Often when I’ve interviewed French pianists the subject has been their native music, and, invariably, after enthusing about their extraordinary rich musical heritage – Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Satie, Fauré, Messiaen and many others – they’d pause and say something along the lines of: ‘But I wish concert promoters/A&R executives would ask me to play some Brahms or Beethoven’. It’s not something an Italian, British or American pianist would ever have to worry about, but for some reason French players have invariably been constrained – hardly le mot juste – to play their own music. It’s no hardship, of course, and it has given us some staggering performances and recordings. (Nowadays things have relaxed a bit – Alexandre Kantorow, for example, is one of the finest Brahms players of his generation and he sailed through the three rounds of the 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition offering just a single Fauré nocturne to fly the Tricolour.) One pianist, though, who side-stepped this pigeon-holing very early on – though he certainly hasn’t avoided French music – is Michel Béroff, who celebrates his 75th birthday on May 9. To mark the occasion Erato has gathered together all his recordings made for the label and the various branches of EMI and issued them in a 42-CD set. And nestling among them is his set of the five Prokofiev piano concertos that put him on the international music map (not to mention his cherishable Debussy recordings including Pour le piano, Estampes, Images, Préludes and much else.)

I took the train to Paris to talk to Béroff, a musician who introduced me to a large swathe of the piano repertoire in my teens, to look back over a distinguished career. We met up on a beautiful spring day and reminisced over a cup of coffee.

There are a number of his recordings I’ve owned for years that I wanted to ask him about, and the first was – yes, French music! – Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, a work he recorded at the Abbey Road studios in 1968 while still a teenager. ‘I first met Messiaen when I was 11 years old, so it would have been in 1961. It came about because my father took a few lessons with Messiaen during the war and we also had a friend who was one of his harmony students. So I started playing his music because my father loved it very much – my mother had bought him the score of Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus. Since I was learning the piano he gave me the music and I began to play some of the pieces – I was maybe nine years old. Then, at 11, I went to a meeting with Messiaen, and I played for him and [his wife, the pianist] Yvonne Loriod.’ I suggest that they must have pretty amazed at this little boy playing such music. Béroff laughs. ‘Of course! They’d never seen anyone so young playing these pieces. So that was how I began with his music. And then I won First Prize in the Messiaen Competition in 1967. I was only the second person after Loriod to play the complete Vingt regards. Of course being young there were so many things I should have asked Messiaen but at that age you don’t think like that. I used to see him a lot and knowing a composer is fantastic, and I should have been more curious. But Messiaen’s music has been like baby milk to me – I heard it even before I started playing. And for me it was always very natural. It’s been with me throughout my life.’

Michel Béroff recording in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Kurt Masur

The HMV recording of the Quartet, the work that Messiaen wrote for clarinet, violin, cello and piano in 1940 while a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A, followed Béroff’s win in the Messiaen prize. For it the 18-year-old Béroff was partnered by some pretty illustrious UK-based players, all of whom were at least 25 years older than him: Gervase de Peyer (clarinet), Erich Gruenberg (violin) and William Pleeth (cello). ‘They were really wonderful musicians,’ Béroff recalls. ‘Before the sessions I went to see Messiaen for advice. He didn’t actually have much to say: it was just a question of adjusting some dynamics, and where the music was so slow that even a string or woodwind player could not do it without too much phrasing, he agreed that it should be a little bit faster than what he wrote. So it was just a few small things which I still have in my score. I was really very happy to do this because it was a great introduction to making recordings. The sleeve design was done by a woman called Arlette de Grouchy – she was in charge of the recording covers – and she had found this image which I found very flashy. But Messiaen, who experienced synaesthesia, approved because he couldn’t see any colours that he didn’t like!’

Béroff enlarged on his approach to the repertoire. ‘This 20th-century music was something natural to me, because when you are young, you are free, your mind is open. You have lots of places inside you – your hard drive is really empty. So it could be Webern or Boulez or Schoenberg – everything is simple to learn. There is no contradiction. You can learn sometime Bach or Mozart or Schoenberg. If you do this later, intellectually it’s much more difficult. So for me it was natural, but it was also out of the question not to play Mozart, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Beethoven – all the things which you learn and just couldn’t live without. Someone told me about some kind of biography of me they’d read – it was so ridiculous – it said I was playing only 20th-century music, except the Mozart sonatas! This was stupid because I played some Mozart but never made Mozart a big part of my repertoire. But of course Russian repertoire has been very important – I’ve played a lot of Stravinsky, Mussorgsky and, of course, Prokofiev. Maybe it was my background – my father was born in Bulgaria which is very close to Russia. But Bartók I love even more than Prokofiev, I must say. For me he is the greatest of the composers of the first part of the 20th century.’

