From Where I Sit - Interview with Pieter Wispelwey by Daniel Jaffe in Gramophone Jan 2002
As your career progresses you're bound to change and have different views or emphasize different aspects of the music you're playing. That has happened with both the Britten and the Bach Suites, which I now approach with more freedom - more expression, more personal interpretation, and also more personal involvement. The experience of performing on stage is of course the main motivation behind change. You discover what works in a performance, what heightens the atmosphere and anticipation, and what's a good balance between drama and, say, lighter elements like humour, or irony, or dance.
There's a fantastic mix of elements in all the Britten suites, ranging from tragedy to genuine humour. In the First Suite's second movement, for example, the fugue's theme comes out of pianissimo and reaches this rest - a sort of stand-still. It is as if you have come onto the stage and are shocked to find yourself there; after that rest the next entry is a whole tone lower - a sort of timid version of that first entry. By contrast the next movement is a Lamento: just one voice speaking with no double stops. It's a completely vocal line with the rhetoric you find in vocal lines - the breathing, the naturalness of the way phrases end and then start.
There's a sense of the theatrical in all tree suites, which reflects Britten's knowledge of how drama works: drama works by contrast. One lesson that I learnt in performing the First Suite piece is the necessity of balancing its drama and humour. The humour is important, since it gives more darkness to the drama and more depth. Also it helps keep the audience with you. You can't strangle them with heart-felt emotions all the time - you give them some breath back and then attack again.
There's also instrumental delight, where Britten's playing around with what the cello has to offer. In the 'Bordone' in the First Suite there's this D string motif going on, with pizzicatos on the bass string. But then Britten suddenly moves the thing around: the pizzicatos turn up on the top string, and those tumultuous little motifs move down to the G string, under the bordone. It's simple but so effective. When you play that and see this effectiveness and the simplicity of the means, it reminds you of Bach. Bach doesn't need the complexity like a Xenakis of a Zimmermann: the complexity comes out of simplicity.
Its a modest, almost humble musicianship, but endlessly creative. We can admire it because we can understand many elements, and we see the bare creativity, which is this simple playing around with elements.
Unlike Bach's, Britten's suites have a more apparent story line - each Suite has a continuous drama from beginning to end. The First and Third Suites don't have any stops between the movements. But the elements to be found in both composers are the rhetoric, the playing around with motifs and building a language out of that. Though Bach isn't vocal like Britten, there's the element of speech and of rhetoric and contrasting motifs and the style brise style - this horizontal polyphony which is very obviously, and naturally, an element in Britten as well. But with Britten, conversely, there's much less of the dance element.
Of course there is a masterful recording of the first two Suites by Rostropovich (the dedicatee, made very shortly after the premiere of the Second Suite at the Aldeburgh Festival). But every musician has to play in his own way; there's no way that it would make sense to imitate that recording. It's impossible to come up with an objective yet musical-sounding translation of the score, so Rostropovich cannot do otherwise than be personal - he can't erase his personality. So while some elements have the power that Britten was looking for and was thinking of, there might be details that Rostropovich was not particularly interested in bringing out, but which are in the score. So you can't say that his is a definative statement - definative statements don't exist.
Performers often have a relationship with the repertoire that has developed for years and years and years. Unfortunately a concert never works like a well-fitting shoe. There's always something disappointing or which doesn't work. On the other hand, as while performing you're always trying to be on the edge, things happen which you hadn't thought of - that could go beyond certain expressions and you find new meanings; a greater intensity behind the elements.
For me the great challenge in recording is to keep an element of this risk-taking, and I want to get better at it. I feel very comfortable, at ease and excited on stage: I love it - and that's why I became a performing artist. Performing for a microphone is different, but it should be the same thing because there's a crowd of listeners 'behind' the microphone, and often bigger than you'll find in your concert halls. So it's a big responisibility. You have to imagine that there is an audience, and because that imaginary audience can't see you, you have to be even more expressive and even more risk-taking. I don't find that easy.
Sometimes you try to record at night just to get more focus, more inspiration; other times you try to just throw yourself at it. But in most cases recording is an exhausting business. It can be very rewarding and at best very painful in the sense that you get so close to the core of the piece that it starts burning. You've been working hours and hours and sometimes things start to glow and it's the real thing, the real spark of inspiration that the composer had or the emotion that the composer felt when he wrote it down. And that happens when you are in the recording studio in a different way to when you're on stage; on stage you're supposed to make that connection but you're also supposed to communicate with the audience. You shouldn't be too aware of that, but on the other hand you should! It's such a multi-layered business: one of the things you want to do is to leave yourself, leave the stage and listen to what's happening - become part of the audience. It's quite a schizophrenic kind of action.
Another legitimate approach is to try to forget the audience, because the more you concentrate to become one with the piece and the instrument, the more intense an experience it becomes for the audience to watch. But...! But getting to the core of the composition on stage can be very intense while in a recording situation that intensity develops over the course of many many hours, and therefore it's of a different intensity but not lesser.