Imogen Cooper on a lifetime in music

English pianist Imogen Cooper, set to play her final public concert at Wigmore Hall in February 2027, was recently  announced as the recipient of the 2026 Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award, celebrating the career of a commanding, deeply communicative and dignified artist. It was a privilege to talk with her about some of the highlights of her career, and the composers and fellow performers who have been so important to her.

Congratulations on receiving the Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award; how do you feel about that?

I was so surprised when I was initially approached and it's a colossal honour, it really is. I thought it was a wonderful evening, and it was so fantastic to see so many people, and dear friends being lauded and praised as they absolutely deserve.

Has it been a long-term vision to make the last three Beethoven sonatas your final recording? 

I'd only played one of the last three sonatas consistently throughout my life; Op. 109 I didn't like very much and Op. 111 I liked only too much and was hugely daunted by it. Somehow, I felt some affinity with Op. 110 from a very early age and it has been with me throughout my life.

I've learned quite late in life that if you have a problem with a work which is agreed by everybody to be great, the only way to get around that is to jump in and start swimming, so that’s what I did. I fell in love with both Op. 109 and Op. 111 immediately, and worked on them incredibly hard, and it seemed so completely natural that my final recording should be those last three sonatas. 

Considering my advanced age it’s extraordinary that I'd never played these works before, but I'm glad, because my relationship had to evolve very intensely and very fast; everything was so alive, light and hot, and it was all there in my mind, and soul. All I had to do was find how best to project what it is that I hear inside myself. The recording part was a very happy experience. It was in Snape Maltings, which I adore, on the wonderful piano which I helped them choose some years ago.

Your repertoire seems to have been very carefully selected throughout your career; how have you approached this?

When you're young and starting to play, your instinct is to go for that which you know you have something to say about and can play well because you need to get concerts, and you need to be playing your absolute best up there. Once that has happened, you then get labelled, and I certainly got a bit of a label for Mozart and Schubert at a very early age. There are worse labels to have so I wasn’t unhappy and the body of work with both composers is huge, so I concentrated a great deal on that.

I added other composers in my thirties because you can't make a career out of just two composers, but I didn't really start branching out until about my forties, and I only came to contemporary music in my fifties.

What prompted that?

My first major contemporary adventure was Thomas Ades’s Traced Overhead. Michael Berkeley rang me up and suggested it was about time I played some contemporary music, and asked who I would like to play. I said Thomas Adès, and he said, ‘well, there's nothing like jumping in at the deep end!’.

When I first saw the score, it was daunting. I loved doing it, and it became so familiar to me, but I had to work on it hard. I just didn't have the specific talents that so many of my colleagues possess to make a contemporary piece sound really good, but I loved the process and came back to it time and time again.

There was then a whole period when I tried every year to take up one new contemporary piece by composers including Brett Dean, Deirdre Gribbin, and Alissa Firsova, but it does take time, and the concerts were getting increasingly pressing. So, I haven't been the greatest advocate of contemporary music, but I've done more than some. 

Have you found that exploring contemporary music has given you a fresh view of some of the established repertoire? 

Perhaps it did, but it's one of those things that happens subconsciously. I became fascinated by Tom's and Brett's sound worlds, for instance, and sound matters more than anything to me.

I learned more about piano playing to be honest. It did bring me something there because I had to do such extendedly difficult things that it taught me how to search in that direction when I was doing more classical repertoire. So, yes, it probably made me a better pianist, and of course, one of the things about those late Beethoven sonatas is Beethoven really does explore the possibilities. 

You famously played to Clifford Curzon and studied with Alfred Brendel. How formative were those experiences?

Curzon was a wonderful artist and certainly opened my mind up about what I could do and what was in the music. It was rather a brief episode, and I went to his house maybe half a dozen times. He played a certain amount himself during the lessons, which was ideal, because that is a way to learn; not that you should feel yourself obliged to copy what you've just heard, but it is extraordinary when you can sit down and immediately reproduce almost exactly the same thing. Whether I wanted to retain a particular phrase in exactly that way I'm not so sure, but it made me think I had to be much more demanding on myself.

Then I went to Vienna to work with Brendel, and boy, was he super demanding. Although I must have been only 19 or 20 when I went to Vienna, Brendel treated me like an equal, and there too the experience made me realise what I could do, particularly in his presence, which was enormously inspiring. He was very eloquent in the way he talked; very articulate. You had to be completely signed up to what he did, which is fine.

A great teacher and a great artist for a short period of time is just ideal. You identify with them one thousand percent, and you've then got to go away and work yourself out, to realise what is yours and what is theirs. That takes a little while, but it's a much better path than staying with somebody too long because you then become a sort of bad copy and that doesn't work. 

