In the company of wolves: How pianist Hélène Grimaud has learnt to deal with her dark side

You don't get to play the Last Night of the Proms on the basis of musicianship alone. You must either be a superstar, or a provocateur, or otherwise distinguished by some kind of freakishness. And though "freaky" is not an adjective that sits comfortably on the pianist Hélène Grimaud, she could be argued to tick all these boxes. She plays Beethoven, Brahms, and Rachmaninov with unique authority, and her lunar beauty has cast her as classical music's ultimate pin-up. But the extraordinary thing is her extracurricular path, which reflects the triumph of something approaching genius over what might, in a lesser being, have tipped over into madness.

Most people's lives follow a messy zig-zag: Grimaud is a congenital misfit with profoundly eccentric impulses, yet her life has been immaculately all of a piece. Born 38 years ago in Aix, France, of an apparently combustible combination of Berber-Jewish and Corsican-Jewish extraction which has prevented her from feeling French, she was an untameable child. "My parents thought it was just physical energy," she says, "but it was actually emotional and psychological. These days people talk about children having an attention disorder – well, I was the opposite of that, I was way too focused. My parents tried to channel this in many directions, but music was the one that grabbed me. It appeared to me as a bottomless void, which I could never completely explore."

Is that not an odd metaphor? In reply, she tells a story: "When I was very young, I used to put myself to sleep by squeezing my eyelids so tight that I'd get a seam of strange colours, and a strong sense of vastness. And when I started playing music, I had the same sensation." Very directly so: Grimaud shares with other select souls – Scriabine was one – that rare merging of the senses known as synaesthesia, which for her means hearing in colour. How did she first become aware of it? "It was when I was 11, and working on a Bach prelude. And I perceived something that was very bright, between red and orange, very warm and vivid: an almost shapeless stain, rather like what you see in the recording control-room, when the image of sound is projected on a screen. But as numbers had always had colours for me – two was yellow, four was red, five was green – I didn't regard this as unusual."

A rebel at school, she graduated with phenomenal speed to the Conservatoire de Paris, where, flamboyantly refusing to follow the syllabus, she found herself once more a rebel, when a visiting record producer chanced to hear her, and insisted on making a disc, for which she chose to play Rachmaninov. Drawn to things Russian, she played at the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition – pianism's triennial answer to the Olympics – where she surged through an impressive field to make the final dozen. Her tiny hands became famed for their big sound, and a string of conductors led by Daniel Barenboim started queuing to work with her.

In a sense, she had now sorted herself out. As she explains in her exquisitely written memoir Variations Sauvages – "not an autobiography, more an exploration of how you turn your demons into strengths"– music also freed her from her youthful obsession with inflicting cuts on herself, and dressing the wounds. But her self-administered therapy took a dramatic turn while she was walking a friend's dog in Florida one night and came across a man out walking his wolf: "I saw the silhouettes of a man and an animal that was seemingly canine, but was a female wolf. We talked, and the animal was obviously interested in me. We met again by chance a month later, and then again, by which time she'd rolled over for me. It was what she exuded that fascinated me: I wasn't afraid – my head wasn't full of Little Red Riding Hood images. It was this sense of mystery, of a free spirit trapped in the net of human dominion."

So she identified? She laughs: "Not consciously. But there was a kind of sympathy." Since the wolf's owner wasn't getting on with his charge, Grimaud agreed to visit her regularly, and started to read up on the subject. "And, as with my approach to music, what started as a passion developed into a mission." She rejected as sentimental the idea of setting up a wolf sanctuary, then conceived a project which she set up and ran on a 16-acre estate near her home in New York: an education centre where wolves lived, and where groups of children came to study them.

"People are afraid of what they don't understand, and what they fear they want to destroy. And as with classical music, the best way to induce conservation is to get to kids." She spent her mornings and evenings at the piano, but her afternoons were devoted to the wolves. "I wanted to create something that would survive me if I got hit by a bus, and I think I have," she comments, and indeed she has: since she left it to come back to Europe three years ago, the Wolf Conservation Center has been accorded official status as part of America's Species Survival Plan.

Wolves, she says, have become her extended family, "which for someone with misanthropic tendencies like me has been very helpful. But it's a privilege to relate to an animal like that, and there's something very musical in it – you need the same quality of concentration. In both cases you're trying to interact with a being which is completely other." Does she look into their eyes? "Not always – with a wolf that can be a serious faux pas – you must let them initiate contact. Every action has to denote respect, with nothing overly familiar, no breach of etiquette. And it's the same with a piece of music. You have to be 100 per cent into the exchange, somewhere between contemplation and meditation."

But there seems no end to the ways in which Grimaud was destined to be a loner. She was born a gauchère – a left-hander – and suffered the usual fate of such children in French schools. But Chopin, whose work literally emancipates the left hand, taught her to glory in this condition: "The right hand stands for normality and order, and the left for fantasy. I am very happy to be gauchère."

Pronouncements such as this suggest a healthy degree of self-love, which her publicity shots seem to corroborate. One wonders how significant it was that for several years her official photographer was also then her partner. Is she a narcissist? "Definitely not. I don't like to see my pictures, or hear my voice on radio. It was just useful that one could keep the business of photo-shoots within the family, as they can often go wrong." How can that be a problem, when she's so photogenic? "You think so? Look at the cover of the July issue of Gramophone – I'm not a control freak for these things, so I accepted their photographer and the

results were horrendous." And they have indeed turned her into a frump.

Liberation from wolf duties has allowed her to focus fully on her pianistic career. Her records tend to be "concept" albums rather than conventional agglomerations of works: the one Deutsche Grammophon is about to release combines pieces by Bach with piano arrangements of works he wrote for other instruments. "It sprang out of my wondering why it is that Bach's music touches and speaks to everyone," she says. "For me he's the Bible, and has been ever since I began playing him daily as a child. His music has been the foundation for everything else."

On Saturday evening she'll be tackling Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, not an obvious choice for the Last Night of the Proms. Yet, though she's now as much on an even keel as a concert pianist ever can be, she's not immune to accidents. Putting out a hand to save a neighbour's window from a flying basketball in June, she stopped it with the tip of her right-hand little finger: the damage to its middle joint forced her to cancel weeks of engagements, and she still has pain. "I shouldn't have cared, and kept my hands in my pockets," she says wryly. n

The Last Night of the Proms is on Saturday and will be broadcast live on BBC2 from 7.30pm. Go to www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2008 for details. 'Hélène Grimaud: Bach' is released by Deutsche Grammophon in October