Leif Ove Andsnes: Years Later, It's More of an Eagle's View
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Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes on Beethoven, Grieg, Gramophone Awards, and his musical rapport with Bertrand Chamayou.
 | By Lucy Cheung 22 October 2026 |
Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and French pianist Bertrand Chamayou won the Piano Award at the 2026 Gramophone Classical Music Awards for Schubert 4 Hands, an album marking a decade of collaboration at the piano. The award came just days after I heard Andsnes perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.
The Schubert album brought back memories of hearing the two pianists perform together at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2023. For a long time, I associated Andsnes above all with Grieg. At the Bergen International Festival, where he has long been a familiar presence, I once came across a “Before I die” wall beside the festival’s open-air stage. Among the wishes written on it was this one: “Have a selfie with Leif Ove Andsnes.” It was a small but telling reminder of the place he occupies in Norway’s musical life.
That connection with Norway will continue in 2027, when Andsnes becomes Artist in Residence at the Bergen International Festival as it celebrates its 75th anniversary. Earlier that year, on 1 May, he will perform Grieg’s Piano Concerto at the Berlin Philharmonic’s Europa Concert, followed by a tour with the orchestra later that month. For a pianist whose relationship with Grieg has been central to his career, the year ahead brings that connection into sharp focus.
I spoke to Andsnes about returning to Beethoven, the freedom he finds in the composer’s music, his plans for Bergen, and the pleasures of playing with another pianist. We also talked about the recordings that have stayed with him, his long-standing affection for Gramophone, and what it means to keep discovering new things in music. The full conversation is also available on London Ears | The Riff Residency.
A Conversation with Leif Ove Andsnes
LC = Lucy Cheung
LOA = Leif Ove Andsnes
“I feel this strong hand taking hold of me”
LC: Ten years ago, you recorded all of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. What have you discovered on returning to these works? And would you consider undertaking a similar recording project in the future?
LOA: I don’t know what the future holds. I recorded all the piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in a major project between 2012 and 2015, which we called Beethoven Journey. It was a really unique project in my life, because for three years I was basically working on just one composer. I played very little else, although I was also working on his solo music, sonatas and chamber music.
There was a kind of freedom in suddenly being able to work within one musical language. As a pianist, you’re constantly being thrown between different centuries, styles and composers. To be able to concentrate on one musical vocabulary for a while was really wonderful.
We finished the project in London, at the BBC Proms, in 2015. After that, I didn’t touch any of the Beethoven concertos for almost eight years. I started playing the Emperor Concerto again a few years ago, and now I’ve returned to the Third. So I’m gradually coming back to them.
The most overwhelming feeling, I think, is how necessary this music is, basically, how important it is, and how wonderful it is to come back to it. It just feels like a really important part of my life.
When I did that project, I was also mainly leading the orchestra myself. We didn’t have a conductor; I was leading the orchestra, sitting in the middle of the orchestra, without a lid on the piano. That has some advantages in terms of direct contact with the musicians, you know? But it also has its challenges, and of course, it’s hard to do both things. Playing the piano while leading the orchestra is challenging enough, and doing so without a lid on the piano can present further difficulties in some halls. It makes the piano sound less clear, and leaves less room for different sounds and possibilities.
So at the moment, I’m very much enjoying playing with conductors, and just being in the normal soloist position, especially when we play in these big halls, as we often do.
It’s been a long time since I played with Esa-Pekka Salonen, so it’s really heartwarming to come back to that. And with the Philharmonia, there was such warm, sensitive music-making in rehearsals today. Of course, this is a piece that most of these well-known orchestras feel they know, because it’s standard repertoire, as we say. But that can be a disadvantage sometimes, because you get into a kind of routine. I felt that with this orchestra, they immediately adjusted to certain details: what I wanted to do, what Esa-Pekka wanted, or what they discovered themselves in rehearsal. Things changed between the first read-through and the second time they played it. It was really a wonderful rehearsal, so I have great hopes for the concert.
LC: If I had to choose one composer, I think it would be Beethoven. When I get travel sick, for instance, I put on one of his symphonies, and it seems to make the sickness go away.
LOA: I’ve had similar experiences in my life. When I’ve been in difficult situations, if I work on or listen to Beethoven’s music, I feel there’s this sort of strong hand taking hold of me, and there’s such comfort in that. There’s such strength. There’s such an uplifting quality to it.
You know, it always goes through struggle somehow, but it’s always looking up. It’s unbelievable that this man, who suffered so much in his life from health problems and isolation, and who became deaf, still always looks up in his music. There’s always hope.
