By |

OK by me – A life in Encores

Steven Osborne, piano

Pianist Steven Osborne’s latest release, OK by me – A life in encores, is far more than a collection of attractive miniatures brought together by a distinguished pianist with a large catalogue of acclaimed recordings. Rather, it is a musical autobiography, a highly personal selection of pieces that have accompanied Osborne throughout his life as a pianist, student, colleague, husband, teacher and listener.

Osborne himself describes the album as creating “a line through my musical life”, and his unusually extensive and candid liner notes are integral to understanding the recording. The repertoire is delightfully eclectic: Bach and Grieg sit alongside Rachmaninov, Schumann, Prokofiev and Poulenc, while Keith Jarrett, Meredith Monk and Joni Mitchell rub shoulders with Peter Maxwell Davies and James Clapperton. There are also Osborne’s own arrangements and improvisations, and the album opens with his own OK by me, a simple melody that emerged, apparently fully formed, while improvising.

The real thread running through the album is not repertoire but memory. Liadov’s delicate A Musical Snuffbox recalls his mother’s musical jewellery box and its twirling ballerina; Bach’s Sheep may safely graze evokes childhood evenings spent listening to his parents play piano duets; Grieg’s Butterfly belongs to his earliest repertoire and to childhood performances. Later pieces carry other associations: Poulenc’s Novelettes are bound up with the chance encounter that led to Osborne’s long relationship with Wigmore Hall, while his arrangement of Schumann’s Widmung is associated with his wife, Jeannie, for whom he played it as an encore on their first wedding anniversary.

OK by me explores something more interesting than the conventional idea of the encore as a charming musical afterthought. These pieces become repositories of experience and memory. Hearing or playing them can collapse time, reconnecting the adult musician with the child reaching up to the family piano, the student discovering new repertoire and new ways of thinking about music, or the performer encountering colleagues and teachers whose ideas have subtly altered his own.

There is another, deeper narrative here too: the evolution of a musician. Osborne writes revealingly about moving away from a youthful concern with getting things “right” towards something freer and more instinctive – what he describes as a movement “from perfectionism to engagement”. Improvisation played an important part in that change, teaching him to experience music not as something fixed but as something that unfolds in real time, “moment by moment”.

Perhaps most interesting of all is Osborne’s discussion of what it means to communicate through music. For him, interpretation ultimately depends on finding personal meaning in the music and on having the confidence to trust one’s own response to it. As a teacher, he values “honest immaturity far above fake profundity”, encouraging young musicians to discover what a piece actually feels like to them rather than reproducing received ideas about how it ought to go.

That desire for honesty seems to lie at the heart of this deeply personal album. Osborne admits that introspection is his “natural territory” and that he particularly values the communion with an audience which intimate music can create. So this is not really an album about encores at all: it is about the music we carry with us, the people, experiences and memories attached to it, and the way our relationship with certain pieces changes as we ourselves change. Above all, it is about music as connection – between performer and listener, certainly, but also between our present and former selves.

As Osborne observes towards the end of his notes, at its most powerful, music can meet some of our deepest needs: “for safety, for connection, for stories, for transcendence”. OK by me feels like a particularly generous expression of that idea: a pianist opening his musical memory box and inviting us to listen.

And as one would expect from a pianist of Osborne’s pedigree, each piece on this strikingly original album is beautifully presented, with fine attention to detail in dynamics, musical colour, texture, melody, character, and so much more within pieces which last only a few minutes in most cases. There’s great delicacy and tenderness in some of the pieces – for me, Osborne’s arrangements of Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You and Keith Jarrett’s My Song are particular gems. Gershwin’s Three Preludes combine upbeat rhythmic vitality in the first and third with a more introspective, almost brooding atmosphere in the second. There are many delights here to suit all tastes, and as a pianist myself, I find myself wanting to explore more miniatures like these, rather than wrestling with middle-period Beethoven or one of Schubert’s late sonatas! A very personal treasure trove of musical gems, Osborne has, in his own words, “allowed the orders to diverge”, so there is no coherent track order; the pieces simply lead on from one another. Thus, it becomes an album which can be dipped into or listened to as a whole, depending on one’s mood or the time of day.

Listening to OK by me, and reading Steven Osborne’s unusually candid accompanying liner notes, I was struck by how closely many of his reflections chimed with ideas I had been exploring while writing my novel Facing the Music. At its heart, the novel asks what it means to be a musician, and what happens when the identity one has built around music is challenged or disrupted. Osborne writes about performance anxiety, injury, perfectionism, honesty in performance, teachers and colleagues, and the gradual evolution of his own musical identity; but he also writes about something I have long felt very strongly myself – the way music becomes bound up with memory. Certain pieces carry people, places and experiences within them, so that hearing or playing them years later can collapse the distance between past and present. In Facing the Music I explored that idea through fiction; in OK by me, Osborne offers something more intimate and real: the story of a musical life told through the music which has accompanied it.