Two other recordings I wanted to talk to Michel Béroff about were ones he made in 1974 in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Kurt Masur – that career-changing set of the complete Prokofiev piano concertos and all of Liszt’s concertante works for piano. ‘I’m not sure why they were made in Leipzig,’ Béroff muses. ‘Probably it had to do with being cheaper. If they didn’t sell well it wouldn’t be too bad! It was always very strange having to go to Berlin and pass through Checkpoint Charlie. But the orchestra was very fine – the only thing that sometimes was a weakness with those East German ensembles were the woodwinds because they didn’t have access to good instruments. Kurt Masur in Leipzig was very strict, and worked everyone very hard. Interestingly, when he later came to the West – I worked with him in London, in New York and on tour – he became much more free, much nicer and much more generous. He was a different person, a very nice man.’ (Béroff also played with the Staatskapelle Dresden and Eugen Jochum. He recalls that it was his first Brahms Second Concerto and it was broadcast. He was asked for his permission, more as a courtesy, and was then rather surprised when in Japan some time later he saw that the performance had been issued on LP.)

The Prokofiev set was only the second of the five concertos to be made in the West (preceded by John Browning’s RCA survey with the Boston Symphony and Erich Leinsdorf, and subsequently reissued by Testament). To return to my opening comments about French repertoire and French pianists, Béroff attributes his atypical repertoire to his teacher, one of the major musical figures in France at the time, to Pierre Sancan, who also taught, inter alia, Jean-Philippe Collard, Emile Naoumoff, Jacques Rouvier, Jean-Bernard Pommier and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (who credited Sancan as being ‘the Master who gave me all the means I needed … to truly become a pianist’).

Sancan’s method, and he is known for tailoring his approach to his individual students, drew on the Russian school of pianism. As Béroff explains it, it was not only focused on the fingers and sometimes the wrists à la française, but also involved the arms and shoulders – the resultant, and more muscular, approach clearly set Béroff up to tackle the Prokofiev concertos (something that Bavouzet would later also do, with comparable success). The Prokofiev set was a commercial hit, and Béroff would later often play all the concertos, Nos 3 and 5 the most, and when he had to take a break from performance with two hands due to focal dystonia, he would play No 4 (for the left hand) quite often. But when pressed he revealed a particular fondness for No 2 – ‘You know, like with Bartók, No 2 is my favourite. And this number is magic for composers … just think of Brahms No 2!’

The Prokofiev set led to the Liszt collection. ‘Obviously there were quite a few pieces which I’d never played – and never have since! – and I suspect there have been a few other things that have been found since then. But at the time it was the first complete recording of all the music for piano and orchestra. And there are some wonderful things there, like that early piece for strings, Malédiction, with some very avant-garde writing. It was very interesting for me to do this and I enjoyed it very much and obviously I got along very well with Masur.’

Mention of Kurt Masur led us on to some of Béroff’s other conductor collaborators: ‘I was really fascinated by Seiji Ozawa [with whom he recorded the Stravinsky concertante works]. Pierre Boulez – there’s was really nothing to say because he was so helpful. We started with Bartók’s Second with the New York Philharmonic in 1972. We often worked together and he was so nice. He had quite a reputation but it couldn’t have been more wrong. Of course, if someone was trying to trap him with questions, he could kill them in just one sentence. An Englishman I liked very much was Colin Davis. He was a very good musician, so humble and such a nice person to work with, really fantastic. I also enjoyed working with Andrew Davis, a very warm person. Bernstein, of course, because he was such an amazing man! And Michael Tilson Thomas was also great to work with, probably because he was also a really good pianist. And André Previn [with whom Béroff made one of the finest recordings ever of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie] was such a gifted musician. And Claudio Abbado [with whom he recorded, for DG, the Ravel Left-hand Concerto] was such a wonderful conductor.’

These days Béroff conducts, teaches – Seong-Jin Cho was one of his students – and sits on numerous competition juries. The Chopin Competition beckons later this year, but meanwhile he’s still surprised, and flattered, to be the focus of this retrospective Erato set, quite a tribute to a musician who has contributed so much to the recorded catalogue.