I had so much to learn. The first round came and it was so much fun – this was the most exciting time I’d ever had. I realised that I loved music, I loved the piano, and I loved being on stage. So I decided to keep playing.’
Having spent a childhood working so hard at something because it made other people happy, it was clearly liberating for the teenage Kobayashi to be told by her parents that she had a choice. And we can all be grateful for the choice she made. ‘Some people grow up thinking they can do only one thing, because this is what they’ve done since they were very young,’ she reflects. ‘But maybe we shouldn’t think like this.’ Ultimately, as she agrees, starting her own family has given her a fresh perspective, on life and on music.