OK by Me – A Life in Encores is released on the Hyperion label on 13 November 2026

(Artist images: Ben Ealovega)

By |

The concert is complete, the applause is given generously. The performer bows, acknowledging the audience and their applause, and leaves the stage. The applause grows more enthusiastic and the performer returns once again to take a bow and thank the audience for their appreciation. As the performer leaves the stage again, the applause may begin to fade or increase in volume, at which point the performer will return to the stage, and a little faux-modest pantomime may ensure: “Me?”, the performer seems to indicate, “you want me to play again?”. The audience quickly settles into attentive silence and the performer returns to the piano. The first notes are heard, and you may whisper to your neighbour, asking them if they know what the piece is.

The word “encore” is French and has a variety of meanings – still, longer, yet, again, but not actually “play some more”. It entered the English language as a corruption of the Italian word “ancora” (“again”), and it was used from the early 18th century by audiences of Italian opera in London. Curiously, when French and German audiences request an encore they say “Bis” (‘twice’), which is what the Italians do as well. Encores are generally short pieces played at the end of the main concert. Many encore pieces are technically challenging and ostentatiously virtuosic, a beguiling or witty little treat tossed out to amuse and delight the audience, a final firework that sends everyone off on a high, or a calming salve after the pyrotechnics of the main programme. Encores should always feel totally spontaneous, though of course they must be practised and finessed.

“Applause is a receipt, not a bill” said the pianist Artur Schnabel, implying that no soloist should feel obliged to play an encore at the end of a concert, no matter how noisily the audience applauds, or rises to its feet. Indeed for some programmes an encore would be inappropriate. So you rarely hear an encore after a performance of the Goldberg Variations, or Beethoven’s or Schubert’s last three piano sonatas: such is the philosophy and otherworldliness of these works that to say anything else would be unbefitting. (Also, the performer is probably too tired to play anything else……)

The timing of the encore is important in creating anticipation and drama between soloist and audience. To play an encore after just one curtain call may seem a little over-eager. The pianists whom I quizzed in advance of writing this article were generally agreed that “third [curtain] call; one encore; short and scintillating” was appropriate. A further encore can be considered an additional treat, but there is nothing worse than the soloist who doggedly soldiers on and offers an encore, or encores, because they’ve prepared for it, even though the audience response does not necessarily warrant it. Most performers are generally alert to the finishing time of concerts as well, aware that some people have trains to catch, or simply want to get to the pub before closing time!

Russian pianists tend to be generous in their encores: in 2007 Evgeny Kissin famously gave not one, not two but twelve encores at his Carnegie Hall performance, tossing off piece after piece to his adoring audience. The concert finally ended at a quarter to midnight…… Grigory Sokolov is also magnanimous in rewarding his audiences with a slew of encores, including the complete Schubert ‘Moments Musicaux’ and sparkling miniatures by Jean-Philippe Rameau, as well as works by Bach, Chopin, Brahms and Scriabin.

13735_show_landscape_large_01
Evgeny Kissin
For the audience, an encore can offer a little more personal contact with the pianist. Performers are often more relaxed when they come to play an encore – the stress and strain of the main concert has passed, and they can unwind with a little bon bon of music, lightening the atmosphere for themselves and audience. Encores are often a chance to hear unfamiliar or unexpected repertoire, and a well-chosen encore can round off an evening very nicely. Some performers even specialize in encores, and build entire programmes and recordings based on them.

Amongst the most beloved piano encores are Liszt’s Transcendental and Paganini Etudes, specifically Feux-Follets and La Campanella, and not forgetting his Mephisto Waltz and Hungarian Rhapsodies, Schulz-Evier’s grandiose paraphrase of Strauss’s ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’, Moszkowski’s exuberant Étincelles, ever-popular waltzes, impromptus, Nocturnes, Preludes and Mazurkas by Chopin, Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat, Preludes by Rachmaninov, Debussy’s l’Isle Joyeuse, the two Arabesques and various Preludes, and etudes and paraphrases by Godowsky.

As a regular concert-goer, I’ve encountered some unusual encores, including a quotation by Horace, read by harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani after his performance of the Goldberg Variations at the 2011 BBC Proms, Dudley Moore’s ‘Colonel Bogey’ in the style of a Beethoven Sonata, played by Piers Lane at the Wigmore Hall, and described by the pianist as “a rather naughty piece!”, and at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2013, Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski played Bach’s complete French Suite No. 5 as an encore. He had already played the work as part of the main programme, but he just “wanted to play it again”, and it was a truly delightful end to a very memorable concert.

Piers Lane/Dudley Moore Beethoven Sonata parody

 

Schulz-Evier – The Beautiful Blue Danube