And of course, you know, how it goes from one note to another, one harmony to another, is just… He had some kind of connection with music which, for me, is stronger than that of any other composer. Maybe Bach comes close, but that’s a different kind of music. Beethoven’s music is extremely strong, and I feel that strength again now that I’m working on it.
Piano Concerto No. 3 is really Beethoven finding himself, one could say. The first two concertos are wonderful too, vivid and powerful, but in the Third his personality becomes much more pronounced. He chooses c minor, a key of drama for him, and the music is very charged. The first movement is full of tension, and at the same time there’s wonderful beauty, like in the second theme and so on. It’s very much a Sturm und Drang moment, reflecting a movement in German culture at the time. It’s all about questions and answers: what is the meaning of this? The shorter phrases seem to ask questions and look for answers, which is fascinating.
The second movement is completely different. It has so much space, and it’s in E major. It starts with the piano alone, with these heavenly chords. There’s something about the way the music is spaced out, both in the piano solo and when the orchestra comes in. There seems to be endless space in this music, and that’s quite a miracle when you think that it was written in the early 1800s. There wasn’t any music like that, you know? It’s so broad. It has an incredible, angelic beauty, and it’s as if it’s preaching something. It says something very important there.
Then we’re back to the minor in the last movement, but with a kind of twist. There’s a lot of humour, even within the darkness, and a great deal of playfulness. The last movement combines these things, with a very Mozartian, tongue-in-cheek virtuoso ending, which is very funny.
LC: Is there a particular period of Beethoven’s music that you feel especially close to? Some pianists are more drawn to his early works, while others prefer the late works.
LOA: At the moment, I’m working intensely on the last three sonatas, because that will be my big project for 2027. I’m playing them a lot, and hopefully I’ll also record them at the end of the year.
I love his early music, but the last three sonatas just open out into these enormous spaces. They combine high and low, such spiritual places with folk songs and folk dances, and there are a lot of references to Bach. There are fugatos, there’s polyphony, and there are lots of acoustic experiments with pedalling and with all these trills. He seems to have a common obsession with vibrations in the piano.
That’s easily understandable, because he was deaf at that point in his life. He needed to feel the piano, and when you play trills, you really feel the vibration of the instrument. So it’s an interesting thought that, probably, if he hadn’t lost his hearing, he would have written very different music.
I also think that gave him a certain freedom. He didn’t have to face the practicalities any more; he could just follow his inner voice. And his inner voice was so extremely strong. The late music is unbelievable to me, including the string quartets and so on.
But now, when I play the third concerto, I think it’s the perfect piece. It’s much earlier and more classical, but it has so much to offer.
LC: Some people feel that Beethoven’s music, particularly the symphonies, is performed too often. Why do you think his music remains so important today?
LOA: I find it interesting how things are changing a little in the orchestral canon, so to speak. Beethoven used to be bread and butter. But in America now, for instance, it seems less common for orchestras to play Beethoven than Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss or the larger symphonies of Shostakovich.
It’s interesting how times have changed. I still find Beethoven’s music so essential. Earlier this year, I heard a performance of the Eroica with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, and it was so overwhelming. It was probably the greatest performance of a Beethoven symphony I’ve heard in my life.
I thought again: this is the best piece ever, this is the best music, and we need it so much. And I have to say, even when I hear lesser performances, there’s always something I take with me, something new I hadn’t thought about. The music is so potent, so full of surprises.
LC: When you return to familiar works again and again, what do you discover? Can you think of something you’ve heard or understood differently in recent years?
LOA: With Beethoven, for instance, I think the key word now is freedom. When I was younger, I saw him as very structural, very elemental and formal. I was very aware of these elemental motives and how the music was constructed. Now I feel that the key word is freedom, because Beethoven wanted to get out of these boundaries. The music struggles, and then it finds freedom.
Take the Emperor Concerto. It starts with a chord and then this flourish, and it’s almost as if he’s saying, “I’ve found it. I’ve found freedom. It’s here.” There’s such an exalted feeling in that music. When you first learn a piece, your view is a little narrow. You’re in a tunnel, focusing on the details. When you come back to it years later, you may have more of an eagle’s view. You see the whole landscape more clearly, the topography of the composition. You know where the climaxes are, where you need to push and where you can take time. The choices become more natural. The music becomes more organic, more spontaneous, surprising and fluid.
“There’s nothing quite like it in Norway”
LC: You’ll be Artist in Residence at the Bergen International Festival in 2027, which will be its 75th anniversary. What are you planning for the festival?
LOA: I want to try some new things. It’s a special year for the festival, and I feel it’s a good opportunity to do something a little different, to go outside my comfort zone and experiment.
