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Who or what inspired you to take up the piano and pursue a career in music?

My family loves music, although none of them are professional musicians. But they enjoy having friends over, having fun playing accordion and singing songs together, so I grew up in a music loving atmosphere. When I was four, my mother bought me a piano as she thought musical training would be beneficial for me. I was a quiet girl and could easily sit in front of the piano for a long period of time, definitely longer than the other kids could I suppose! I guess I was quite attracted to the sound of piano without knowing what it would mean to my life. Later, I won first prize at a number of piano competitions held in my home city Chongqing when I was between the ages of six to nine. My parents were encouraged by the professors from the best conservatory in China, and decided to send me for professional music study. So, I moved to Beijing at the age of ten, and “officially” started to pursue a professional career at the Central Conservatory of Music. Once I started to understand music and gradually build up a genuine connection with it along the path, I became more certain about choosing a career in music.

Who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

My piano teachers. I wouldn’t have gone this far without them. I’ve always been lucky to work with teachers who have helped me tremendously in different stages of my career. Professor Huiqiao Bao was my teacher for twelve years in the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. She laid a solid foundation for my career, as a respectable female musician, she is most certainly my role model. Her lessons have extended beyond the scope of music and spilled over into my life, learning better how to navigate through difficult periods. I studied with Professor Alexander Korsantia during my time in New England Conservatory in Boston; his passionate attitude to music and bold approach to life constantly encourage me to step out of my comfort zone and break my limits. My current teacher at the Royal College of Music in London, Professor Norma Fisher, is bringing my understanding of music to another level. These teachers have always been by my side and have guided me to be a better pianist. Their attitude towards music has inspired me to pursue the ultimate goal to become a better artist.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

The greatest challenge I have faced was to hold on to the passion and belief in the music I perform, regardless of any dilemma and obstacles that came my way. I believe all the greatest artists have experienced the same challenges and overcame them.

Which performance/recordings are you most proud of?

All of the performances I have given were meaningful for me; I keep learning from every performance, also getting to understand the pieces and myself better. Thus, I would say I am proud of every step I have taken.

Which particular works do you think you play best?

It depends on the time being. However, it would definitely be the pieces that I feel connected to the most at that time. Lately, I feel a deep connection with the music of Scriabin and Rachmaninov.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

I think it’s important for young artists, including me, to try to add variety into their repertoire. I would not want to limit myself to a certain style, or certain composers. Instead, I love challenging myself by selecting pieces that cover a wide range of styles, and pushing myself to play pieces that I don’t feel most comfortable with.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

It’s really hard for me to pinpoint a favourite because I’ve enjoyed playing in different ones. Some are grand concert halls, some are intimate salon venues. I think each venue has a unique character and my adjusting to it can certainly be a fun part of the performance.

Who are your favourite musicians?

There are many extraordinary musicians I’d like to mention, but Radu Lupu and Martha Argerich are the two living musicians I admire the most. Radu Lupu’s playing always flowed with the genuineness and the simplicity which held deep thoughts behind the musical language; his interpretation of the works by Schubert simply blows me away. Martha Argerich is a female musician who has a strong character; her boldness and fearlessness makes her music so unique and effective.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

I was attending a music festival in Kiev Ukraine in February 2014, and was scheduled to play Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 in a concert. At this time the Ukrainian Revolution broke out, there was violence involving riot police, shooters, and protesters in Independence Square. I was very frightened being in the city. However, the concert went on as planned, and I was deeply touched when I saw so many people in the audience At that moment, there was no doubt that music can heal great divisions. It was the most unique concert experience in my career so far, and it reminds me the meaning that music can bring to everyone.

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Despite all the obstacles, keep playing, pursuing and sharing music for a lifetime!

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

Always be genuine to the music and the composers, learn the background and history of the music and composer, try to understand the true meaning that the composers wanted to convey and interpret their works with your own voice. To build up a career as a musician, our persistence and love for music are always the backbone to support our dreams.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Doing the things I love to do for life and could have others benefit from it.

