Maria João Pires (Lisbon, 1944) does not usually look back.
"I'm disconnected from the past," he says.
That is why she does not think to pay much attention to the recently released box that brings together her complete discography with Deutsche Grammophon, her label.
"I just hope you don't find it too bad ...", he says.
It would be rare, because it would mean ruining what has been one of the most brilliant trajectories of contemporary piano.
Records, okay, they were something you had to count on for a while to build careers.
Now they have become a timeless rarity that, however, when they appear like this, as a compendium, they give an idea of the solidity and legacy of some chosen ones.
And Maria João Pires is.
It came to mark an era as a counterpoint and continues to do so.
Her mere presence, her determination, responds to a firm will to impose delicacy and seek spontaneity in an art that is too encrusted within structures, devices and destructive dynamics that terrify her: "Competing, in art, has become a disease", He says.
He knows it because he has suffered it.
He regrets it but is not resigned.
He's been fighting it a lifetime, in fact.
The first time he acted he was four years old.
He does not remember it precisely and, for a time, has had to resort to the memory of witnesses, such as his mother and sisters.
“I know that I had a bad time, that I did not like it, it was a negative experience, but it did not lead to trauma.
They tell me that they felt very tense and defensive ”.
How did you solve it?
"I have not solved it, I have accepted it," he says.
To do this, she has had to shed that part of the ego that somehow convinces someone to get on stage to give.
“It is not like that, you do it to share.
You turn it into a communion with the public, who does their part.
That joint responsibility takes pressure off him, in my case. "
When you attend one of his recitals or his concerts, you feel that search for simplicity alien to anything that has to do with any feeling of superiority.
It is a practical question, in her case: "Everything that is not useful, is left over."
A quality that stands out in composers like Mozart or Schubert: "They are complex, but not complicated," he distinguishes.
The first, many people believe, has something mysterious.
But it is an element that Pires knows how to identify and explains: “For me, it simply consists in that it belongs to the sphere of nature itself.
Like the light, the moon, the sun.
That is why it escapes us.
However, what Schubert expresses is another type of nature: human.
The feeling of joy and loss, the need for acceptance.
It is different".
Beethoven, on the other hand, represents for Pires a fusion of both.
"Look for a connection between the universe and the human being, the consciousness of being someone, the ego in front of everything."
In each of them and before, since Bach, Pires investigates the essences of an intrinsic and natural continuity.
To travel with this interpreter through the history of music through her recording legacy is to break boundaries, build bridges of styles that follow one another, flow ... And not much enter the twentieth century or the contemporaries: “I like to listen to them, I have a problem with reading his scores, it is not worth the effort.
Besides, why would I get involved if others do it so well?
"We have lost the essence of the creative feeling, which comes from love, from helping, from enjoying being together, from making each other happy ..."
She believes that she should now focus more on other issues: pedagogy, for example.
He has always taught, in fact he set up a center in Belgais, near the border with Spain, to promote his own vision, alien to elitism: “Beethoven wanted his music to be heard by everyone and it has become something restricted.
From now on, society must reflect on how to share it live with a greater number of people, not closed in auditoriums, theaters and spaces in which only a minority has the right to enjoy their stars, that promotes an undesirable egocentricity " .
It is something that he has fought since his musical phalanstery in Belgium, but has suffered many ups and downs.
From the utopian ideal that it pursued in its beginnings, it has actually become possible, where today, in the midst of a pandemic, it offers classes on the Internet: “I like doing it, it dismantles exclusivity.
I don't know who comes to attend them and who doesn't, there are no filters ”.
This responds in some way to the founding spirit of its teaching center: "We created it to think collectively, outside of our respective individualities, in palpable solutions for art, sustainability, the relationship with nature, music."
Especially to train with other values in a specific, close, rural environment.
She built it centered on her obsession against competitive drift, oblivious to creativity and tending towards a conservative vision of music.
“Art is the opposite of competition.
If you compete, don't believe, ”says Pires.
He does not know when the musicians ended up there.
“Perhaps due to the influence of a certain American vision.
They were pushed to do that more than to learn together and share or make friends ”.
Everything changed dramatically 30 or 40 years ago, the pianist believes.
"The students became worse than robots, they were forced to hate each other, not to join."
Over time, nothing has improved: “Now we are at the worst moment, we have lost the essence of the creative feeling, which comes from love, from helping, from enjoying being together, from making others happy… Not from a closed ego: like this it does not exist, it does not exist, it must be opened ”.
Perhaps this crisis of which we still do not know the consequences will change it.
He hopes so.
Something must bury, according to her, this perverse dynamic: “Nothing is stimulated other than the hunger for triumph without the need to discover, without the food that this implies.
It is an attitude that goes against the very essence of music.
They believe that they promote opportunities and they do not.
They play like machines, they prepare to suit the tastes and preferences of the jurors.
If this is good, I don't understand anything, I'm getting old, ”she says.
Musicians are taught to seek security against risk, says the interpreter: “As if they made a life policy so that nothing happens to them, when being an artist is the opposite: assuming and accepting all risks.
And this is so because they are trained to win.
Winning does not imply taking risks, it represents just the opposite.
In sports, it may be worth it, in art, no ”.
And so it happens in other facets of life, hence I demand an artistic and comprehensive education to stop it.
“It also happens with the human being against nature and the environment: many destroy to win and they do not care what they destroy and their consequences.
If it affects human lives or life itself.
I do not want to be negative because a door opens to us with what this pandemic has brought us.
Things, as they were, were not working.
We must find other ways out ”.
Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon.
Maria João Pires.
DG 4838880. 38 CD