One day in July, Hélène Grimaud was practicing the piano in a hotel room in Munich. The Palace, where she was staying, is near the Prinzregententheater, and is unusually accommodating of classical musicians; Room 606 comes equipped with a Steinway. Grimaud needed to work on the piano part to Mozart’s concert aria “Ch’io mi scordi di te,” which she was scheduled to record the next day, for Deutsche Grammophon. The instrument, an old upright, was not well tuned, but that did not bother Grimaud, who does not fetishize refinement. Offstage, Grimaud, who is small, often resorts to standing on the balls of her feet. But at the piano her powerful shoulders and muscled forearms make an impression. She goes at the music with flat-fingered stabs, her body crouched over the keyboard, like a swimmer preparing to dive.

Grimaud, a bold reinventor of phrasings, admires “the more extreme players . . . people who wouldn’t be afraid to play their conception to the end.” Photograph by Lise Sarfati

Grimaud’s room was mostly glass, and she likes musical extremes, so the place soon vibrated with sound, augmented by the grunting chant with which she marked passages in the aria. In “Ch’io mi scordi,” the piano plays faithless lover to the brokenhearted soprano. Soprano: I can’t bear to leave—I’ll stay with you forever, whether you want me to or not. In response, the piano teases, flirts, revels in being desired. Grimaud, who once told the Times that she should have been born a boy, played the exchange with a taunting lilt—La-da deeh-da dah-da-dah. Grunt. Da-dah-da dah-da la-da-dah. Grunt. By the time she got to the rolling arpeggios of the song’s resolution, you felt certain that the soprano had chosen the wrong shoulder to cry on.

Grimaud doesn’t sound like most pianists: she is a rubato artist, a reinventor of phrasings, a taker of chances. “A wrong note that is played out of élan, you hear it differently than one that is played out of fear,” she says. She admires “the more extreme players . . . people who wouldn’t be afraid to play their conception to the end.” Her two overriding characteristics are independence and drive, and her performances attempt, whenever possible, to shake up conventional pianistic wisdom. Brian Levine, the executive director of the Glenn Gould Foundation, sees in Grimaud a resemblance to Gould: “She has this willingness to take a piece of music apart and free herself from the general body of practice that has grown up around it.” Grimaud also tries to move her audience. Emmanuel Pahud, a flautist who has played recitals with her, says, “She is a deep romantic who—probably the German language is more suitable—goes where the belly’s hurting.”

As she practiced the Mozart, Grimaud sometimes slowed to replay passages, slightly altering their emphases. These adjustments did not take much time—one or two tries, and she moved on. She had played the score only twice before, but she is a fast learner. She paused over a phrase in which the singer grows faint with grief; Mozart employs all twelve tones of the scale, in an arresting disruption of the piece’s key, E-flat major. “This is about as modern as Mozart gets,” Grimaud said, with pleasure.

At one point, her partner, the photographer Mat Hennek, stepped out of the bedroom and asked her to help negotiate the details of a piano delivery for an upcoming concert, in Gstaad. Grimaud broke off and discussed the matter in a phone call, then came back and picked up where she had left off. All told, her preparation for the recording session took only about twenty minutes. She stood up to leave. “Let’s keep it fresh for tomorrow,” she said, eager for dinner.

Grimaud, who is forty-two, has blue eyes and motile sandy-brown hair. At a recent performance, her hair was up for the Mozart, down for the Liszt, and back up for the encore, a transcription of Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.” On album covers, her hair telegraphs a mood. It is pinned up in a Clara Schumann-like bun for a Brahms recording, and on the cover of “Credo”—a CD of Beethoven and a pair of mystic-minded modern composers—it is tucked behind her ears, in wan, heroin-chic strands. Ordinarily, her hair is shaggy, with too-busy-to-blow-dry bangs.

Grimaud has been recording since she was fifteen, and she has put out some twenty CDs in the past twenty-five years. She plays around a hundred concerts a year. Her strongly interpretive playing has made her a favorite among many conductors and reviewers. For others, though—Michael Lang, the president of Deutsche Grammophon, calls them “the conservative classical police”—her style is too far outside the norm, the score too much a plaything. Grimaud says, “It’s not everyone’s taste, perhaps because it’s too impulsive, more emotional than controlled.”

