Ivan Moravec will be playing the piano in concerts in Australia in 1998. Prosaic words, but in some circles they'll cause great excitement. Few pianists are more respected by their peers or more admired by connoisseurs of piano music.

Moravec is known above all for the sheer quality of his music-making, and he's happy for things to be that way. Gracious and thoughtful in conversation, he is as far as it is possible to be from trying to impose himself as a “personality” apart from music.

I'd always been curious about Moravec, ever since his first recordings became available in Australia, and their distributor, the late Peter Mann of Discurio, enthused to me and others about this great Czech pianist. It must have been a common experience, and Ivan Moravec says he is glad people got to know his playing this way.

“It was basically through music - not through agents - that my playing became more known through the world,” he explains. “I began to record in 1962 for an American company, and once the recordings were there, they slowly came to other parts of the world”. I suggest to Moravec that he expresses more gratitude for recordings than do some other performing artists.

“Yes, and first of all because of the quality of the public which listens to recordings. I would call it a better sort of public, because those people sit at home and compare. Mostly they are very knowledgeable - they know different versions of say - Beethoven sonatas, and it's almost a form of amusement for them to have an evening and play different versions of a work. I would say that these fans know much more about music, and are not so influenced by the physical appearance of an artist, they simply take the musical message from the recordings. I regard recordings as a very honest way to become known and to be compared with other artists.”

Recently Moravec's earlier recordings have been reissued on CD. His Chopin Nocturnes and Preludes, selected Beethoven sonatas, Debussy pieces and other discs have received superlatives from record reviewers. I wondered whether Ivan Moravec was one of those rare artists who actually prefers to play for the microphones?

“No, I don't!” he assures me. “But all concerts are recorded for broadcast, for example, when I come to Australia, and you cannot refuse that - in fact it's an opportunity to check your playing. I think the high level of quality of orchestral playing after the war, in the United States, for example, has been influenced by the mikes - they simply have to listen!”

Obviously Ivan Moravec is a perfectionist, which can probably be said of all artists at the top international level, only in Moravec's case, particularly among piano technicians, his perfectionism is legendary. Perceptive listeners to his playing will have sensed that his art subtly transcends the mechanically and technically perfect, without in any way drawing attention to the artist.

An interview is a chance to probe behind what can be heard in the concerts and the recordings.

When I spoke to Ivan Moravec by telephone at his home in Prague, I think he was surprised by my first question. I remembered from a post-concert conversation in Australia his enthusiasm for an Indian philosopher whose name I hadn't caught. I had tried to identify this thinker in preparation for the interview, but failed.

“It was very likely Aurobindo Ghose, ” says Moravec. “He had in India a city of people who were deeply interested in the Vedanta teachings. And his wife, he called her The spiritual Mother.”

Aurobindo had strongly influenced another Czech musician, Bohuslav Martinu. The composer had all Aurobindo's books at home, Moravec tells me, suggesting the philosopher's ideas were quite important to him. I ask Moravec how he himself had become interested in Aurobindo's thinking.

“Well, you know, all my life I have been interested - certainly in Indian philosophy - but in all philosophies which transcend our short life”.

The conversation turns to books and I make the observation that Moravec has obviously read a lot.

“My most beloved English author is Aldous Huxley,” he tells me. “He doesn't use too many words, but all sentences or words are of deep content, and of course he knows Aurobindo's books, this is obvious in Huxley's book The Perennial Philosophy - it is full of quotation of the spiritual thinkers like Aurobindo, and Meister Eckhardt the mediaeval mystic.”

Huxley's interest in music clearly appeals as well, and Moravec describes a “very beautiful chapter about silence in music”, in which Huxley compares Mozart with Wagner. I comment that there is not much silence in Wagner. This, Moravec explains, is Huxley's point: “He says Wagner is too talkative - unlike Mozart, he has no place for nice silence behind the tones. ”

“Huxley's book The Grey Eminence,” continues Moravec - referring to the story of Father Joseph, the 17th-century French priest who was spiritual and political adviser to Cardinal Richelieu - “is fascinating, because there is no doubt Father Joseph was a deeply thinking philosopher, but he made only one mistake: he thought that France had a fateful importance to the world, and he caused a war in fact. There you have the conflict between the quality of the man and the one fatal mistake in his thinking; and he caused a long war, the Thirty Years War.”

I remark that Moravec must feel particularly strongly about that war because of its devastating consequences for his native Bohemia. “Of course,” he says, “but for me the fascinating thing is that a man of high quality can have only one defect, and that can cause fatal consequences for him and for his surroundings.”

As he continues, a pattern, a theme, emerges from Ivan Moravec's answers: the individual transcending concrete historical and political situations by attempting to overcome the limitations of human being.

“That's the Hamlet story, you know - you remember the film by Laurence Olivier, who put in the preface, ‘this is the tragedy of a brilliant man who had only one defect: he couldn't make up his mind’ - that's what fascinates me!”

How does Moravec apply these reflections to himself?

