#17 Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief, Writer, Pianist

“I got up to Grade VI piano when I was around 16, then I gave it up.  I didn’t have the patience to do all the technical training that now, as an adult, I realise you have to do.  I started again when I was 40.  I’d inherited my mother’s old piano, a little baby grand, and that gave me the excuse to take lessons.  I’ve begun taking it very seriously, I find myself getting better.  About six years ago I discovered piano courses in France which gave me the excuse to work all year on something big.  Suddenly I had goals, teaching; everything changed.  I did big song cycles such as Winterreise and Dichterliebe, each would take me a whole year to learn. For the past two years I’ve been working on the Chopin G Minor Ballade, because that’s what I’ve been writing the book about.  The reason I started learning it was that there was a fellow at the piano camp, he was no better than me, and on the last day he just sat down and played it.  I was curious; I could not imagine how an amateur pianist could play that piece.  When I decided that I would learn it I went to see him and it turned out that he had played it six times a day for over a year, in a sort of life-saving sort of way.  He’d been at a low point in his life when he’d discovered this music.  This is just one example of how, when you hang around with fellow amateur pianists, you get inspiration from each other. 

All the time people say to me that they wish they could learn as well - that was one of the points of writing the book.  I’ve obviously got a pretty busy day job; the year that I took on the Chopin turned out to be a particularly frantic year with Wikileaks and phone-hacking and so on.  So I thought if I could edit a national newspaper and also find time to carve twenty minutes per day from an incredibly full-on life, then I could say to them “what’s your excuse?” 

I get up earlier in order to practice.  It’s therapeutic, you can’t think of anything else while you play.  If I’m feeling disciplined I start my practice with scales for around 5 minutes.  The way I learned the Ballade was to break it up.  There were fifteen passages that were frantically difficult so I used post it notes and sticky tape and isolated those bit I couldn’t play, then I’d just obsessively practise those bits.  After around 6 months I started knitting them into the bits that I could play.  I was 56 when I started this piece and I’d never memorised a note of music in my life.  The piece is so complicated that I knew I wouldn’t be able to play and look at the sheet music at the same time.  I was worried that a brain in middle age can’t learn new tricks so I went to see some neuroscientists to find out about the whole machinery of learning and fingers and so on.  I think that is the reassuring part of all of this for other adults thinking of taking up the piano.  There seems to be no physical or mental reason why you can’t take up the piano at any age and make fairly good progress.” (Alan Rusbridger)

Alan Rusbridger is Guardian Editor-in-Chief.  His book, Play It Again: Why Amateurs Should Attempt the Impossible (Jonathan Cape) is due out next year.

#16 ROK PALČIČ, CONCERT PIANIST, MASTERCLASS ORGANISER

                            Interviewing Rok in the main square, Koper, Slovenia where he organises summer Masterclasses
                                                                                          Photo: Karl Ferre

"I sometimes think about the way musicians look at the piano and about the relationship we pianists have with our instrument. You open a violinist’s case and you see pictures of family, friends, loved ones. They cherish their instrument, polish it, always handle it with care, never leave it just laying somewhere on a desk. Most people and musicians, even pianists for that matter, see the piano as a tool, nothing more. Rings from coffee cups, stains on keys, dust, it’s actually a piece of furniture most of the time. I can’t say how much it drives me crazy to see a plant or some books on the lid in someone’s living room, once I even saw a huge bird cage, which made playing fun in a way - but you get my point. Yet one of the most common problems we encounter in music schools is actually using these instruments to practice. I organise masterclasses and the most difficult part of organising a good one is giving the participants the chance to practice on a good instrument, because many of them do not have such an option at home. But even piano teachers think you can ruin a piano simply by playing it, so they keep them locked and they get played a couple of times a year. Ask any piano tuner what will that do to it. I would like to appeal to everyone who owns one of these magnificent instruments. Use them, let them be used, teach everyone to use them for the one purpose they have been created, but, most importantly, teach them to develop a relationship with each one of them. Students!  Closing the lid after a practice session, even if you are only playing at home, is a sign of respect towards this marvelous piece of engineering - and the music." (Rok Palčič)

Rok is a Slovenian concert pianist specialising in chamber music.  For the past two years he has organised the summer Masterclass, Art-Halieti, for international musicians to study with Kevin Robert Orr (piano, USA) and Koyrun Asatryan (saxophone, Armenia) at the beautiful, seaside enclave of Koper near the Italian border.   

