Andrei Gavrilov was a teenage superstar with the world at his feet. But then he crashed and burned. One morning in 1993, he decided he couldn't make the journey from Frankfurt to Brussels to play that evening. "I suddenly realised I was not going to play this concert," he says. "It came spontaneously. I called my agent in Belgium and said, 'I'm not coming.' He said, 'Don't be crazy, we are sold out and the Queen is attending.' I couldn't really even explain what was happening to me."
But there were more prosaic factors at work, too: a move to Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2001; a second marriage to a young Japanese pianist and the birth of a son; as well as a number of supporters determined to help him resurrect his career.
With the help of wealthy Swiss benefactors, Gavrilov is performing again. It is difficult to know what this second coming will amount to. He is now 51, no longer young in an ultra-competitive world that thrives on new pianistic sensations. The music business had written him off, and his rejection of its values, his bombast, will not endear him to it. There is always a danger that his nerves will get the better of him, that the Queen of Belgium will again be disappointed.
But the day after he and I talked, he gave a sell-out concert at the Lucerne piano festival - nine Chopin nocturnes in the first half, Prokofiev's Sonata No 8 in the second. The audience was rapt, the standing ovation instantaneous. Knowing his story, I found his playing deeply moving, his theatricality on stage - he has always been a showman - overwhelming. A veteran critic sitting next to me thought he took too many liberties with the Chopin, but I found it thrilling.