Rising Stars

How long do you have to practise the piano to be able to play a Chopin waltz properly? How long must you practise Beethoven’s piano sonatas until you’re able to play them in public? How many years of study does it take to master Brahms’s Hungarian Dances? And how much life experience do you need to do justice to Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s “Songs without Words”? Most piano virtuosos invest their whole lives in order to meet the high demands that the concert business makes of them. They study for many semesters at different universities and conservatories, practising their technique and training their art of expression. And then there are the exceptional talents of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, such as Aidan Zhao and Deva Mira Sperandio, just 13 and 17 years old respectively, who are already prepared to tackle Chopin and Beethoven. They too have already studied with renowned professors at assorted conservatories and have participated in exclusive masterclasses, dedicating their lives to the piano. Is there perhaps something in the playing of such young people that we can’t find in older, ostensibly more mature pianists? A certain fearlessness perhaps, or a greater open-mindedness towards the difficult works of the repertoire? Their sheer youthful joy in performing? Or is it the buoyant sound of extraordinarily talented pianists who are already very advanced, but haven’t yet been moulded by the music business?

You can hear for yourself how the 13-year-old Aidan Zhao interprets Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s sparkling, thoroughly Romantic Song without Words in f-sharp minor, how he engages with the wit and surprises in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 6, and how he masters the bitonal, rhythmic challenges of Alberto Ginastera’s rousing Danzas Argentinas. Deva Mira Sperandio will reveal her skill in the virtuoso, restless, scurrying runs in the first movement of Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata in b-flat minor and in the extreme complexity of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre – an arrangement in which her two hands at the piano have to do the work of an entire orchestra. Despite all the talent, musicality and sheer hard work that are necessary to perform these works at concert level, this 17-year-old is still convinced she’s a long way from reaching her goals: “Sometimes I feel like an observer, looking at the music from different angles, searching for the composer’s intentions, scrutinising their score in a never-ending search for an impossible perfection”.

This concert is a collaboration between ANDERMATT MUSIC and Swiss Alps Classics.