Pent-up pianist a bit mellower

By all accounts, Polish-born pianist Piotr Anderszewski is the kind of earnest, self-critical individual often characterized, with a hint of condescension, as a perfectionist -- someone who is “hard on himself.”

By his own account, Anderszewski is continually wrestling with what any given piece of music could and should sound like, as if he can hear the ideal in his mind but realize it only after a profound internal struggle. The pianist, who will give a recital in Walt Disney Concert Hall tonight, says he has to love a piece entirely to be able to even play it -- “I have to be 100% convinced.”

That demanding sensibility “doesn’t make life easy,” he observes by phone from the road, with something between a laugh and a shrug of resignation. Just listening to music requires such concentration that he hardly ever does it anymore.

Playing can be even more perilous. Part of the lore about Anderszewski, 36, is a concert he never finished: In 1990, at a competition in Leeds in northern England, he stomped offstage after he was unable to render a Webern variation to his satisfaction.

Anderszewski says he’s unlikely to storm from the Disney Hall stage. “To walk off in the middle of a performance takes a lot of courage. I’ve never done it since. But God knows sometimes I feel like it” -- when he’s playing poorly or the piano doesn’t resonate perfectly.

He’s older and wiser now. “It was a young man’s impulse. When you play for an audience, you have to forget about yourself a little bit.” Plus, “at that point, it’s too late.”

Still, Anderszewski’s intensity, which seems undimmed despite a slight mellowing of his temper, has brought him acclaim as one of the most personal and exciting pianists of his generation. Though his touch is typically gentle and his lines nuanced, he has electrified listeners through concerts and recordings of Bach, Chopin and Beethoven’s knuckle-busting “Diabelli” Variations.

John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune called him “among the true originals of the keyboard ... an artist who doesn’t have to dazzle with technical gymnastics,” while The Times’ Mark Swed wrote in a concert review that he “had the quality of digging deep inside the keys to the piano, as if Bach were a rich, organic soil to be plumbed.”

Being a Polish pianist is a bit like being a rock band from Liverpool: The job comes with a lot of baggage. Anderszewski, when starting his career, resented the natural expectations.

“People were surprised,” he says. “A Polish pianist with a Polish name who doesn’t play Chopin? I hadn’t found my way to him.”

Indeed, although Anderszewski retains a strong emotional connection to the land of his birth, he’s really more cosmopolitan than Polish. His mother is a Hungarian Jew, he grew up in both Warsaw and Paris, speaking several languages, and he’s lived in a number of other European cities.

He even, as an 18-year-old, spent a year studying piano and harpsichord at USC, where the sun and car culture was a huge contrast to the regulated world of “cold, communist” Poland, and he loved escaping into the desert’s vastness.

Now he’s living in the French capital again. “Music,” he says, “is an international language, after all.”

Eventually, he did record a disc of Chopin, albeit mostly lesser-known pieces. More recently, he has become fascinated with the music of his countryman Karol Szymanowski, who lived from 1882 to 1937.

The composer, whose work seems to cross the knotted fury of Scriabin with some of the chromaticism of the French Impressionists, originally baffled the pianist: “It was one huge mess, and you couldn’t find the logic inside the chords. It had no construction, no logic. But when you go through it, you see every note is in the right place. It’s so refined, and so complex.”

In the last years of his life, Szymanowski gravitated to mazurkas and other folkloric pieces, making him a kind of Polish Bartok. But appropriately, the piece Anderszewski is scheduled to play at Disney Hall, “Metopes,” is one of the composer’s least obviously Polish. “This was Szymanowski’s second period, where he was very influenced by Northern African and Mediterranean cultures. He was a great traveler and was interested in the basis of European culture.

“I think,” Anderszewski says, in an assessment that could refer to himself as well, “he’s being most himself in this second period, with no nationalistic connotations.”

Anderszewski tells a story about the titanic Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who’s been his hero since childhood, that shows another side of the hotheaded youth who abandoned the stage in Leeds.

When Anderszewski was about 20, the protean Richter came to Warsaw for a recital. The younger man, then a conservatory student, sneaked into the concert hall to try to overhear his rehearsal.

“Richter has accompanied me on record for so many years,” he explains, “so I would do anything to hear as much as possible.”

He hid on the floor, in between the rows of seats, three or four beautiful pianos on the stage before him.

“I waited one hour, two hours...,” he recalls. “But nobody came.”

Eventually, the great man walked into the room. Then “he touched one note on one piano and told the tuner, ‘You pick one for me.’ ”

Dejected, Anderszewski went back to class to prepare for a test. Little did he know that as the day went on, Richter would reject the woman chosen to turn his sheet music for him.

“He said the breast would distract him.”

So, at the last minute, Anderszewski was able to realize a dream. “It was an hour before the concert. I was in the music academy, waiting to go into my exam.” A friend tracked him down to tell him he’d been tapped for the job.

“I had to put on a white shirt and run over. It was completely crazy.”

And for the first time in a wide-ranging conversation, this careful, pent-up personality, thinking back to the chaos of that day, allows himself a full-throated laugh.

*

Piotr Anderszewski

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall,

111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 tonight

Price: $32 to $82

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com