She was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at just 13 and won first prize in piano performance a mere three years later. That same year, renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim invited her to perform with the Orchestre de Paris. Between her debut in with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Claudio Abbado and her first performance with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur in — just two of many notable musical milestones — Grimaud made a wholly different kind of debut: in upper New York State she established the Wolf Conservation Center.
Her love for the endangered species was sparked by a chance encounter with a wolf in northern Florida; this led to her determination to open an environmental education center.
Her love for the endangered species was sparked by a chance encounter with a wolf in northern Florida; this led to her determination to open an environmental education centre. For a number of years she also found time to pursue a writing career, publishing three books that have appeared in various languages.
Her first, Variations Sauvages , appeared in In Florida, she could slow down and take on challenges. Keesecker remembers her learning the Burleske of Richard Strauss. In New York, Grimaud led a picaresque life. In three years, she changed apartments roughly every three months. She says that, other than her concert clothes, she had only one outfit.
When she wanted to practice, she sometimes borrowed the pianos in the basement of the Steinway facility, on West Fifty-seventh Street. She did this, in part, to prevent herself from becoming dependent on a particular instrument. She also exercised her remarkable ability to prepare without actually playing. Mat Hennek, her current partner, remembers that one day, when he and Grimaud were first dating, they went shopping in Philadelphia and then to a Starbucks.
Did you practice? In late , she played a sold-out solo recital of Bach, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff there. By then, the critical divide over her style was well established. She misses notes and she does all these things that make some people think, Oh, God. In the early nineties, Grimaud, then living in Tallahassee, met and grew friendly with a loner who lived on the outskirts of the city. He had a collection of automatic weapons that he let her shoot, and he kept a wolf as a pet.
Its name was Alawa. The first time Grimaud met Alawa, she recalls, it lay down on its side and allowed her to caress the length of its body. Grimaud now thinks that Alawa may have been a wolf-dog hybrid. Grimaud read about the plight of wolves, many species of which had been hunted nearly to extinction, and formed plans to open a center to protect them.
She took a class on ethology and started saving her concert earnings, with an eye toward funding the project. She and Keesecker adopted a pair of wolves.
A third animal, a wolf pup, wound up in the Alphabet City apartment she shared with her next boyfriend, a photographer named Henry Fair. She hired workers, and helped them install fences and landscape hollows, so that they could be used as dens. In , she opened a conservation and education center. In the past decade, the facility has become a considerable success and a respected part of the movement to protect wolves. It has sixteen Mexican wolves—only some fifty of the animals exist in the wild in the U.
Grimaud remains both active on its board and involved in its daily work. Her taste for liverwurst, she says, came from mixing it with pills for the animals. The relationship with Fair lasted until After their breakup, he refused to leave their house, which was on the grounds of the center. In , Grimaud met Hennek—as with Fair, on a photo shoot. Hennek accompanies her on some of her tours, managing his own career while helping her manage hers.
They seem a happy couple, affectionate and able to avoid the trap of her fame. They are currently renting a condominium in Weggis, a mountainside town on Lake Lucerne, near where Rachmaninoff had his summer retreat. Weggis is near the airport in Zurich, and Switzerland taxes foreign residents only lightly, which is useful for touring musicians.
Nearby Lucerne has good hospitals. In the spring of , Grimaud had a tumor removed from her abdomen. She finished treatment and that summer returned to playing with renewed zeal. She took only five days off from August until the end of that year. She is confident that she has been restored fully to health, and does not like to dwell on the drama of being sick. It was the day before the opening of the summer Wagner festival.
The theatre was full, with a lively crowd. Grimaud explains her approach to playing with a metaphor borrowed from veterinary medicine. During the opening bars, when many pianists tee up a coming explosion of sound with pairs of staccato taps on the piano, Grimaud held the keys for a muted tenuto. Liszt, Mozart, and Berg seemed to be passing phrasings and cadences back and forth. The French artist has established herself as a committed wildlife conservationist, a compassionate human rights activist and as a writer.
Grimaud was born in in Aix-en-Provence and began her piano studies at the local conservatory with Jacqueline Courtin before going on to work with Pierre Barbizet in Marseille. She was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at just 13 and won first prize in piano performance a mere three years later.
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