HÉLÈNE GRIMAUD
Piano, born in 1969 in Aix-en-Provence, France
Though born in France, Hélène Grimaud’s ancestry is North African, Corsican, and Italian Jewish. “As a child I had a huge surplus of energy...My parents tried to channel this in many directions, but music was the one that grabbed me.” So at age nine, she started playing piano, and by a year later had mastered some impressive works. At the Paris Conservatory, where at age 13 she was the youngest student at the time, she was not content to follow the prescribed pace of learning the repertoire. The evidence? Sixteen- year-old Hélène Grimaud’s recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2, which garnered a Grand Prix du Disque. Outside of music, Hélène Grimaud champions the cause of wolves, and divides her career between music and the Wolf Conservation Center in upstate New York, which she co-founded with photographer J. Henry Fair in 1999 (the same year she made her Philharmonic debut with Kurt Masur). At one point in her life she wanted to be a zoo veterinarian, and later a biologist, and even earned a degree in animal behavior (just in case her music career didn’t work out). The Center is a non-profit organization that promotes wolf conservation by teaching about wolves, their relationship to the environment, and the human role in protecting their future in their natural habitat. In her first encounter with a dog-wolf hybrid, she recounts in her 2003 memoir,
Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves, “I merely stretched out my fingers and, all by herself, she slid her head and then her shoulders under my palm. I felt a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body. The single point of contact radiated throughout my arm and chest, and filled me with gentleness ... a most compelling gentleness, which awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force…I had fallen in love with this she-wolf.” But her work with wolves also affected her life as an artist and how she plays. “In the end, being around my wolves is an extension of my artistic life. It’s an original enrichment that resounds, I’m sure, in the way I interpret the works I choose.” Hélène Grimaud is left-handed—something that was frowned upon in regimented French schools. But when she played Chopin, whose compositions freed the left hand, she learned that being left-handed was an asset to her as an artist: “The right hand stands for normality and order, and the left for fantasy. I am very happy to be
gauchère.” She has also written a second book,
Leçons particulières, which, along with her memoir, continue to be runaway successes on France’s best-seller lists. Her latest recording is
Reflection, the music of Brahms, and Robert and Clara Schumann. In 2007 she plans to record a Bach CD and release a DVD
A Letter from Clara [Schumann]. In January 2002 she was appointed an Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
“…an ebullient Hélène Grimaud (another familiar face in Lucerne) brought on storms of applause with a passionate performance of Ravel’s G Major Concerto.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Her Chopin and Rachmaninov are volcanic, a force of nature. The playing, like her eyes, is persuasive, insistent, mesmeric.”
Standard (London)
“Strength and style, artistry and technique, sensitivity and power…”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch