Scored for an encore

We are in the garden of Christian Blackshaw's house, deep in the Suffolk countryside in eastern England. Behind us lies the civilised domesticity of his kitchen. Ahead looms a meadow of fern and woodland. It is into this rustic paradise that Blackshaw leads me, until we arrive at a small clearing. There, in glorious isolation, sits a wooden hut.

"I love the idea of being surrounded by nature," he says pensively, inviting me inside. "It's not divorced from reality - reality lies in the practising [at the keyboard] - but it's a place where I can think and work and concentrate on the complexities of a score, without distractions. It may seem a luxury, but for me it's a necessity."

Blackshaw, 60, a concert pianist of international stature, refers to the hut as his dacha, a Russian summer house but it is really too small for that. It does have a wood-fired stove and an armchair but its purpose is to house his grand piano, which occupies most of the floor. "It's a modest space where I can try things out," Blackshaw says. "No one can hear me."

Exactly. The fact that no one can hear Blackshaw has become a running sore for his admirers. He had a brilliant early career and looked set to become one of United Kingdom's most substantial musical exports until a series of setbacks in the early 1990s put a block on his progress. His wife died, leaving him with three daughters to nurture. He turned down a recording contract at the very moment when he needed the fillip of publicity.

By the time Blackshaw's life was back on track, the music world had changed. A younger breed of virtuoso had emerged - less thoughtful than Blackshaw, perhaps, and less experienced but more upfront. Unlike Blackshaw, the new breed didn't shy away from competitions or self-promotion. Blackshaw found himself on the sidelines, as if his maturity were a disadvantage.

But as anyone who has heard him recently will know, Blackshaw's musicianship has not deserted him. His performances reveal all the old virtues: elegance, inwardness, delicacy of touch, poetry of feeling.

Such qualities are at odds with the in-your-face pianism now fashionable but they are essential for anyone hoping to probe the keyboard oeuvre of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, on which Blackshaw has long focused.

So it is good news that Blackshaw is slowly but surely emerging from his dacha and taking his share of the limelight. This month he starts a cycle of Mozart piano sonatas in Bristol. A recital at London's Wigmore Hall is promised.

Blackshaw - quietly spoken, impeccably groomed, a bit of a dreamer - is no more comfortable talking about himself than he was in the past but you cannot mistake his burning desire to rekindle his career.

"I shy away from people," he observes in a moment of unexpected candour, "and yet I can't wait to go out on a concert platform and bare my soul. I want to show my love of the music and share it with whoever wants to listen. [What motivates me is] that total commitment to what the score is and trying to transmit to an audience the idea of 'This is what I feel about this music.' Without ego. Unless you have that feeling, I don't know how a musician can exist."

Blackshaw's English reserve melts when he reaches the keyboard: That is where he expresses himself. What, then, were his artistic influences? He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, made a precocious solo debut with the BBC Philharmonic (known then as the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra), spent a summer at the Salzburg Mozarteum and won a scholarship to study in Russia. "I wanted some input from a country that had produced so many artistes who could speak with such a committed voice."

Back home, he was mentored by the great English pianist Sir Clifford Curzon, whose qualities, as fondly recalled by Blackshaw, bear an uncanny resemblance to his own today. "He never struck a note in a mechanical way. He had this magical connection that is very rare - how you put your fingers on the key to make a note sing. I was struggling inside to let my true voice come out but when you're young you don't understand what you're doing - you just do it. Sitting at the feet of a great master made me realise I wasn't there yet. I didn't know enough that was profound."

Blackshaw says the ultimate goal in performance is a "sense of release. If you feel a connection with a great work and it speaks to you, you really want to understand it and fly with it. But to reach that stage you have to work on the minutiae. It's the same in any art form. Look at the great ballerinas: You're not aware of the hours and weeks and years spent honing their art. I believe I'm an intuitive musician, I still have a childlike wonder but I hope that this side of me is now in greater harmony with an understanding and physical knowledge of the music in my fingers. Isn't that the aspiration of every performer?"

The "harmony" to which Blackshaw aspires will come under the microscope in his upcoming Mozart performances. A cycle of those 18 sonatas is rarer than a traversal of Beethoven's 32 but Blackshaw believes Mozart's keyboard music is in no way inferior. "Why can't we appreciate both? Mozart being a very vocal composer, the challenge is to make the piano sing, especially in the slow movements. The sonatas give you the luxury of wide dynamic contrasts."

He says Mozart encompassed a wider range of expression in his sonatas than is commonly believed. "The first six are a calling card, running the gamut from sadness to joy, eloquence and wit. From the slenderest of harmonic means you have the ultimate in expression."

Blackshaw's conversation makes me want him spontaneously to illustrate his point. He declines: I have ventured a step too far into his world. Anyway our time is up and lunch beckons. As we emerge from the hut, discussion turns to the comparative merits of Haydn and Mozart. Blackshaw says Haydn "nearly always does the unexpected but I don't find the same profundity [as in Mozart]. Profundity is a strange muse. If it could be explained, wouldn't we destroy the spontaneity of feeling?"