Interviews with musicians, composers and conductors
I would say that true success is being able to do this job with dedication and curiosity; always trying to tell people something new through this form of art, respecting the composers’ wishes too but putting your soul into everything you do. Being able to do this is what I think we call success.
The singular greatest challenge I’ve experienced is the result of asking “why don’t we change the shape of the piano?”. It turns out this is at least a life’s work!
To me success is a dead silence during your performance on stage, when you can hear someone’s breath from the audience and when after the concert you see people’s eyes full of joy and sometimes tears and sense the sincere enrichment of their souls.
I feel very close to the songs of Hugo Wolf and love the process of analysing the detail of his writing and trying to figure out what he might be doing with the music. Playing songs is fascinating because you get to go inside the mind of a composer and get a sense of how they read poetry. In a way, songs are little acts of translation – the poetry as read by an individual, transformed into sound.
I think people are collectively much more in an upbeat mood on a Friday evening compared to Monday so it’s important I don’t ‘offend’ them with a 250BPM aggressive bebop track on a Monday evening, for example!
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