Yet, at a moment when vast catalogues of classical recordings are moving onto the digital cloud, Grimaud is at an advantage. Her albums aren’t merely proficient tours through the repertoire; they are highly personal explorations that can stand out among dozens of rival performances. And in the concert hall Grimaud can offer surprises, something rarely provided by players who have been processed by the conservatory machine.

Whenever Grimaud can manage, she doesn’t perform at all: she is at a conservation center for wolves that she co-founded, in 1999, in northeast Westchester County, where she helps care for the animals. Grimaud does not relish the stiffness of the classical world. In a 2004 photograph of her, prized on the Internet, she is rehearsing with an orchestra wearing what looks like a wife beater; more recently, she apologized to a music reporter for showing up for an interview smelling of deer meat. On some album covers, you don’t even see the piano; you just see her face, which is striking enough to withstand the kinds of closeup that the recording industry normally reserves for pop stars.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this strategy helps Grimaud attract younger, less committed listeners who shop for music online. “Hélène is attractive, and that makes a difference,” says Paul Foley, who oversees classical-music marketing in the U.S. for Universal Music, which owns Deutsche Grammophon. “Her covers can compete against the pop records that are on the home page of iTunes.”

Grimaud grew up in Aix-en-Provence and was, by her own admission, “a fairly contrary child.” When her class was instructed to draw chickens, she drew pictures of wire mesh. Grimaud, whose parents taught Italian and Italian literature, dreamed of being a veterinarian or a public attorney, of “rectifying injustice.” Her behavior often leaned toward the bizarre, though she does not always seem to recognize this. She cheerily recalls the story of bringing her father’s letter opener into class one day, with the intention of stabbing a teacher who, she felt, had treated another child unfairly. The weapon fell out of Grimaud’s bag as she tried to hide it in her desk, and it was confiscated. “I was very disappointed to have shown so little character and not gone through with my plan while I still could,” she says.

Grimaud soon turned her frustrations on herself. If she fell and hurt her right knee, she carved an identical mark on the other. Cutting herself, she recalls, was “more than pleasurable. It was a feeling of accessing something else. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

Her parents, determined to socialize young Hélène, tried judo, tennis, and dance lessons. Grimaud hated them all, but particularly despised ballet—the costumes reminded her of the dolls that she flung across her bedroom. Full of nervous energy, she folded and refolded sweaters until her parents begged her to stop and come down for dinner. What distinguished her behavior from that of obsessive-compulsives, she says, was her high self-esteem: “I had people who supported me, who helped me believe in myself, so it doesn’t really fit the description.”

One day when Grimaud was seven, her parents took her to a music-appreciation class. Each child was asked to hum the melody of Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer.” Grimaud did so with uncanny accuracy. The teacher advised Grimaud’s parents to start their daughter immediately on the piano. Her mother balked, as Grimaud remembers, afraid that all those hours at the piano weren’t likely to make her “more conforming or normal or lighthearted, or something.” Her father had no such worries; he arranged for an upright to be delivered to their house. It turned out that Grimaud didn’t need to dissipate her energy; she needed to focus it. In playing music, she finally met a task absorbing and complex enough to satisfy her. It felt “vivifying,” she remembers, to immerse herself in a world in which symmetry and order reigned.

Grimaud quickly surpassed other children who had been playing piano for years. “By nine, I was already obsessed,” she remembers, in love with “the pure pleasure and evasion of being at that instrument.” But, rather than spending all her time at the keyboard, she did much of her “practicing” in her head. “Some wonderful pianists practice eight hours a day,” she says. “I was never really that person.” She notes of her childhood, “I don’t remember ever having had a piece that I found hard.”

