MUSIC / A test of nerve: Stephen Kovacevich thinks performance is 'torture' but he still wins awards for it. Mark Pappenheim reports

IT'S been a good week for Stephen Kovacevich. On Sunday morning he could be heard conducting Sibelius's Fourth Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic on Radio 3; that same afternoon he launched a three-concert piano series of Schubert and Beethoven at the Barbican - the first artist ever to be offered more than a single date in the Centre's regular 'Celebrity Recital' programme; and yesterday he went for lunch at the Dorchester and picked up a Gramophone Award for his new EMI concerto recording of the Brahms D minor with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the London Philharmonic.

At risk of biting the hand that fed him, Kovacevich admitted beforehand that winning the award would lend a certain added savour to the lunchtime jamboree. For not every critic had echoed the Gramophone magazine's own warm response to his new disc. 'Radio 3 actually said it wasn't even worth reviewing. And, like it or not, I know that that's garbage] Because I know it's good: I have some slight reservations about it, but I am also very proud of certain things in it. So there was a certain piquancy about getting the award.'

But then, like most performers, he's used to the vagaries of critical opinion: 'Let's put it this way: I've had good reviews for bad concerts, bad reviews for good concerts, and every permutation possible, I've had - we've all had. But what happens most,' and his voice cushions the coming obscenity with quiet deliberation, 'is to be shat on for the best things. And if you've done something that you know in your heart of hearts really is remarkable and someone just does what they do . . . Well, no one gets used to that. So my first reaction to the Gramophone review was simply, Thank God they noticed]'

But then, as he also says, 'You can't take anything for granted.' The very same issue of the Gramophone that boasted the rave review of the Brahms also carried another review dismissing his first offering in a projected complete set of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas as 'frankly unsuccessful'. Yet Vladimir Ashkenazy, reviewing the same disc in the European, described Kovacevich's Op 111 as the kind of performance Beethoven himself might have given - 'which, coming from such a great colleague, is praise indeed'.

What pleases Kovacevich particularly is that both this month's Barbican concerts and his new EMI contract came about not because of the usual power lunches, management deals and marketing packages, but directly as a result of his playing - simply because, in each case, somebody went to one of his concerts and liked what they heard. 'The way it's supposed to happen,' he says, 'like in the films. And if you think I'm not proud of that . . .'

He's all the prouder because, as he admits, his playing has long been dogged by nerves and the futile struggle against stage fright. It's a surprising revelation from a player who gave his first public recital, in his native California, at the age of 11, made his Wigmore Hall debut 10 years later, in 1961, and has never really been out of the public eye or off the concert platform since. Yet nerves have been his problem from an early age, and his move to Britain, at the age of 18, was as much due to his reluctance to brave the hothouse atmosphere of New York's Juilliard School as to any desire to study here with the 68-year-old Dame Myra Hess.

'Playing concerts has always,' he says, 'had, for me, an element of torture. It's heart-breaking to arrive at a concert extremely well-prepared, to know that you're gifted and to have the event just disappear. But why someone is not their own best friend on certain occasions is a complicated issue.'

He himself identifies the extra anxieties introduced by the pursuit of technical perfection in this CD-dominated age as one key factor. But he also has a certain sympathy with Glenn Gould, who abandoned public appearances because he believed that concert-going was in itself an immoral activity - a sort of musical circus, in which the audience comes to see the performer fail. 'And that's partly true. Why are people thrilled by great virtuosity? Because inherent in it are great risks. And, you know, what's wonderful is to play without a net.'

Given his own history, it might therefore have seemed like courting disaster for him to end his first Barbican recital last Sunday with Schubert's A major - a late work which he relishes for one particular passage in the slow movement that he compares to 'a person coming apart, a kind of nervous breakdown written down. I know of no other passage in music that even approaches this idea of someone unravelling before your ears.'

As it happens, disaster nearly did strike in the first half, when part of the pedal support suddenly fell to the floor during the last movement of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata. 'It was like a shot,' he recalls, 'amazingly loud. I didn't know what it was and stopped playing. The funny thing was that, from where I was sitting, I couldn't see what had happened, whereas the audience could. So after peering blankly under the keyboard, I just said, 'Steinway owes me a drink' and went back to the start of the movement. I would say that I played notes only for about three or four minutes afterwards, and then I went back to making music. But my nerves held.'

He puts this down to a recent course of successful counselling, though it's clearly still not easy to talk about. 'I feel, at the moment, I . . . am optimistic that I . . . have an extremely good chance of playing well when I'm playing, let's put it that way.'

The other key factor in easing his 'comeback' has been his growing interest in conducting. He first swapped the piano stool for the podium, about nine years ago and it came as a revelation: 'It was the first time I realised that you could actually look forward to a concert. I mean, when I did my first performance of Beethoven's Ninth, you would expect me to have been absolutely paralysed with fear. But no - I just couldn't wait for the evening to arrive and some of that spilled over into the piano.'

His rediscovery of the joys of piano-playing has coincided with a rediscovery of his Slavic roots. His pride in his origins has survived the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and he's now been appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic. Last month he opened the Orchestra's season with Beethoven's Seventh. He insists he is there strictly to make music, not take sides. 'The musicians are working for the equivalent of pounds 150 a month, and Yugoslavia's not cheap, you know. They've all lost somebody. And they all feel sold out. Here in Hampstead, I have whatever opinions I can possibly have from reading the newspapers and when I'm there they all seem terribly glib . . . But I will say this, I do believe that if there were bloody oil there, there would be a solution to this problem. That you can quote me on - in fact I wish you would.'

Schubert / Beethoven series: Sun 10 Oct 4pm, Wed 20 Oct 7.30, Barbican Centre, London EC2 (071-638 8891).

(Photograph omitted)