Today Dame Fanny Waterman celebrates her 95th birthday. I was privileged to host a reception for her at the House of Lords a few days ago to mark her birthday, and to celebrate the Golden Anniversary of the Leeds International Piano Competition, which she founded, and which will be held again in September of this year. Among its award winners are Michael Roll, Mitsuko Uchida, Andras Schiff, Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu, and one may safely say that it is among the leading piano competitions in the world. It is held in Leeds Town Hall with the Halle Orchestra, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, providing the backing. It put Leeds on the cultural map and has made an exceptional contribution to the musical life of the UK.
Dame Fanny was a Scholar of the Royal College of Music, and after a performing career, decided that her real vocation was teaching. She has given masterclasses on 6 continents and her books, Piano Lessons with Fanny Waterman/Marion Harewood have sold 2m copies. But, so the story goes, one night in the early 1960s she woke her husband to say she had an idea, namely to start a leading piano competition to discover new young talent. He told her to go back to sleep, but it was no dream, and she put her immense energy, charisma, organisational and fundraising skills to its establishment. Aung San Suu Kyi is a fan and asked to meet her when she was over here. Dame Fanny is retiring from the chairmanship but, with her, “retirement” has a nuanced meaning, and she will be at hand for the recruitment of her successor(s). The competition is renowned for its integrity and thoroughness and looks set to continue for another 50 years. Her particular anxiety is for the very youngest audiences, for, it seems, primary school children are not getting the exposure to classical music that they used to get, and audiences for concerts are getting older.
Dame Fanny, a bundle of energy and shrewdness, is a star in Leeds, and has honorary doctorates from the universities of Leeds and York (why not Oxford and Cambridge?) Fortunately, musicians seem to live for longer – Toscanini, Menachem Pressler, Horowitz, Menuhin, Mayer, Stravinsky, Rubinstein, Cherkassky, Backhaus, Kempff, Tureck, Klemperer, Herz-Sommer, Stokowski, Casals, Boulanger, Boult, Bruno Walter, Jochum, Maazel, Strauss, Solti, Beecham, Haitink, Bohm, Colin Davis, Copland amongst them – there is clearly a life force in music!
Why Leeds and York? Perhaps something to do with it being the Leeds piano competition that she founded, in Yorkshire?
I’m not sure I agree with the, “why not Oxford and Cambridge?” question as a matter of principle, it’s as if you think they are the only two institutions in the UK worth holding degrees from. We should be proud of the range of fine universities in this country, the “Oxbridge or nothing” mentality surely damages and holds back all the rest of them.
You’ve come “from the top down”
let me put in something from “the bottom up” –
for the general public,
sort of from the general public.
Not only can “professional workplace” skills be self-improved ‘partway outside of the box’, but so much more can ‘all-fingers-and-thumbs’ abilities be improved in our wider general “lifeplaces”;
and indeed often major achievement can be found among the millions of body movements our human-beingness has been gifted with,
whether for daily ‘normalising’, or for ‘time-out’ remedially-resolving an injury.
Using the Tetris falling-block game as an illustration, many of one’s lifeplace-abilities or enablements [as distinct from Workplace-Skills] are ‘full of holes’, or ‘more holey than righteous’ – we ‘failed’ to put all the different shapes of bricks into place such that no ‘holes’ or gaps would be left in the ‘wall of a building’ we were building.
With piano, I found late in life that one can stretch and strengthen the little fifth finger by turning the thumb under it, on an upwards scale of ten notes and the little finger over the thumb descending.
A better tip is from career organ-master Philip Liddicoat [two years ahead of me at Plymouth College WW2] who before he passed on recently had shown us via The Organist magazine, how to ‘succeed’ with an audience by first practicing to perfection the Closing bars of the piece, then the opening bars, and lastly the more ‘forgettable’ middle.
Later still when I was nearly eighty already, my grand-nephew ‘challenged’ me, “Why don’t you play the Chopin Fantasie Impromptu in C# minor”
(the one with triplets in the left hand ‘against’ fours in the right) –
“Oh that’s concert-level expertise” I replied;
but he at the same friendly level just said it again “You should play it”;
and that led me to a venture ‘outside of the Bigger-Life-Box I had been imperceptibly allowing to ‘box me in’;
and I felt a new opportunity and freedom to ‘practice practice practice’,
this time one-pointed-focusedly, because in retirement I had ‘plenty of time’, instead of in youth dodging between the bombs and various School, Boy Scouts, Church choir, and Army cadets homeworks and exams.
I set about it daily, detailed re-groupings of my fingers, halving the speed
[Hanon’s advice in “The Virtuoso Pianist” had been “First practice slowly. And then very slowly”.
Fortuitously, when that nephew’s wedding day came, I was able to play that piece right through and ‘up to speed’.
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‘Up to speed’ is a sine qua non requirement in the Workplace.
But in this much more richly varied Lifeplace, there is possibly no end to the opportunities to apply microskills from Workplaces such as piano-or other instrument playing, and musicianship,
also to discover one’s own,
and become less scared of being thought to be ‘more than halfway outside of the box’.