Born in 1992, Chinese pianist Siqian Li started her musical education at the age of four. She studied with Madame Huiqiao Bao, received her Bachelor of Music Degree at the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing) and became the first pianist to be awarded the “Best of the Best – Top and Innovative Talent” diploma and scholarship from China’s Ministry of Culture. As a student of Professor Alexander Korsantia, she obtained a Master of Music Degree with Academic Honors and a Graduate Diploma at the New England Conservatory (Boston). She continues to pursue an Artist Diploma at the Royal College of Music (London) under the tutelage of Professor Norma Fisher.

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Guest post by Dr James Holden

I’ve always really enjoyed playing the piano. However, I’ve always avoided doing my piano practice. This spring I decided to put an end to that. I was particularly motivated by the start of the annual 100 Day Project, in which people commit to doing something creative for 100 days. I determined that my project would be to teach myself how to play Chopin’s Nocturne op. 27 no. 2, a piece I’ve always loved but lacked the impetus and dedication to learn. To do this, I committed myself to practising for at least 30 minutes every day. What’s more, I decided to make myself publicly accountable by streaming my practice sessions on my Twitch channel.

In case you’re not aware, Twitch is a streaming platform usually used by gamers to broadcast themselves playing videogames. However, it’s also used by artists and other creatives to stream their ongoing work. At any one time you can usually find several pianists playing live in the ‘Music & Performing Arts’ category. These players are often watched by hundreds of viewers as they perform arrangements of popular songs and other tunes, improvisations and more.

If these pianists are giving online concerts, they are less like modern concerts than they are nineteenth-century salon performances. Twitch allows real time interaction through a chat window which means that these pianist-streamers can engage with their audiences in real time between and even during pieces, and are therefore able to perform requests, respond to suggestions and otherwise chat with viewers.

My own Twitch streams are a little different. Firstly, my standard of playing is generally lower: I am an intermediate level amateur at best with limited repertoire (largely the result of my limited practice!). Secondly, I’m not attempting to give salon style performances. Instead, I’m ‘just’ broadcasting my daily piano practice.

Practice is normally private not public. It’s what precedes a performance; it’s not the performance itself. And yet, the simple act of streaming it on a public media platform means that my private practice does take on a performative aspect. Even if no one is watching – and that’s often the case on my channel – people could be watching. And that makes all the difference.

The performative aspect of my streams has necessarily altered my relationship to my practice. It has introduced an implied need to make it enjoyable to watch. This means, in the first place, choosing to work on a piece that will appeal quickly to viewers surfing between channels. The Chopin nocturne I’ve chosen is a beautiful work with relatively immediate appeal. However, it simply doesn’t have the mass recognition or popularity that a cover of a hit song would have. Secondly, the need to make my streams an enjoyable watch potentially risks altering how I practice. It feels as though I should play the work through coherently ‘in flow’ rather than working in a more deliberate, detailed fashion. It’s just not that much fun to watch someone play one bar over and over, or play a phrase slowed down to the point of unrecognizability. And yet, that is the kind of effort that is often required when practising.

On the plus side, Twitch’s interactivity means that it’s possible to get immediate positive reinforcement during practice. I was genuinely thrilled when a viewer typed in chat that my playing sounded good. The comment led me to think about the broader possibilities of learning on stream. I can imagine a practice session becoming something like an informal masterclass with knowledgeable viewers offering encouragement and advice.

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Given my chosen piece, I can’t help thinking about all these issues in relation to the Romantic virtuosos. Chopin himself, of course, was a brilliant performer but famously averse to giving large concerts. Perhaps he would have enjoyed playing in the privacy of his own home to an invisible public audience on Twitch. I’m not sure how he would have felt about making the private work of practice public though. I certainly know how the older Liszt would have felt. It’s probably true that during his years as a touring virtuoso the younger Liszt did much of his practice in public on the concert platform itself. However, in later life as the stern master of Weimar he was famously dismissive of pupils who displayed poor technique during his masterclasses, berating them with the declaration: “Wash your dirty linen at home!” I am literally counting ledger lines during my streams so am certainly, musically speaking, washing my dirty linen in public.