Connect with Rok: rok.palcic@ars-haliaeti.si

#15 ROSEMARY CHRIMES, OLYMPIC ATHLETE, LANDLADY & PIANIST

“I originally come from the Scottish Borders. I remember my aunt encouraged me to start when I was nine or ten. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested. I was always out doing active, sporty things, and then five minutes before the lesson I’d do a little bit of practice. I’m not sure music really runs in my family, although one of my grandchildren (he’s in his twenties now) had the most wonderful ear as a child, and he could sit at the piano and make up little tunes. I was staggered at how good he was when he was a little boy. When I was in my twenties I thought, “This was silly, you must learn at least to read music, now you must do a little theory!” So I went through Grade V Theory and that wasn’t too bad. But I always found playing frustrating because I could sightread but I couldn’t memorise, I had great difficulty playing anything without having the music in front of me. And then, getting married, having children and having a full time job, I left it for a few more years. And then I came back to it because my second husband was a good singer. So I accompanied Brian a little bit. And then, I had music students staying in the house who were studying at the Conservatoire in Birmingham. I’d managed to get up to Grade VIII when I was playing with my husband, but I still had no ambitions. I asked the students if they knew anyone simpatico who could give me a few lessons. I’ve been learning with Mikael for a few years now, some of us are very elderly students, just doing it for fun. The problem now is that all the things to do with age start piling in, you might have arthritis, your eyesight starts to go and you can’t see the notes. You need the notes printed large. In the libraries there are books with big print, so I would like music with big print. That would be extremely useful. Some of my friends they think I’m crazy, others admire. Some say to me that they started as a child and then never had the courage to pick it up again. So I tell them that I started as a child and picked it up again at three different times. I like playing but I am scared still of performing. I don’t practise every day, there’s too much else to do. I’ve had the same piano for the last 20 years, a baby grand with a pleasant sound. Fortunately I’m in a detached house so I don’t have to worry about the neighbours. In fact, sometimes my teacher arranges a little concert in my house which is rather sweet because there’s a big room with a piano; therefore we gather and play together. It’s very pleasant. This happens every few months. Sometimes his very young students come, and they feel confident about performing in a private house, it gives them a good experience and I put a pile of toys in the corner for them to play with as well. We all profit in our own ways.” (Rosemary Chrimes)


Rosemary took part in the 1972 Olympics Games in Munich.  She has won a Gold Medal in the Commonwealth Games in Athletics.

#14 ANA SILVERA, SINGER AND COMPOSER

"I start with an image in my mind and then I make some words and a melody, the image is like a little seed which then grows.  I’ve always been very driven by words so I will create the song around the words.  They are my words that come to me from an image.  For example there’s a song I’ve written called ‘Notes from an Opera’.  I must have read the story of Coco Chanel somewhere but I wasn’t conscious of that, I had this image of a woman in wartime Paris, and she’s pampered and spoilt. I followed her story and I found these words she would say in the image I had as I followed her around Paris.  Then I sat down at the piano and started to sing the words.  I think what this means for my music is that it comes out more linear rather than cyclical, so it will have lots of different bits as if it’s a sort of film, rather than it being verse, chorus, verse, chorus.   It’s more driven by narrative. I’m writing about characters with a completely independent mind, I’m outside of them and they are separate to me.  Sometimes I will sing them as “I” or sometimes as “she”.  These are songs that emanate from my imagination rather than being songs about me.  I compose the music through a process of filtering through many layers of the story. I had piano lessons for a long time, I loved Bartok, Ravel, Debussy.  I sang opera from a young age,  and learnt a lot of John Dowland and Palestrina, very sparse music that was meant for harpsichord, I played it on the piano while I sang and really loved the purity of that music.   These days, as well as working with my band I have a couple of large scale projects coming up that I’m looking forward to - one is with an orchestra.  I’m also working with a choir in London, reviving a choral work I originally composed for an Estonian choir." (Ana Silvera)

Ana will be performing with her band as part of the Markson Pianos Concert Series 7pm on June 27th at Saint Mary Magdalene Church, London NW1

Ana Silvera CD ‘The Aviary’  (KMC Records) is available from www.anasilvera.bandcamp.com 

Connect with Ana

http://www.anasilvera.com/

www.twitter.com/anasilveramusic

#13 ROGER STEDMAN, DOCTOR

                                                   

“I learnt piano as a child, did some of the grades at school and then I had a very long period of not developing my piano playing at all.  I am a Consultant Anaesthetist with special interest in Intensive Care Medicine; the way we work is a week at a time on the Intensive Care Unit, we organise it that way so there is continuity for the more difficult patients.   So as a consultant I am responsible for a large intensive care unit of around 20 beds and I will be on duty for a week.   We have a ten-hour day and we share on call out of hours.  It’s a very intensive period of work, you get involved with the patients and the work is quite high pressure but believe it or not, it is enjoyable!  I share the rota with eight other colleagues so then I’ll have a period when I’m not on Intensive Care and work in a more routine area of anaesthetics.  Training in medicine is very involved, it’s an immersive activity and one tends to give up a lot of activities and life interests in order to get through the training.  Once you qualify to become a Consultant you have a team of doctors working for you and suddenly you have a bit more time on your hands and life begins again as it were.  And so, you can re-discover certain things, and get that private time on your own away from the job.  I try to practice piano most days, I revisited piano learning soon after I became a consultant.   It was a few years ago and I had decided I wanted to develop my piano playing in my spare time and I started having lessons with Mikael Pettersson to try and undo the bad habits I had acquired in the intervening years.  Even though he teaches us as individuals, he is really good at bringing us together in a group for master classes and concerts.  The piano has the tendency to be a very isolated instrument and it adds a level of challenge when you know you are going to be playing in front of your peers, rather than in your own back room, that has been very good for my development.  We play pieces by the same composer; it’s good to hear how other people are getting on with the same sort of pieces.    The current project is Scriabin, and a while before that we learnt the Debussy Preludes for which I performed the Sunken Cathedral.  It’s been difficult to learn Scriabin but he’s growing on me.  Scriabin is interesting because there’s a very clear transition in his work which I think reflects the transition from Romanticism to Modernism that was going on at the time.  His transition was quite stark and quite overt, and some of his later pieces are quite challenging.  There are a lot of parallels between Scriabin and Debussy as he also underwent a similar transition; his later work is also very different.“ (Roger Stedman)