She was helped along, she says, by having synesthesia—the conflation of one sense with another. She first noticed this phenomenon, at the age of eleven, while playing the Prelude in F-sharp Major from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”; she has described seeing a “shapeless stain . . . between orange and red.” Afterward, she was surprised to learn that this wasn’t normal. Seeing music as colors helped her memorize scores and made playing the piano feel even more visceral. Even today, when she plays, especially in concert, colors can come unbidden, each connected to a particular key. C minor is black. D minor is blue. E-flat major, the key of the Mozart aria, is “very bright—something similar to sunlight . . . and sometimes switching to green.”

She completed an eight-year piano curriculum in four. When she was twelve, in 1982, Grimaud applied to the Conservatoire de Paris. Among the pieces that she played to gain entry were Chopin’s Second and Third Sonatas; Chopin, a tempestuous pianist himself, was a musician with whom she felt a kinship. Grimaud, who is left-handed, thought that the Classical greats discriminated against players like her. In their music, the left hand was largely devoted to chords, while the right played the melody. “Chopin opened up the piano for the left hand,” she says. Grimaud was accepted to the conservatory, and began travelling from Aix to Paris each week for classes, staying for two days with a host family. She completed her regular schooling through a correspondence course.

Playing the piano in Paris made Grimaud happier, but hardly happy. She wandered the city in a loose sweater, to disguise her figure, and repelled men’s stares with her own. She read the novels of Dostoyevsky, enjoying especially the intense irony of “Crime and Punishment.” “I wanted to have the courage and I killed. . . . Did I murder the old woman? I killed myself”—she understood lines like that. She was several years younger than the other students at the conservatory, and she fell deeply in love with an older man. In “Variations Sauvages,” a memoir she published in 2003, the man is identified simply as “him, the one I had loved so.” (The book has been translated into English, as “Wild Harmonies.”)

Laurence Contini, another piano student, remembers Grimaud as “a solitary being who watched everything” and who rarely joined the older kids, after class, at the Café de l’Europe. She recalls hearing Grimaud for the first time: “I knew immediately how gifted she was. She had sensibility and assurance.”

“Fine. Sit there and check your messages. Perhaps it will give you something to contribute to the conversation.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The typical French pianist was supposed to be an airy being, chasing after Debussy’s wispy clouds. Grimaud wanted to try something stouter. The pieces she was told to play for her second-year evaluation confirmed her concerns: they consisted of études by Chopin, Liszt, and Scriabin. When her teacher insisted on this program, she left and went home to Aix, where she performed Chopin’s Second Concerto with an orchestra of students and professors from her old conservatory. Being at the swirling center of an orchestra enthralled her. In her memoir, she writes, “I was completely myself, unmoored, borne aloft by the brand-new and delightfully breathtaking feeling of absolute freedom.”

Afterward, to her relief, the Conservatoire de Paris didn’t punish her. In fact, when she gave a tape of the Aix performance to her teacher, he passed it on to the head of recording for the Japanese classical label Denon, who signed her up. Grimaud insisted that her first record be devoted to Rachmaninoff.

Her performance of the challenging Second Piano Sonata came out in 1986, when she was sixteen. The contrast between the diminutive teen-ager and the colossal Rachmaninoff piece was striking. The recording, which is lush and dramatic, showed her obsession with emotions, perhaps surprising in someone who was not conventionally emotional. The first time she deeply cried, she says, was after playing Brahms’s D-Minor Piano Concerto, as a teen-ager: “I was already in love with Brahms, but I knew right when I heard it that it was going to be one of mine.” It remains one of her favorite pieces. “It is a sort of requiem written in response to Schumann’s suicide attempt,” she notes. She especially loves the first movement of the Brahms, and one of her favorite passages is a moment in the recapitulation when the thunderous agitation that the piano has declared dissolves into something wistful, almost ghostly—a moody wanderer looking for comfort.

Today, Grimaud considers some of her early playing too slow and too attentive to detail at the expense of “the big arc,” but at the time she felt febrile with ideas that she had to share. Though she believes that Romantic composers like Brahms and Chopin hold special wisdom, she is not wedded to that style. “If you talk to me, you can call a lot of things Romantic,” she says. “You can call Bach’s Sixth Partita as Romantic as any Wagner opera. Romanticism is, for me, much more than a period in culture.”