Benjamin Grosvenor - Westcliffe-on-Sea, Essex - UK
Benjamin
Grosvenor was a finalist in the BBC Young
Musician of the Year aged just 11, which he followed this year (2011)
by becoming the youngest-ever
soloist in the history of the BBC Proms
when he plays Liszt's Second Piano Concerto on the opening night.
Furthermore, he just signed a deal with Decca as their youngest-ever
artist.
"My mother tried to start me when I was five, but I couldn't be bothered.
I only began practising seriously when my friends at school started to
play, and I thought, 'they're not going to get better than me!'"
Benji's mother taught him until he was nine. "She realised I had a
gift for music when I was eight and I could play a Chopin waltz with
more of a feeling for conveying emotion in the music than her 17- or
18-year-old pupils. But I don't have any particular early memories of
the piano," he said.
Benji's inspirations don't come from today's pianists. "I've become disillusioned with how people play
these days. If you compare the way people perform Mozart now with, say,
Lili Kraus's recordings, or Schnabel's Beethoven with today's players –
today, things are so much blander and more boring.
They were each so
unique back then." His favourite - "Probably Horowitz, but
there are so many: Cziffra, Rosenthal, Cortot, Cherkassky, Moiseiwitsch.
Maybe it's because of recording and the pressure to make things
note-perfect, or the influence of competitions, but we've lost touch
with that tradition of playing, with its imagination and expression."Maybe neither the Alfred Brendel nor
the flashy Lang Lang brand of pianism would interest him as much as the
older generation. He admits to being fascinated by Chinese sensation Yuja
Wang's repeated octave-runs, but really, "it's
with the old dead guys" of the bygone age. Their fearlessness
is what he aspires to, even if it means doing things the composer didn't
write. "If you presented any composer with their music in a completely
different way from what they wrote, but it was incredibly effective,
they would be flattered. And with most of the composers I play, there's
even less of an obligation, because they're dead. They're not ever going
to hear it."
