Helene Grimaud - Living with Wolves. 2002

The 34-year-old French pianist Hélène Grimaud lives in a comfortable two-storey wooden house in South Salem, New York, at the end of a steep track that climbs through magnificent woodland. Her estate on the hillside includes a scientific zoo for wolves and the educational Wolf Conservation Centre, which has been visited by many thousands of children since it opened in 1997. Grimaud, a slim but robust woman with delicate features and large lively eyes that look you straight in the face, said: “We’re in the middle of vaccinating the wolves, so my day is all topsy-turvy. We had to isolate the animals. They know what’s going to happen to them, and it’s a day they hate. Every year they get jumpy before the fateful day.“ Grimaud has a low, slightly husky voice. Like many French who have lived for some time in the United States, she often speaks “Frenglish“ and sometimes even slips into English without realising it. “I speak English the whole day, and I live with an American. Some people think I do it on purpose, just to be hip, but I assure you it’s something I can’t control. When I travel to Europe for concerts, which is about twice a month on average, it quickly stops.“ Grimaud does not abide by the rules and conventions of her profession. Almost 15 years ago, she cut off all connections with the Parisian milieu and moved abroad. In her book, Variations Sauvages (Wild Variations, just published by Robert Laffont), she writes: “In 1989, during the Roque-d’Anthéron [piano] Festival . . . I got extremely depressed . . . I suddenly got this wild and irrepressible urge, for the first and last time in my life, to disappear.“ Shortly afterwards, Grimaud went on a concert tour of the US. Feeling she needed a change of air, and having met her present partner, she decided to stay on. “In the US I no longer felt out on a limb. Nobody thought I was peculiar any more. The question was simply: did I play well or not? Was I any good and was I musically appealing? Nobody cared about the rest. Because they have no traditions - even though they have a particular way of life - Americans don’t know what snobbishness is. And, paradoxically, while they’re capable of marvelling at anything, nothing ever surprises them,“ she writes in her book. Grimaud has left her recording company, Warner, for Deutsche Gram mophon, which offers a more secure environment at a time when the recording industry is in deep turmoil. She insists that the marketing people should fit in with what she wants to play, and not the reverse - as can be seen from the just-released Credo, her first record with DG, which offers a very audacious choice of works. “My contract with Warner was about to run out,“ she says, “and DG seemed prepared to let me record what I wanted to.“ There were rumours that the flamboyant Jean-Marie Messier had intervened to try to keep Grimaud with Warner when he was still boss of Vivendi Universal. He had apparently become fascinated by the pianist and given her a Steinway concert grand, which went with her everywhere in the world. “At the time when I first was in contact with DG, I didn’t know Messier,“ Grimaud explains. “It was only after I’d signed up with them that I dined with him. The rest is fantasy and speculation. I’m used to that sort of thing.“ Her fascination with wolves has set a lot of tongues wagging. “Men - and so few men are really men - look at me in a funny way,“ she writes in her book. “I seem to be endowed with an incompatible combination of qualities: looks that I could exploit . . . and a demanding and elitist profession. If I have been successful it has nothing to do with my looks, and everything to do with very hard work . . . “But when you throw together the ’living with wolves’ factor (which bristles with fantasies about sexual potency) and my looks, then you get some really wild imaginings.“ Grimaud’s book broadcasts her affection for wolves and the emotional intertwining of music and Canis lupus in her life. She has studied wolves closely, but constantly needs to update her knowledge of them to meet the stringent requirements of the federal authorities as regards her centre. When she stands near the enclosure, she imitates their howl, which starts low in the throat and rises high in the mouth. She talks to them, and looks at them with the strong stare that made Alawa, the first she-wolf she met by chance in Florida, roll over in a position of submission. “I realise people accuse me of using wolves to draw attention to myself. All I can say is that I’m happy that by being in the public eye I’ve helped people to become more familiar with an animal whose worst enemy is man, but which is not an enemy of man.“ Have wolves encouraged Grimaud to keep her distance from the piano, as some feared? “I decided not to become a slave of the instrument,“ she writes. “I went wild.“ For years she did not own a piano. “I worked by using my mind, associations of images, mental projections, and visions of architect