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Franz Liszt in concert in the 1840s

I’m only a short way into #the100dayproject. Despite the complications it has introduced, the decision to stream has already had several positive effects. Firstly, it has given me the necessary commitment to keep practising. My advertised stream schedule makes me publicly accountable for my practice in a way I’ve never been before, not even when I had lessons as a kid. I have, as a result, stuck to the task far more than I would have done otherwise, and my playing has genuinely improved as a result. I’ve certainly made solid progress with the nocturne. Whilst it’s true that I’m still stumbling over the more challenging passages and continue to play wrong notes, I at least play them better than I did before. It turns out that regular practice really does make a difference!

A second consequence of my decision to stream my practice is that I now have a video archive of my progress. I can compare the video of my day 1 stream with, say, that of my day 21 stream and quickly see the progress. This is a source of positive reinforcement that offers continued motivation when things seem challenging. More immediately, the fact that Twitch makes streams available as VODs means that I can watch myself back straight after I finish my practice. I can listen to my playing divorced from the act of playing itself, which means I can hear things much more clearly. The critical reflection for which this allows feeds back into my following practice sessions.

Thirdly, I have become somewhat used to the idea of others watching me play (if not perform exactly) – which was a rare occurrence before. In particular, I’m more accustomed now to the idea of people seeing me struggle with a piece and play wrong notes. I’ve had to get over any embarrassment about my lack of technical ability or competence, and my playing is probably becoming freer as a result. I think, overall, that streaming is making me more forgiving of my mistakes.

I’m excited about where my 100 Day Project is heading. I’m certainly looking forward to hearing the improvements I’m sure to make in the days and weeks ahead, and to exploring new pieces alongside my current choice of nocturne.

I’ll be streaming my practice on my Twitch channel at 6pm UK time for about 30 minutes every evening until I reach day 100. It’d be great if you could tune in, say hi in the chat and give me some encouragement. Please do give the channel a follow whilst you’re there too. Can’t make it at 6pm? Don’t worry, you can always find videos of all of my previous practice sessions, so do stop by.

James Holden is an independent writer and academic. He is a Lisztian, a Proustian and a Nerd. He is currently streaming his piano practice every day at 6pm on his Twitch channel. Find out more about his work and publications on his website. You can also follow his progress on Twitter and Instagram.

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Review by Karine Hetherington

Natalya Romaniw’s star has been shining bright on the operatic stage for the past five years as her creamy soprano voice continues to draw an ever increasing legion of fans. A Daily Telegraph critic suggested in February this year that Romaniw was the next Netrebko of her generation.

At Opera Holland Park last season, I was enraptured by her lead performance in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta. Her Tosca at Scottish Opera and, more recently, her Madame Butterfly at ENO, earned her the highest of accolades from critics and audiences alike. Her Cho Cho San at the Coliseum was unforgettable.

And now away from the heady world of live opera, Romaniw, together with pianist and long time collaborator, Lada Valešová, are bringing out Arion, an album of Slavic song repertoire.

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Guest post by Clare Hammond

The best recordings expand our ideas of what is possible, on every level, and introduce a sense of camaraderie and kinship with performers and composers that spans generations.

One of the strangest and most unexpected aspects of the lockdown for me has been discovering how fundamentally different playing the piano is when you cannot perform to an audience. For the past twenty years, almost every hour I have spent at the keyboard has been either to prepare for or to give a performance. I know that a piece ‘in practice’ is not remotely the same creature as one in concert, and have experienced the incredible transformation that takes place in an interpretation after the first performance. Yet I have never been in a situation, even when on maternity leave, where I am practising without a performance in mind.

Public concerts will be among the last events to be reinstated when we emerge from this epidemic and we have no idea when that will be. With two small children at home, my practice time is also severely curtailed. Do I use the limited time I have to prepare the new commissions for August? What about the concerto I am scheduled to perform in October? Would I be better learning repertoire for a recording that may never take place? Do I even enjoy playing ‘just for fun’? So far, the most promising avenue for me has been to focus on how, rather than what, I play. I find myself gravitating towards recordings, listening to the same passage repeatedly, and analysing exactly what my idols are doing in an attempt first to mimic, and then to recast in my own style.

