Enjoying Piano in Bejing
By admin on 2014-12-26

For those intimidated by classical music, take a tip from pianist Zou Xiang and relax.

"It's alright, clap between movements. I'll smile at you," joked Zou backstage before rehearsing for his performance tonight at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, Beijing.

With disheveled hair and wearing jeans and sneakers, it is hard to tell Zou from his students. Barely 30, Zou is one of the youngest faculty members to ever teach at Beijing's prestigious Central Conservatory of Music.

With one foot in the performance world and one in academia, Zou's mission is to promote new music and new attitudes, something he wasn't completely able to do while on tour.

"As a young musician in the real world, managers would much rather you play Chopin. But now for me I can choose my own artistic path and share my own artistic views," he told the Global Times.

Zou's position as a teacher and performer also provides him a unique perspective on being a young musician in China, many of who he feels have lost touch with the very music they study.

"In English the words 'play music' intimate enjoyment, whereas I don't think that is part of the learning process for most here," Zou explained.

"Most of my students tell me, 'I just want to be the best in the school' or 'I just want to get my diploma and find a job.' So, the biggest challenge for me is to get them truly interested and more passionate about music, then we can talk about practicing three to four hours a day."

Many classical music students in China are under extreme pressure from their families, a situation that Zou understands, only too well.

"Even my parents' primary motivation was their hopes for me to be a celebrity," he recalled.

Zou, a native of Hunan Province, attended the elementary school affiliated with Shanghai Conservatory before receiving his master's and postgraduate Artist Diploma from Juilliard in New York.

"I remember arriving, holding two suitcases and being so nervous I was almost visibly shaking," Zou recalled with a smile.

Despite studying with world-renowned pianists such as Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald, Zou admitted that it was outside the classroom in the classical music world of New York where he received his true education.

"My first two months there I saw 40 concerts and that alone was like taking two years of lessons," Zou said.

It was during this time that he observed the noticible differences in attitude toward classical music between China and the West, something he is now instilling in his students.

"Here for many, music is regarded as a vehicle to success; to prove 'who I am' or 'how good I am,' but there I saw more of a connection with music to life and enjoyment."

"In China, it's assumed that the older you are, the more respected or valued your talent is. But that's not necessarily true. Most of the greatest music in the world was written by the young."

Zou's program tonight emphasizes this point; Franz Shubert's Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, the last of the composer's major piano works, was written at 31. Valee d'Obermann, from Années de Pèlerinage by the virtuosic Franz Lizst, is a revision of a work written in his mid twenties.

However Zou was quick to admit that he identifi ed most with the performance's centerpiece, the monumental Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus or Twenty Contemplations on the Baby Jesus written in 1944 by 36-year-old French composer Olivier Messaien.

Filled with blurred tonal centers and splashing ephemeral melodies drawing from the composer's fascination with birdsong, the 20-movement, two-hour piano cycle is considered one of the great piano works of the 20th century and a late pinnacle of French impressionism, a movement which, as Zou pointed out, draws from eastern musical traditions.

"Chinese relate well to French impressionism. In contrast to the German tradition, which is very structured, fixed and detailed, the Chinese aesthetic is innately impressionistic. It leaves a lot of room for the imagination."

Zou is not only the first Chinese pianist to perform the Messaien song cycle in China but also the first to record it, set for release in April.

Zou's focus for the future is to expand China's musical vocabulary in all directions.

"My dream is not to be famous playing Shubert and Messaien, but rather the work of Chinese composers like Chen Yi and Xiao Gangye."

Above all, as China continues to rise, Zou hopes to influence more people to concentrate on the art rather than just the politics.

"Music lessens the distance between us. Maybe I'm young and na?ve, but I think even putting this thought in people's heads is meaningful."