This year's theme for the piano festival is “Lisztomania”. Do you think Liszt has been underrepresented in the piano festival? Are there any other composer-based themes you might explore in the future?

Franz Liszt seems to be an obvious choice of composer for any piano festival. He wrote such a great volume of piano music, encompassing so many different forms and facets. Not all of it is on the same level of inspiration, it must be said, but there is enough variety to go around. So I’m baffled to say why it has not been attempted at PianoFest previously! The indefatigable Leslie Howard did an all-Liszt recital in 1998, and devoted one half of his 2004 recital to Liszt. Nikolai Demidenko has also played a considerable amount of Liszt in his returns to PianoFest too.

This is the first year I’m developing a theme based on a particular composer. Previously there have been themes built around Schumann (1995), Beethoven (1997) and Chopin (1999). For my final year as Festival Artistic Director, I will devote the 2008 festival to music by J.S. Bach and works influenced by his legacy.

How did you go about selecting repertoire and performers for this year's concerts?

Once I selected the theme, it was a matter of finding the right mix of pianists to built five complementing recitals. There should be enough different aspects of Liszt represented – the virtuosic (obviously!), the contemplative, the spiritual and the visionary. I think all these facets have been fulfilled to a certain degree. I also wanted to included a two-piano work (surprisingly rare by Liszt standards!) by Liszt.

About the pianists, this was how it all came about:

One evening two years ago, I was invited to a dinner by local virtuosos Ong Lip Tat and Rena Phua. At the same table was the famous duo of David Nettle and Richard Markham! They had last performed in Singapore in 1985, and so I invited them for 2007 with one condition – they must play the Concerto Pathetique of Liszt! And so they learnt the work, and have included it in their 30th anniversary season. It’s a fantastic 18-minute long piece – much in the mould of the Sonata in B minor. Not many pianists have recorded it, among them Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire, Bartok and Dohnanyi!

I had written to Valentina Lisitsa around the same time as Valery Kuleshov when I was planning the 2006 festival, “The Golden Age of the Piano”. Both pianists would have fitted in perfectly into either festival, but as Fate would have it, Kuleshov’s agent got to me earlier, so he got to play in 2007, while Lisitsa was reserved for 2008. I received the e-mails within a day of each other! She gave me a fantastic list of Liszt, and we narrowed it to include two blockbusters – the Reminiscences de Don Juan and the solo version of Totentanz, the latter will certainly be a Singapore premiere.

It was a similar situation for Singaporean Young Virtuoso Albert Lin. I heard him and Lee Pei Ming in a joint piano recital sometime in 2003. I felt Pei Ming to be more ready of the two and so she got to play in 2006. Then, I received an e-mail from Albert saying something like, “I hope you haven’t forgotten about me.” I certainly had not! He had performed two very good recitals of piano music by Singaporean composers and that convinced me that he was every bit as deserving. So his recital on 30 June includes works by Singaporean composers and Liszt’s very private and anti-virtuosic Six Consolations.

As for Cyprien Katsaris and Minoru Nojima, the choice was a no-brainer. Both are natural-born Liszt players and legends in their own right. Katsaris’ agent, Mr John Ballard had written to me saying that the French-Cypriot virtuoso was touring regularly in Australasia, so he was definitely available. And I am so pleased that he picked an unusual selection of Liszt – one that includes a number of late works, such as the Funeral Prelude and Funeral March, Nuages gris (Grey Clouds), Csardas obstine, and At the Grave of Richard Wagner, all written in the 1880s. The jewel in the crown is however Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, one of Liszt’s most sublime creations. I had planned this to be a Singapore premiere, but the 14-year-old Rachel Cheung from Hong Kong played it at The Arts House in February!

My original programme for Minoru Nojima was the tandem of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor and Schubert’s Sonata in B flat major D.960. There was a change in programme, but I was unperturbed by it. Now we get to hear Beethoven’s Sonata Op.101, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and a rare performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata No.8. There’s enough Lisztian fireworks here to satisfy the most rabid of pianophiles.

How many years in advance are performers generally engaged for the piano festival?

I always initiate the programmes and engagements one to two years ahead of time. It gives the artists and myself more time to think through the programmes.

How do you think the festival has grown under you?

That’s a loaded question! I had inherited a marvelous and already thriving festival that had grown for ten years under the care of the previous Artistic Director Mr Goh Yew Lin. Just to do things a little differently, I set myself a few targets which I hoped to give the festival a separate identity.