I’ve been doing some historical piano projects, for instance. We have an 1881 Steinway coming from Belgium, and I’ll play Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Franck’s Symphonic Variations on it. I’ll also be working with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, with period instruments and gut strings. So there will be more historical piano projects.
And then there’s Satie’s Vexations, which is a very different kind of thing. The piece can take 18 or 20 hours, because you repeat the same theme 840 times. I’ll be one of a number of local pianists taking part in this community project.
Musically, it’s only two lines, so it’s not very rich in terms of musical content. But the concept is interesting. It becomes almost a kind of meditation. In a time when our attention is so fragmented, I think there’s something interesting about spending so long with the same music.
LC: Grieg’s music is so closely associated with the Norwegian landscape. Do you feel his music evolves over time?
LOA: There are some works that I feel have been played too often, and I’m less interested in playing them. But there are other works that grow with me, and I find them more and more interesting. His songs are particularly important to me.
At the Rosendal festival in 2025, we did a lot of Grieg songs. I think that, at his best, he’s comparable with Schubert. There’s something very universal about his music.
I recorded Haugtussa with Lise Davidsen. It’s a cycle of eight songs, and because the text is in Norwegian, it doesn’t travel so easily outside Norway. But it’s one of his greatest works. It tells an intense story, a little like Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.
The best of Grieg’s songs tell stories through these almost spoken melodic lines. They’re not really arias; they’re more like natural speech. And his harmonic language is so distinctive. You can recognise a Grieg piece within seconds. Schubert and Chopin have that quality too: you immediately know who you’re listening to.
LC: This year, you also recorded music by another Norwegian composer, Geirr Tveitt. Could you tell us about him?
LOA: Tveitt was born in 1908 and died in 1981. He wrote some very good music during and after the Second World War, and most of the music on my album comes from that period.
The main work is his Piano Sonata No. 29, a monumental sonata lasting around thirty-five minutes. It’s very virtuosic and very epic. The colours are just amazing. At times, it sounds a little like Messiaen.
That has something to do with the fact that Tveitt was such a great pianist. He studied piano alongside composition, and he played many major works by Brahms, Chopin, Grieg and others. He really knew the instrument. He really knew how to build sounds, use overtones and create different harmonic colours. It’s a very impressive piece. I hadn’t played it until the last few years, and I’m so happy to have finally recorded it, because there’s nothing quite like it in Norway. Grieg wrote some pieces lasting fifteen or twenty minutes, but they don’t have the same scale of ambition. Tveitt’s sonata is really unique. That’s why I felt I had to record it.
There was a tragedy in his life. In 1970, the farm where he lived, where he kept most of his manuscripts, burned to the ground. A great deal of his music was lost. We think around seventy to eighty per cent of his output disappeared.
Fortunately, some of the larger and greater works, such as the Piano Sonata No. 29, had already been published. But this is actually the only piano sonata to survive out of around thirty-six. You can imagine what was lost. Fortunately, we still have some wonderful music by him, and I tried to make a careful selection for my recording.
LC: Your sister Solveig also sings on the album, doesn’t she?
LOA: Yes. I recorded some of his songs with my sister. They’re not very well known, and some don’t even survive in manuscript form. Apart from the first song, which has actually become very popular and is sometimes performed with guitar, the others are hardly known in Norway.
LC: You mentioned the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival earlier. I’ve never been, and I wish I’d had the chance, but the festival has now ended. Why did you decide to stop?
LOA: I felt we had done everything we could within the framework we had created. Rosendal is a small place, and I love it, so I’ll still organise concerts there over a couple of summer weekends, with different programmes. But the festival as we knew it has come to an end.
It’s a very special place. There’s a 300-year-old manor house, and the concert hall was built ten years ago. It’s right by the fjord, with the mountains behind it and an English garden. It’s a very special combination of nature and culture.
Before Rosendal, I ran the Risør Chamber Music Festival for 17 years. Altogether, then, I’ve spent 27 years running festivals. I feel that I want to use my summers differently now. I want to be able to go to other festivals in August, and perhaps have a summer holiday without thinking about the festival all the time.
I love Rosendal, and I’m sure I’ll continue to be involved there in some way. But it’s good to make a change.
“We could understand each other’s timing at the keyboard”
LC: Let’s talk about Schubert. Over the years, you’ve collaborated with different pianists, playing music for two pianos and piano four hands. What attracts you to this kind of collaboration? And could you tell me more about your partnership with Bertrand Chamayou?
LOA: I’ve done much more two-piano repertoire over the years, especially with Marc-André Hamelin. We recorded together, worked on Stravinsky projects and played a lot of concerts.
Four-hand music is something different. It’s quite difficult to find a partner for it, because you’re sitting so close together and sharing the same keyboard. You need to have a similar sense of timing and touch, especially with Schubert.
