Interview: Steven Osborne - Jazzing it uo

Published on Tuesday 9 June 2009 19:04

THERE'S a world of difference between the so-called crossover artist and a musician multi-talented enough to inhabit more than one stylistic genre with equal degrees of distinction. The former has become the stuff of fly-by-night commercialisation – former pub singer Russell Watson belting out second-rate Puccini, say, or Lesley Garrett turning her operatic warbles to Lennon and McCartney.

The latter is less about watering down boundaries than super-refining one skill through the inspiration of another, and it's to this camp that stellar Scots classical pianist Steven Osborne belongs. Having proved himself over the years as a brilliant interpreter of the piano repertoire's most difficult and esoteric challenges – definitive recordings of Messiaen, Tippett, Debussy and more recently all 24 Preludes of Rachmaninov – the Linlithgow-based musician has discovered a liberating inspiration in jazz.

His interest in the genre has emerged gradually over the years, initially surfacing as "lighter" concert encores, feeding into toe-tapping performances of such mixed-genre concerto repertoire as Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, but now manifesting itself as a key independent facet of his stage persona. Both sides will be on show next week, when Osborne joins the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (SSO) on 19 June for a performance of Stravinsky's Concerto for piano and wind instruments, before reappearing later that evening for a late-night solo jazz spot. Note, of course, how he keeps the two quite separate.

It's all part of ListenHere!, a four-day mini-festival during which the SSO opens up its Glasgow City Halls home to present a weekend of free concerts aimed at drawing in new audiences. The opening event on 18 June features Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Then, on Saturday morning, Dundee-born Gordon Stewart – a frequent con ductor of BBC Television's Songs of Praise – directs an impromptu audience of amateur singers in a "do-it-yourself" performance of Haydn's Creation (not a public concert), while the evening slot is given over to a programme called The New Celts, in which Ilan Volkov conducts a series of recently composed works by Martin Suckling, David Fennessy, James Clapperton and David Horne. Sunday's finale is essentially for kids, when madcap Paisley-born presenter Alasdair Malloy introduces a programme called From Hamelin to Hogwarts.

In such an eclectic context, Osborne's dual appearance looks set to be a sizzler. On the one hand, he turns his probing intellect to the cool neo-classicism of the Strav-insky concerto. On the other, he lets his hair down in a series of original jazz improvisations driven by his interest in the music of jazz trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and of the late guitarist/songwriter Nick Drake. The interesting point is this: Osborne is reluctant to draw direct cross references between these two very different performance styles. Any cross-fertilisation, he says, is subliminal.

So where might he identify a link? "I suppose there's something in the freedom you experience in free jazz improvisation that can inform the way you approach the classical repertoire," he says. "These are not only fun things to do, but they help you get in touch with the spontaneity of live performance. Suddenly there are no boundaries. You feel as if you have attained the highest level of skill and mastery of the music. It's a liberating experience."

It's that sense of spontaneity which he feels can often be missing from performances of standard classical music. "By their very nature, pieces written in another age are out of context today and extremely hard to recreate convincingly," he argues. "The experience of being free, which jazz improvisation encourages, opens all sorts of new possibilities when it comes to recreating, say, Mozart or Beethoven."

Strangely, when it comes to a relatively modern figure such as Stravinsky – who died in 1971, the same year Osborne was born – Osborne has found getting to the heart of next week's concerto something of a struggle. It's only his second performance of a work he agreed to play in Aldeburgh recently with the London Philharmonic Orchestra "just because they asked". "I have a problem with its neoclassical language," he admits. "I can't quite get my head around it."

Coming from a pianist renowned for his rigorous self-criticism and high expectations, that comment is perhaps best taken with a pinch of salt. Then again, maybe such clinical, abstract language is simply not Osborne's thing. Looking back a couple of years to his illuminating Edinburgh Festival performances of the Debussy and Rachmaninov Preludes, or his brilliant Hyperion recording of Messiaen's epic Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jsus, or even looking ahead to planned forthcoming recordings of Schubert piano duets with Paul Lewis and solo discs of Beethoven and Ravel, it's clear that Osborne's forte lies in music with a beating heart, music that vents its emotions openly.

Of his jazz improvisations, he says: "Playing these pieces well comes down to a state of mind – whether it's a hit or a miss depends on the mood you are in."

The same might be said of his approach to his mainstream concert repertoire. I wonder, too, if playing jazz has been therapeutic to a pianist who found himself so overloaded with work a few years ago, he was forced to withdraw from major concert dates. "It's so easy to get caught up in a constant stream of deadlines," says Osborne, who now manages his workload to allow him time to periodically recharge the batteries and enjoy family life in Linlithgow with his clarinettist wife. "I like to have periods of time when I don't play at all," he explains. "Music can be very absorbing. Last year I concentrated on jazz and didn't learn any classical stuff at all. As a result, I now feel I have all the energy I need to learn new repertoire."

I suppose that's what a jazz player would call taking a break.

&#149 Steven Osborne appears at City Halls, Glasgow, on 19 June as part of ListenHere! Full details on the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's mini-fest, which runs from 18-21 June, are available on www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso