Leif Ove Andsnes fits every round peg into the square hole
Which he does with varying levels of success
Schumann’s Four Piano Pieces Op. 32, Selections from Kurtág’s Játékok, Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path Bk. 1, Schumann’s Carnaval Op. 9
Vivo Performing Arts
Leif Ove Andsnes, piano
New England Conservatory Jordan Hall
Jan. 30, 2026
On Friday, Jan. 30, seasoned concert pianist Leif Ove Andsnes played pieces by Schumann, Kurtág, and Janáček in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.
He began the evening with Schumann’s Op. 32, opening the Scherzo with full-bodied sound. The subsequent Gigue ambled along without a single breath taken across the entire piece. A stormy Romanze followed, which then unfurled into a sweet but lonely intermediate melody. These opening statements established baseline characteristics of Andsnes’s style that would remain incredibly consistent throughout the recital: clear voicing of all notes, rhetorical demarcation of phrases, strict metronomic rhythm within those phrases, and a preference for smooth gradations of volume whenever possible. He presented a very comfortable manner of playing, perhaps to a fault.
Andsnes played the last Fughette in Op. 32 with a light but muted dryness. Despite the piece’s tonal distance from its more impassioned predecessors, Andsnes still constrained to the same sepia tones that characterized his performance thus far. As the final hushed major key chords hung in the air, Andsnes remained motionless to savor the moment before launching immediately into the next set of pieces.
The first characteristic that caught the ear was the dissonance. In the almost 200-year gap between Schumann and Kurtág, music had become unmoored from tonality, anything becoming permissible. For an undisturbing concert thus far, the Kurtág offered the first wrinkle, the first hint of intrigue. Yet even in these free-spirited “children’s games” (Játékok), one could feel Andsnes’s restrained, serious presence. Past an unsettling entrance into the set, the next piece allowed Andsnes a chance to showcase the sonic capabilities of the piano to glittery effect. In fact, the whole Kurtág experience could be summarized as an exploration of all the sounds at the mercy of two hands and a keyboard, up to and including pure noise, which made its appearance somewhere midway through the set. Paradoxically, the expanded suite of sound did not lead to a diversity of sonic experiences, instead, it remained rather uniform. Despite Andsnes’s crystal-clear control, the music was not crystalline; it was a haze, fuzzy at its densest, tingly at its most sparse. The seven Játékok went by in short order, a confusing blip in the grand scheme of things.
The audience let out an audible sigh of recognition (or perhaps relief) upon the return of melodious music present in Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, again segued immediately without applause. Andsnes played these ten memories in the same measured manner and sepia tones he did with the earlier Schumann. Like some old photographs, a few of these pieces turned out particularly powerful. The fourth piece (“The Madonna of Frydek”) suited his seriousness perfectly, eerie placidity alternating with brooding introspection, ending surprisingly in exuberance. He succeeded in literally fulfilling the title of the seventh piece (“Good Night!”) for one tired soul in the back of the audience, but he also succeeded musically in pacing the dynamics of an otherwise overly repetitive piece.
In the other Janáček works, Andsnes’s approach seemed less idiomatic. He equalized the four contrapuntal lines in the opening piece (“Our Evenings”), as opposed to a more typical homophonic melody plus accompaniment. Rhythmic freedom within phrases was nonexistent, the melodic contour of the top line bound to the strict regimen of his internal metronome. It would be hard to claim that the clarity of line justified the sacrifice of expressive rubato. A similar interpretation defined the second piece (“Blown Away Leaf”). Although he took rhetorical liberties between ideas, the eighth notes within each phrase always fell exactly in time, a little too stuffy to be the love song that the program notes implied. In the fifth piece (“They Chattered Like Swallows”), he took his rhythmic precision to an extreme, mimicking the chatter more of a typewriter than of birds or humans. Even between phrases, he took no time, giving the same breathless quality present all the way in the opening Schumann. However, in the final piece of the set (“The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!”), his tendencies managed to align into a convincing performance, the reward of the climax ever greater by the suffocation of the nearly overlapping previous phrases.
Post intermission, Andsnes began Schumann’s Carnaval much like he did the opening of the concert: declaimed boldly, loudly. The first half of this long set of pieces felt like exposition, a necessary step to get the audience acquainted with the characters. Among the characters presented, the two aspects of the composer (Eusebius and Florestan) stuck out. In Florestan, Andsnes even got close to feigning unpredictability. Of course, his restraint and rigidity prevented him from committing.
Nearing the end, Andsnes seemed to loosen ever so slightly, perhaps in anticipation of the end of the recital. The Valse Allemande bore no evidence of conscious control, its lilt cute and natural. The subsequent flurry of notes representing Paganini again showcased Andsnes’s incredible ability for clarity in dense textures, but it was in the return to the Valse that Andsnes created a truly magical moment, a haunting dominant chord that lingered after clearing Paganini’s cacophonous ending from the pedal.
Andsnes then laid bare his full capacity for lyrical warmth in the final “Promenade” before the finale. All his best slow music qualities coalesced into a full-bodied singing voice floating over a glowing bed of harmonic accompaniment. The subsequent “Pause” barely registered as much more than noise, but it mattered little as it led straight into the bombastic belligerence of “March of the Band of David Against the Philistines.” Here, Andsnes revealed all of his best fast music qualities. Abounding triumph. Heroism in spades. An exciting churning forward momentum. Surprise! Clarity. The final concluding leap quickly brought the audience to its feet, the horizontal musical velocity channeled into the vertical. They had to hear more if he still had that in store.
Andsnes obliged with Chopin’s Tarantelle, a fun whirlwind of a showpiece that maintained the energy of Carnaval. Again, the audience coaxed him back for one last round, for which he gave the Mozart Rondo in D Major K. 485. In Mozart, his orderliness and technical finesse found a complete aesthetic synergy. Gone were any cognitive dissonances of style. What remained was pure joy and the magic of Mozart’s modulations. Andsnes had saved the best for last.