I first played Schubert’s Fantasie in f minor with Bertrand about ten years ago, at the first Rosendal festival. It felt very natural and easy. We understood each other immediately, and we started talking about doing a project together.
We breathe the phrases in the same way, and our hands seem to communicate. Our techniques are different, of course, but not in such a way that it becomes a problem. We understand each other’s sense of timing at the keyboard, and that’s quite rare. We don’t have to discuss every detail.
LC: Did that sense of understanding come naturally from the beginning?
LOA: Yes. It felt as though we were breathing the phrases in the same way, and somehow our hands communicated with each other. Of course, we have different techniques, as everyone does, but they weren’t wildly different. We could understand each other’s timing at the keyboard, which is very important. Otherwise, you just become frustrated because you’re not really together and you don’t feel the music together. We could do it without talking a great deal about everything. It happened very naturally, and that was quite rare for me in four-hand music.
Schubert wrote wonderful music for four hands, especially in the last years of his life. All the works on the album come from 1828, the year he died. There’s the Fantasie in f minor, Lebensstürme, the Grand Rondeau in A major and so on. One of the challenges is that the middle register becomes much denser, and the sound is more orchestral than what we usually associate with Schubert’s piano music. We had to get used to that different idiom. We also included works by György Kurtág. He has written wonderful music for two pianists, and he worked with his wife for many years. It was lovely to bring that music into the project as well.
LC: I heard you perform together in Edinburgh in 2023. Was that before you recorded the album?
LOA: That was still quite early in the development of the programme. I think it may have been the first time we played all the works together. We were still discovering things, and the programme continued to develop after that. The album was released by Warner Classics and Erato, Bertrand’s labels. It was a very satisfying project, because we had spent so much time getting to know the music and learning how to play together.
LC: Do you plan to continue working together?
LOA: We’ve completed this Schubert project, but we may come back to Schubert in 2028, which is another anniversary year. We could play works that we haven’t done together, and perhaps record something as well. There’s still a lot of music to explore.
LC: As well as working with other pianists, you also perform with singers, including Lise Davidsen, Ian Bostridge and Matthias Goerne. How does working with a singer differ from working with another pianist? How do their personalities affect the collaboration?
LOA: Ian Bostridge was an earlier collaboration, but Matthias Goerne is the singer I’ve worked with most over the years. We’ve recorded Schumann songs together, although we’ve performed many Schubert cycles.
Working with singers teaches you a lot about breathing, about how a phrase sings and lives, and about the tension between intervals. As a pianist, you can sometimes become more mechanical, because you’re dealing with the keyboard and the physical movements. Singers remind you that the music has to breathe.
Schubert and Schumann songs are among my favourite repertoire. I remember the first time I played Dichterliebe with Matthias. I completely lost track of time. I was so immersed in the music, and I enjoyed it so much. It felt important to me, and I was completely sold on performing songs after that.
“It’s a wonderfully nerdish magazine. I hope it exists forever.”
LC: What does winning a Gramophone Classical Music Award mean to you?
LOA: It’s a great honour, of course. It’s a great honour. I’ve been reading the magazine since I was a teenager, and I’ve always had great respect for the writers and their knowledge.
I’m particularly curious about British composers I don’t know so well. You read a review, and the writer refers to five or six other works, and perhaps I haven’t heard half of them. It makes you curious. You want to go and listen to them.
It’s a wonderfully nerdish magazine, something that’s so rare these days. I hope it exists forever. It also sometimes makes me want to play new works. At the moment, I’m studying Britten’s Piano Concerto again. I played it quite a lot when I was young, and I love that piece. So the magazine can lead you back to music, or make you discover something new.
LC: You’ve also worked with the Norwegian jazz saxophonist Marius Neset. Is that a project that takes you outside your comfort zone, or do you feel quite at ease with it?
LOA: A little bit outside my comfort zone, perhaps. I’m not an improviser, and I’m not a jazz pianist. Marius writes my part out, although I feel freer to change the textures and do things in my own way.
He works between classical music and jazz, and he has collaborated with the London Symphony Orchestra. He does it masterfully. I’m normally not such a great fan of crossover, because people often tend to do things they’re not so good at. But in his projects, I feel completely comfortable. I play as I would with any other music.
The music just comes so easily from him. He writes so much all the time. He’s such a source of inspiration. We did a small project together around 2018. Then, during the pandemic, he wrote a quartet for my festival, which I loved. That made our collaboration grow, and we started to work together more closely. His music occupies a space that hasn’t really been defined yet, somewhere between classical composition and jazz. I find that very interesting. We’re planning a Nordic tour in 2028, and perhaps there will be more projects after that.
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