Post by Billy R on Jul 21, 2009 10:05:10 GMT 1
..............on 21st July 2009:
Author, Michael White.
Something’s happening with British children and pianos, and it isn’t good: a dismal falling-out that surfaces a few years down the line with their poor showing - worse still, no showing at all - in significant piano competitions.
We can’t even produce vulgar showmen like Lang Lang
There was a time when half the households in the UK had an upright in the sitting-room, even the working-class ones. I grew up in East Ham (next to West Ham where the football team is) and we had a piano. So did several of our neighbours, and they played them: on a hot day in the summer with the windows open, Burges Rd E6 could sound like Charles Ives jamming crazily with Conlon Nancarrow.
A hundred yards along the street and round the corner where my wily, whiskery, lazy old piano teacher lived (”keep at those scales, dear, I can hear you from the kitchen… leave your money on the table when you go”‘) the thunderous crescendo of East London keyboard culture must have been intense.
Not any more, though. Walk the back streets of East London these days and you won’t hear a piano. Screaming babies, bangla music, rap, the vacuous din of daytime TV, yes. Pianos, no. And the result - magnified a few hundred times to reflect what’s happening across the country - is a damning piece of non-news about to be released by the London International Piano Competition, which starts on the 18th of this month and reaches its grand final at the Festival Hall on Tuesday 28th.
The LIPC isn’t the number one piano competition in Britain - that’s the Leeds - but it’s the number two. And you could fairly read it as a indicator of the keyboard health, or otherwise, of those parts of the world that take an interest: Europe certainly, Asia increasingly, America to some extent. The prizes don’t amount to Croesan wealth in cash terms; but there’s the prestige, the public exposure of playing a concerto with the London Philharmonic at the RFH. And winners get a raft of almost guaranted engagements, which is no small thing. This kind of competition launches big careers.
But look at the list of candidates who’ve made it beyond the preminary sorting-out rounds of the LIPC to what you might call the demi-semi-finals, and you find something truly shocking. Of the 24 perhaps-stars who’ve reached this point there are, as you’d expect, contestants from Russia, Korea, Israel, China, Belgium, the USA, Italy etc etc. But is there one British contestant? One home-produced player good enough to have passed through the preliminaries? Just one?
Not a single one.
What’s happening in this country if we can’t produce a single pianist good or interested enough to reach the demi-semi-finals of the leading London piano competition? Something has gone seriously wrong here.
It’s ironic that the Chinese pianist Lang Lang is in residency this month at the Barbican. You may not like his vulgar, self-indulgent playing - me, I hate it - but you can’t deny he has charisma (of a brutally commercial kind); and back in China he’s the role model for literally millions upon millions of young players. Every second child in China seems to want to learn the piano. And I’ve seen this for myself.
In Beijing there are teaching factories where six or seven hundred infant pianists pile in every Saturday and bash away at six or seven hundred pianos in sound-proofed cubicles. They do it with a grim determination that’s not terribly attractive to a Western liberal sensibility, and I don’t say that the process turns them all into great artists. But it does provide a grounding from which armies of extremely promising young Chinese pianists are emerging.
Meanwhile, here in Britain, we have nothing to compare. You don’t believe me? Count the heads of British pianists as against their foreign counterparts in UK music colleges. And check out LIPC later in the month. If you can bear the shame.
Author, Michael White.
Something’s happening with British children and pianos, and it isn’t good: a dismal falling-out that surfaces a few years down the line with their poor showing - worse still, no showing at all - in significant piano competitions.
We can’t even produce vulgar showmen like Lang Lang
There was a time when half the households in the UK had an upright in the sitting-room, even the working-class ones. I grew up in East Ham (next to West Ham where the football team is) and we had a piano. So did several of our neighbours, and they played them: on a hot day in the summer with the windows open, Burges Rd E6 could sound like Charles Ives jamming crazily with Conlon Nancarrow.
A hundred yards along the street and round the corner where my wily, whiskery, lazy old piano teacher lived (”keep at those scales, dear, I can hear you from the kitchen… leave your money on the table when you go”‘) the thunderous crescendo of East London keyboard culture must have been intense.
Not any more, though. Walk the back streets of East London these days and you won’t hear a piano. Screaming babies, bangla music, rap, the vacuous din of daytime TV, yes. Pianos, no. And the result - magnified a few hundred times to reflect what’s happening across the country - is a damning piece of non-news about to be released by the London International Piano Competition, which starts on the 18th of this month and reaches its grand final at the Festival Hall on Tuesday 28th.
The LIPC isn’t the number one piano competition in Britain - that’s the Leeds - but it’s the number two. And you could fairly read it as a indicator of the keyboard health, or otherwise, of those parts of the world that take an interest: Europe certainly, Asia increasingly, America to some extent. The prizes don’t amount to Croesan wealth in cash terms; but there’s the prestige, the public exposure of playing a concerto with the London Philharmonic at the RFH. And winners get a raft of almost guaranted engagements, which is no small thing. This kind of competition launches big careers.
But look at the list of candidates who’ve made it beyond the preminary sorting-out rounds of the LIPC to what you might call the demi-semi-finals, and you find something truly shocking. Of the 24 perhaps-stars who’ve reached this point there are, as you’d expect, contestants from Russia, Korea, Israel, China, Belgium, the USA, Italy etc etc. But is there one British contestant? One home-produced player good enough to have passed through the preliminaries? Just one?
Not a single one.
What’s happening in this country if we can’t produce a single pianist good or interested enough to reach the demi-semi-finals of the leading London piano competition? Something has gone seriously wrong here.
It’s ironic that the Chinese pianist Lang Lang is in residency this month at the Barbican. You may not like his vulgar, self-indulgent playing - me, I hate it - but you can’t deny he has charisma (of a brutally commercial kind); and back in China he’s the role model for literally millions upon millions of young players. Every second child in China seems to want to learn the piano. And I’ve seen this for myself.
In Beijing there are teaching factories where six or seven hundred infant pianists pile in every Saturday and bash away at six or seven hundred pianos in sound-proofed cubicles. They do it with a grim determination that’s not terribly attractive to a Western liberal sensibility, and I don’t say that the process turns them all into great artists. But it does provide a grounding from which armies of extremely promising young Chinese pianists are emerging.
Meanwhile, here in Britain, we have nothing to compare. You don’t believe me? Count the heads of British pianists as against their foreign counterparts in UK music colleges. And check out LIPC later in the month. If you can bear the shame.