Your exploration of Schubert has gone beyond the solo works, to Lieder, where the piano is so integral to the storytelling and the colouring of the music. How would you describe your partnership with Wolfgang Holzmair?

There are many wonderful things about Holzmair, and one was that he absolutely didn't want an accompanist, and he didn't want anybody who particularly knew about the voice. It was all about the music and the poetry; in fact, it was about the poetry ahead of the music, and that was wonderful. 

He would encourage me, particularly in the early days, to play up more. He said, ‘I need you there for me’, and that's when I started revolting against the word 'accompanist', because I think we are, without being arrogant, a sort of motor for the singer.

As somebody who's just done the Wolf Italienisches Liederbuch twice in three days, I can tell you there's no accompanying there at all; it’s unbelievably challenging music to play. I like doing Lieder with the tail of the piano pushed slightly towards the back of the stage, so that the singer can move into the curve, exactly in my line of vision, and I can see as well as sense their breathing. I can also hear exactly the sound they're making, which if they're four foot in front of me, I have to guess sometimes. 

You made a wonderful recording of Kreisleriana; do you find that playing Schumann’s Lieder helps in characterising the movements of that world? 

Yes, there’s no two ways about that, and I would say not just Kreisleriana, but also the Davidsbündlertänze and the Humoresque. I’d much rather be in the world of those pieces than Carnaval or the Abegg Variations which for me personally are a little bit more on the surface. The Fantasie lies somewhere in between the two, but it is extraordinary.

You established the Imogen Cooper Music Trust in 2015. How important has teaching been to you? 

Until late on, I had no interest in teaching at all because I felt I was spending so much time learning myself. There are some who would say you learn proportionally more if you're teaching somebody else too, but I didn't see it that way. I just haven't got the time and the headspace, or so it felt, and then two things happened at the same time.

I went to a concert given by the Belcea Charitable Trust, who had this idea of giving very specific time to young quartets. The young quartet played in the first half, and they were very good, then the Belcea Quartet played in the second half, and they were better. I realised there comes a time when we do have a huge amount to pass on, and at the same time I made some new friends who had a nineteenth-century farmhouse in southern France with a big old Steinway concert grand. I asked how they would feel if I scooped up a couple of pianists and visited every now and then, and that's what has happened for the last eleven years now.

I really do think the young ones who come benefit from the peace and the quiet, the beauty of everything around. I mean, it sounds a little bit rose petal, but it's not. We sometimes have to work and function in quite harsh environments, which is fine, but then when you get beauty and peace and quiet, you realise how precious your relationship with music is within silence. It goes through you much more quickly and clearly, and your ideas can form and be expressed much more easily. We look after them very well, and we don't talk about anything to do with the profession. This place is for music, because that is actually at the core of what they're doing.

It’s a very lonely time when they've left their institutions, and the moment they're out there, they're going to be judged and compared to whoever played last week or one month ago, and so they've got to be super solid and yet firing on all cylinders. I hope I can help with that. 

Is there one performance memory that really stands out for you?

If you'd interviewed me six months ago, I would have said that I have never forgotten my first experience of performing the last three Schubert sonatas together, which I did in Westminster School, where there was a wonderful series of concerts run by the indomitable Richard Stokes, who was teaching there. I remember that evening so well, and it opened up my world.

Now, I have to say there's a memory from July which is absolutely burnt into me. I played the last Mozart Piano Concerto with Simon Rattle and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerische Rundfunks in Munich, and we had four generous days’ work on it because there was a public rehearsal, which was a pretty well full hall, and the concert the next night.

I've heard a few good orchestral sounds, believe you me, but the sound that orchestra made and their collective listening; you felt that you only had to move slightly in one direction, and they were with you. They listened so intently, and I guess Simon had a lot to do with that too; he was wonderful and he gave the rehearsal so much time. You know, they've played it a few times before, he's conducted it a few times before, I've played it a few times before, but somehow something new was going on, and something really magical happened in the concert. Modesty forbids that I pass on all the things that were said after to all of us, but it was a sort of blessing over us that evening and I don't think I shall ever forget it. I don't think any of us will.

Besides the Beethoven, what are some of your favourite recordings from your career?

The Liszt & Wagner disc on Chandos, because this was certainly not expected of me and I'm not sure I expected it of myself, and it had some really quirky, wonderful happenings. I realised about ten days before the recording that I was about twelve minutes short of music, so I got out the first waltz, which is not the easiest piece of music. I'd been listening to Richter playing it and it was so wonderful that I thought I've got to do it, and it turned out extremely well.

There's a disc called Iberia y Francia, which is French and Spanish music, and a lot of the recordings with Holzmair. The recording of the Schumann Kerner Lieder matters to me more than I can say.