“It is difficult to know honestly one's own defects. I am trying to avoid any harsh involvement or violent changing of my fate. I just try to accept what life brings to me as a part of logical outcome of character, and your character you can honestly try to improve. That's my idea for life.” I suggest he must have found it very difficult at times, not least because of communism. But, he tells me, “I tried, even with all the unpleasant events in our country, to overcome.”

Ivan Moravec began to be known outside his homeland in the mid 1960s, before the events of 1968, and the repression of the greater openness which those years had promised for Czechoslovakia. Had this bad timing made it more difficult for his career?

“It was very difficult, because it was not automatic that a citizen of the former Czechoslovakia had his passport, and not only musicians', but everybody's professional career has been damaged by the want of freedom, and also promotion. The work of a famous surgeon needs promotion, and travel, just as much as that of a musician... all my colleagues, myself, my students were damaged by the want of freedom of movement.”

Transcending limitations, political and spiritual - Ivan Moravec is an artist whose craft is deeply grounded in reflection. But he is famous in Australia already among a very specific group of craftsmen whose challenge lies in overcoming the physical limitations faced by pianists, limitations imposed by the vagaries of the instrument. All the concert managers and piano tuners with whom he has worked have stories to tell of his legendary perfectionism. But he is quick to point out that he is not alone in this.

Krystian Zimerman, an artist Moravec greatly admires, carries around with him a complete Steinway action to replace the mechanism of each piano he plays! Ivan Moravec does not go to such extremes: “I only try to meet with the technician, and I listen with him for any unevenness in sound. I do not find mechnical problems, because today the technicians in great cities are very knowledgeable, so mainly I listen to harsh notes, or to weak notes, and ask for these to be changed gently, and I try to put the local piano in the best condition.”

How technically knowledgeable and skilled was he, I wondered. If he had to do it himself, could he?

“Well once, in Puerto Rico before an important concert, at the Casals Festival, I hadn't been with the technician when he worked on the piano. I played the first part of Debussy's Estampes, then one note simply didn't produce any sound - it was dead.”

“So I finished that first piece. I stood up, went backstage, and called for the technician, but he was not there. I returned to the stage, and said ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Look!’ - and I played the bad note, and no sound came out - ‘This is our problem. There are only two possibilities. Either we go home, or I will try, with my partial knowledge of the mechanism, to correct it.’ Well! Big applause - even better than for the music!”

“An assistant from the backstage came with me, and we unscrewed the two famous screws under the piano and took the action out, and I was dying with fear that I didn't know the exact reason. My suspicion was the repetition spring, and when we took out the action, it was showing and I knew I was right. Fortunately I happened to have with me the very special tool that you need, and I put the repetition spring in the right place, we put the action back in the piano, I banged the note, and sound came out - so that was the biggest success of my concert!”

“That is a situation where I'm grateful to old friends I made when I was a student; both of them were piano technicians. They supported me, and part of that support was that they taught me basic things about the piano action. Technicians like to work with me because they know that I don't demand anything which is against the instrument, and everything is written in the old Steinway books.”

And it's not unusual, Moravec tells me, for pianists to be so interested in how the piano actually works. “Michelangeli knew much more about the piano than I do. Zimerman knows a lot. Brendel knows a lot, Pollini... I suspect that really excellent players have to know something about the action. Brendel has his own tools and voices his pianos himself, or he stays with the technician and uses his ears and expresses his demands. Very simple demands: you need to have 88 keys that are reasonably even - even in motion, and even in sound. That is what we need!”

“There are so many things that can disturb the player in a public concert. An oboe player is so much concerned with his reeds, a violinist is constantly checking the condition of his bow, of his instrument... You have your own weaknesses - why make your life even more difficult? I would say that a player who doesn't try to improve the voicing of the piano is a little bit guilty. Why should I leave the piano in a worse condition if, with the technician, we can make it better? I know that some of my colleagues like to play in a city where I have just played, because they know the piano will be in a better condition!”

Ivan Moravec's thoughts on pianos, not surprisingly, harmonize with everything else he says, with the same reflective, mature quality as his playing. Don't expect novelties, or sensationalism, from him. The growing band of his Australian devotees will be coming to hear him play a carefully selected repertoire, pieces he has not played in Australia before, but by the same composers we've heard him play in the past.

I observe that he's not one of those pianists who play all the works for piano of a single composer - does he play just the pieces which mean most to him?

“I am not a kind of Claudio Arrau, who when he was 15 played all the works of Beethoven, all the works of Chopin.. My repertoire is relatively smaller. I came to the USA in 1962, made my first recordings, of Mozart, Beethoven, Franck and Chopin. After that I was constantly asked to record more Mozart, more Beethoven, more Chopin, more Debussy.” Nor are there parts of his repertoire that he feels are neglected by concert promoters. “I'm constantly asked to play Mozart, Beethoven concerti,” he says. “I'm constantly asked to play Chopin... I'm very happy with this!”

In his 1998 Australian tour, Ivan Moravec will perform piano concertos by Mozart and Beethoven, and in recital the music of Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and Debussy.