#12 ROLAND PERRIN, COMPOSER & PIANIST

“We started off in the States, moved around quite a lot from New York and Mexico and Florida ending up in England via Scotland. I remember as one of seven children playing a game in the living room in Glasgow where we had a grand piano and the game was based on the weather; one person would be playing the piano and the rest would be dancing around. It seemed to involve a lot of sustain pedal. The person at the piano would replicate beautiful calm sunny weather by playing delicately at the top of the piano, and then at some moment would go to the bottom of the piano and bang out the lowest notes like thunder and lightning and rain and we’d all scream and hide under the grand piano. It was simple, but endless fun. Another early memory was that my mother used to like us to play the piano first thing in the morning to help get her out bed, it was a happy time, and I’d play whatever it was that I was learning at the time. Now I’m a teacher myself, I teach students from all over the world; Finland, England, Iran, Japan, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Austria, France, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Trinidad....I could go on! As they get more advanced, what I’m trying to do is to get them to play jazz with their own twist. For example there’s a very good pianist who’s brilliant at playing traditional Iranian and Azerbaijanian music on the piano, sometimes it’s centuries old, and sometimes it’s pop music from the last thirty years. He’s starting to get a really good feel for jazz, and we’ve been working together on getting him to fuse the two together. He has actually influenced me as a composer. Another example is a Japanese student; she’s working on a collection of Japanese folk songs and that’s really nice because she took a while to understand how jazz works and now she’s really starting to find herself by not trying to sound American but by arranging Japanese folk music. My way of looking at things is to that there’s no point learning the tradition of an art form unless you’re going to bend it your own way. The end game is to create a personal statement, and not to present yourself as someone who is the carrier of a tradition, but as someone who has taken the tradition and made it their own.” (Roland Perrin)

ROLAND PERRIN is a composer, pianist and educator who creates music that combines irresistible world music grooves, jazz improvisation and structures in the European symphonic tradition. His compositions range from solo piano works to full orchestral pieces. The style is wide ranging - the result of being steeped in classical music and jazz and also by having played with many artists from around the world. Roland sees his music as taking some of the best elements from different traditions: it develops and unfolds like a story, it leaves space for spontaneity and it dances. Roland's "Limited Edition" has five members from five countries. He also works as a solo pianist, in duos with singers Rachel Sutton and V, and with the Cuban bass player Rey Crespo. He is Head of Piano Studies at the London Centre of Contemporary Music and operates a thriving private practice as a jazz piano teacher.

Connect with Roland at www.rolandperrin.com

#11 NATSUMI IKENAGA, STUDENT & PIANIST

 “My family all live in Tokyo so fortunately none of them were affected by the tsunami, but it was a huge shock.  Many concert halls were totally destroyed and it’s been very difficult.  The Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra, the big orchestra in that region, has been working so hard.  They went to many of the shelters in small groups; I heard they performed more than five hundred charity concerts.  Many musicians lost their jobs and it’s still not good for them there. Here in London my friends and I organised a big concert at the College and it raised a lot of money.  I’m in my fourth year at the Royal College of Music.  I’m not sure I want to limit myself by aiming to be a Concert Pianist; I also want to play in ensembles.  For example I’m working in a horn trio at the moment. It’s a new project and we’re about to have our first concert.  We’re all Asian but from different countries, the other players are from Hong Kong and Korea.  We became close friends so we decided to work together.  Unfortunately, there’s not much repertoire for Horn Trio so our violinist Joo Yeon Sir decided to compose a piece.  I’m really looking forward to that.  We’re also doing the Brahms Horn Trio No.1, probably the most famous piece for horn trio, plus a little known piece by Duvernoy, an eighteenth century composer.  It’s a very short piece.  We’ll also play a duo piece, the Ravel violin sonata. As a soloist I have been learning Beethoven, Chopin and Scriabin recently, soon I’m moving over to Russian composers including Rachmaninov and Prokofiev; I’m currently choosing the other composers.  My plan is to expand myself as a soloist and enter competitions.  While I’m still a student I plan to make the most of any opportunities to play with other performers and get as much experience as I can.” (Natsumi Ikenaga)

Natsumi plays in The Schwartz Horn Trio with Jade Wing-Yi Cheung on horn and Joo Yeon Sir on violin.  Their debut concert is for Markson Pianos May 16 at 7.30pm at Saint Mary Magdalene Church, NW1.  Click here for more details