I retained the idea of having a theme every year. In the past, the pianists and programmes were selected first and an overall theme was given to the festival after that. I did the opposite – create a theme and then chose the programmes based on important works I wanted performed. Then I selected the pianists who would do justice to the music and worked with them on refining the programme. Thus one might say the festival was repertoire-based rather than pianist-based. Of course, there were pianists I wanted to feature and so I included them in the year where their repertoire best fitted. Persuading them to learn certain works was not too difficult – many were keen to oblige and to be part of the artistic programming exercise.

The only year that was pianist-based was 2004 – Legends of the Piano. Even then, I had studied their repertoire closely and knew exactly which works I liked them to perform in Singapore. All the subsequent editions were repertoire-based.

One advantage of this plan was this: there was almost no repetition of repertoire. Other than Chopin’s Ballade No.1 in G minor (played by Idil Biret in 2004 and Valery Kuleshov in 2006), no single piece has been heard twice! In the earlier years years, Chopin’s popular Third Sonata was heard four times and Rachmaninov’s warhorse Second Sonata thrice. No one could accuse me of being boring!

Another obsession of mine: to make each pianist include a work that has never been heard in Singapore. So in the last three years, we have heard Singapore premieres of works by Stravinsky, Ligeti, Alkan, Bartok, Martin, Sorabji, Godowsky, Tansman, Mussorgsky, Takemitsu, McPhee, Scharwenka, Busoni, Medtner, Dutilleux, George Crumb, Dick Lee, Earl Wild, Vladimir Horowitz and Valery Kuleshov. This year, we get to hear more local premieres from Liszt, Bruch, Katsaris, Godowsky, Kapustin and Lysenko. Want to know about the premieres in 2008? There has never been such a wealth or plethora of “new” piano music to be heard.

Another development I have been proud of initiating: the Young Virtuoso Recital. Now, talented young Singaporean pianists get a chance to perform a recital alongside the more established names of the festival. Since last year, I’ve also made it a point that piano music by Singaporean composers should be included in their recital. There was initial scepticism to this proposal but the young pianists have all proven themselves to be worthy of inclusion. I now seethe at the suggestion by a former arts admininistrator (a pianist who has since “progressed” to private banking) that local talents would bring down the standard of the festival. Patent poppycock!

The Young Virtuoso concert is now in its third year. Which other pianists do you have in mind for future concerts?

That is a secret! I’ve already named the pianist for 2008, and she will play major works by Bach, Beethoven, Gubaidulina and local composer Tan Chan Boon. You’ll know about who she is in a few months’ time. As for other young local talents, there are enough names to programme recitals for another five years. And when those wunderkinds from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory graduate, there will be a further embarrassment of riches!

Are there any other ideas for expansion? For example masterclasses / chamber music concerts?

I am happy to retain the concept of four or five piano-only recitals over four evenings. This format is compact and does not lose focus. As for chamber music, there’s always the problem of logistics. I would leave it to our local musicians to pick up that tab!

Piano concerts have grown a lot more "common" in the years since the Piano Festival was first founded. How has the role of the piano festival changed since?

I am not sure whether piano recitals have become more common these days. They are still a relative rarity considering how many years of professional music making has existed in Singapore. Excluding recitals by students and local pianists, recitals by internationally known pianists in Singapore can be counted in one hand. It’s June now, and there have so far been just four piano recitals by visiting artists far this year – those by Roy Howat and Joseph Banowetz, Chen Sa and Kenneth Hamilton

The PianoFest remains the only significant ready source of piano recitals in Singapore today. However, my gut feeling is that the audience for piano music in Singapore has not grown to keep pace. If there isn’t much Chopin, Rachmaninov, Schumann or Beethoven in a recital programme, many people won’t turn up. If it isn’t a “big name” performing, people stay away. That’s a sad fact of life that won’t change until the listening public matures and becomes more adventurous, more inquisitive.

Anyhow, I think it behooves the Singapore International Piano Festival to continue setting a high standard of programming, to challenge, educate and at the same time entertain its audience. Just as you would expect the SSO to lead the way in terms of shaping the listening habits of the concert-going public, the PianoFest should do the same.

The Victoria Concert Hall is slated for renovation next year. Where will the piano festival be moving to during this renovation?
 
For your information, 2008 will be the final year I am helming PianoFest. For the 2009 edition, I return the relay baton to the founder of the festival itself, Mr Goh Yew Lin.

As to your question, there aren’t that many venues in Singapore that seats the 883 of Victoria Concert Hall. Singapore Conference Hall has about the same number of seats. However it also has a Steinway grand that is inferior to that at VCH, and acoustics not as ideal for piano music. The next best venue would be the Concert Hall at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music that seats about 650. That might be a possible venue. Who knows? The trick is in bringing the entire audience from Empress Place to Kent Ridge. Westward Ho!

Chang Tou Liang was interviewed by Derek Lim.

 

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