Ashkenazy - Still Russian to the core

Now a boyish septuagenarian, the pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy might be said to have led a charmed life. Two homes in Switzerland, two successful musician sons, an idyllic 47-year marriage: not bad. Add a career that has glittered ever since he won the Brussels piano competition at 19. Moreover, as is clear from Christopher Nupen's 1968 film Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices Are Russian (reissued this month as a DVD) this modest man has a rare ability as a communicator.

Yet, when he tells his story, you realise that nothing's come easy. His earliest memories go back to Tashkent and the railway truck he and his family lived in after evacuation to the Urals in 1941, when he was four. When they went back to Moscow, it was to a single room. Their old Bechstein occupied the only space not taken up by beds.

Here, Ashkenazy had a series of experiences that reflected the aridity of his initial musical soil. Strauss, regarded as a Nazi by the Soviets, was rarely played in Moscow, and one day a friend brought a rough recording he'd made of Don Juan. "I will never forget where I was sitting," says Ashkenazy. "What time it was, the window, the room, the huge tape recorder – I was absolutely floored by that music." Hearing Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet on the family's old radio had the same effect.

When he made it to the West, he filled his suitcase with LPs. "I just wanted music. I also bought scores – I became an object of envy for Soviet conductors, because orchestral scores were almost impossible to buy in Russia."

One of the surprises of Nupen's film comes when the pianist confesses that, when it came to playing Bach and Mozart, he and other Soviet musicians felt inferior – despite their fabled virtuosity – to their Western counterparts. "We felt that Russian culture was overwhelmingly strong," he says now. "It seemed to prevent our understanding of Western culture."

After winning Brussels, Ashkenazy was drafted into the official Soviet musical team, which brought unwelcome side-effects, including pressure to enter the Tchaikovsky competition: after Van Cliburn had won it "for America", the Soviets were desperate to win it back. Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, the required work, didn't suit his small hands, but he was told to get on with it. He won, tying with Britain's John Ogdon, "who played the Tchaikovsky fantastically well, whereas I only played it well". Soviet honour was satisfied.

More seriously, the Moscow conservatoire was riddled with informers, and Ashkenazy was enlisted. "One of the KGB men said they'd be grateful if I could let them know what people were saying and thinking. I was terrified, and agreed. If I'd said no, they'd have stopped my career. But I did my best not to inform on anybody, so they fired me. Then I married a foreigner, making me even more untrustworthy.'

Then he was denounced by a minder after his 1958 US tour and told he wouldn't be sent abroad again. His trips to the West, and his recordings, were cancelled. No wonder he emigrated. It speaks volumes for his nature that he tells the story without rancour.

Moscow's loss was London's gain. Teaming up with musicians like Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré, and Daniel Barenboim, Ashkenazy carved out his great career.

How Russian does he feel now? "I wasn't a typically Soviet person, and I never felt Jewish; my father was ethnic Jewish, but not at all religious. My mother, an actress, was very Russian. As my father was always away, it was my mother who brought me up, and instilled in me my attitude to life." But the magical sounds he extracts from the piano in Shostakovich and Chopin suggest an unequivocal answer: still Russian to the core.

'Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices Are Russian', on DVD from Naxos, is broadcast on 17 October on BBC4