In one sense, this is just an extension of an ongoing process. As a teenager, I was very careful never to listen to recordings of repertoire I was learning for fear of copying them. Not only was this fear misplaced, but it also created significant problems for me further down the line. I did not go to a specialist music school or a Saturday school at a conservatoire, so only heard other people play when I attended piano recitals. I was conscientious and my playing was, on the whole, faithful to what the composer had written, but I had no concept of the vast landscapes that lie beyond the score. Without hearing others play the pieces I was working on, I lacked context.

At university, we studied the notion of ‘authenticity’ in performance, and fidelity to the score was a large part of that. We barely mentioned, however, the idea that the score might be insufficient and that there was an expansive arena of expression that could never be notated. I was unaware that a crescendo might have completely different expressive significance in Schumann to Mendelssohn, that the degree of legato a slur implied might affect the emotional narrative, or that I could use my own life experience in truly inhabiting the psychology of this music. For me at that time, the score was merely to be deciphered, memorised and regurgitated. I understood that a performer should ‘express themselves’ but had no idea how you might do this beyond self-indulgently injecting some illicit rubato. I still believed that it was possible to play in a vacuum, while being completely unaware of my predicament.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I went to study privately with Ronan O’Hora, Head of Keyboard at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In our second session, he explained that while my playing was (mostly) accurate and technically sound, it “didn’t mean anything”. It took me a long time to fully understand this and for months I felt as though I had lost my bearings. When I came to the GSMD as a Master’s student, I was surrounded for the first time by a significant number of aspiring pianists and heard others perform several times a week. I began to understand what it was to truly communicate through music.

This was now my environment and provided the backdrop to the most intense part of my studies, working with recordings. In one lesson, Ronan and I experimented with a passage of the Barber Sonata Op. 26, a work that I played well and for which I had a natural affinity. We discussed various shortcomings in my performance, and then listened to an excerpt from Horowitz’s recording. Without further discussion, Ronan asked me to play the same passage again and something fundamental happened that was to change my attitude to recordings forever. I caught the spirit of the piece, found colours at the instrument that I had never encountered before, and accessed a freedom that brought the music to life without disregarding the score. The best recordings expand our ideas of what is possible, on every level, and introduce a sense of camaraderie and kinship with performers and composers that spans generations.

I now have no scruples about working with recordings. After all, even if I set out to mimic another’s performance exactly, it would be impossible. When learning Schumann’s Humoreske, I heard Radu Lupu create a pearl-like colour at the keyboard that I would not have thought possible. I spent three hours

listening to the first few seconds on loop in an attempt to capture the astonishing tenderness he creates. Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann is not a piece that comes naturally to me. It has an unselfconsciousness and almost naive bravado that is alien to my character, yet Volodos’ recording showed me how to look beyond that and find its heart. Many months on, I play these pieces in my own way and my interpretations are all the richer for the different influences I can bring to bear.

It is vital to take the score seriously and to be as faithful to it as possible. Yet the text is just a starting point, the skeleton of a finished interpretation. We need to take all of life’s experiences, all the music we have heard and the wisdom of other performers, in order to truly inhabit a work’s emotional and psychological narrative. Without this, we cannot be faithful to the composer’s intentions because we can neither engage with nor communicate their message. The reason I, and no doubt many other musicians, feel so disorientated at the moment is because playing without communicating is such a bizarre and potentially meaningless act. In isolation, recordings are a way of connecting, across space and time, to feel the true fellowship that music can provide.

wsmucdoo_400x400Acclaimed as a pianist of “amazing power and panache” (The Telegraph), Clare Hammond is recognised for the virtuosity and authority of her performances and has developed a “reputation for brilliantly imaginative concert programmes” (BBC Music Magazine).

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