The Russian pianist Nikolai Demidenko is now such a well-known presence throughout the musical world that it would be easy to forget the special place Ireland played in the early years of his international career. In the 1980s, before he had acquired his present fame and fortune, Demidenko was championed by the Belfast Festival's director, Michael Barnes, who liked the young Russian's playing so much he brought him back year after year. It's the sort of gesture that performers don't forget, and Barnes and Belfast still retain a special place in Demidenko's affections.
In 1990, five years after his British dΘbut, he settled in England, and in 1995 he was granted British citizenship. There's a tendency these days to see such gestures by former Soviet citizens as a definitive snub to the social and political system in which they grew up. But when I ask Demidenko whether the Soviet Union of his youth was a good place for the study of music, he answers with a resounding affirmative.
"Best in the world. Absolutely, unquestionably. Best in the world. The educational standards were not simply much higher than what I can see in the West. They were on another planet, in another dimension." The pressure to achieve was intense and excuses weren't welcome. "We had an incredible education, the whole culture splashed on us. I was lucky that I went to a special school, the Gnesin Music School, and we had terrific teachers there, mainly old ladies from the surviving intelligentsia, those who survived through Stalin's times. But" - he lowers his voice to a hush - "they were spectacular. That knowledge, you can't replace it with anything else." Not only was the musical education wide-ranging, with encouragement to explore chamber, orchestral, and vocal music, plus the repertoire for other instruments, but the high standards applied to other subjects.
"Every teacher was entirely convinced that his discipline was the most important of all. So absolutely no excuses with maths, or physics, or chemistry, or with the physical exercises which were also a part of that.
"In Russia, practically every pupil swims. People start swimming at a very early age, and it's part of their education. If you just go into water, say it's nice and swim for 25 metres, that's one thing. How about a kilometre - timed. That's hard." And although music students didn't really have the money to afford concerts, there were always ways of getting in, even if the seats weren't so good.
Demidenko paints a picture of himself as too preoccupied with learning to have paid much notice to the political system. "You see, when you are inside, you don't pay much attention, even when you see the news on the television and 100 per cent of the news every day is about the great president, general secretary, Mr Brezhnev, or whoever, and all the positive reports are about the country getting richer and better, and then you go to a shop and you can't buy a piece of bread. That's what happened in the 1980s. But we didn't have much time to notice it, frankly, because so many things had to be done - probably a good thing.
"The education given to us," says Demidenko, "was so good that several pupils, after having studied 11 years at the special music school, went brilliantly into architecture, into maths, into physics, no problems." He's retained wide interests himself. "Even today, I'm very interested in electronics and computing and with the way the Internet works . . . I just try to understand how the things are being done, how they work . . it's a lovely instrument to understand yourself. And when you understand certain processes of your mind, it helps in music."
Once he had his sights set on the piano career, he knew where he wanted to go - to the Moscow Conservatoire, a move that couldn't be taken for granted given what he calls the "undeclared war" that existed between the different arms of music education in the Soviet State. "And there was no question about who I wanted to study with, it was Bashkirov only."
Dmitri Bashkirov was one of the pupils of the legendary Alexander Goldenweiser, a close associate of the composers Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Medtner, whose best-known pupils in the West are Lazar Berman and Tatiana Nikolayeva. Along with Demidenko, Dmitri Alexeev, winner of the 1975 Leeds Piano Competition, is the best-known of Bashkirov's pupils. "I knew how Bashkirov's pupils played, and the best indication of his teaching skill was that all of them played differently, and none of them played the way he did. And I liked the way he played himself. I talked to him, and my first teacher talked to him, and he said: 'OK, if you get through the exams I will take you.'"
For Demidenko, what we now call the Russian piano tradition was defined by the cultural background. "As the country was separated from the West for decades, it went its own ways. It had to grow on all the wealth from the past. That's different from the West, naturally." Can we be sure, he asks, that Viennese musicians of today play and continue the traditions of Beethoven and Schubert? "No. Not at all. There are some verbal traditions, some cultural traditions, yes. There are some national things which are reflected in music, yes. But it's not the main thing. It's people who pass the knowledge. So every next generation we have changes. Times change. People change. Style changes as well.
"In Russia when you consider who was the first professional piano teacher who really meant a huge lot to the country and who established a professional piano and composing school, it was John Field - a great Russian composer! Welcome to the bridge between Ireland and Russia! Since then, when the Moscow and St Petersburg Conservatoires were established in the 1860s by the Rubinstein brothers, Nikolai and Anton, they just started teaching people in a certain direction, so the way pupils played was heavily influenced by these two brilliant musicians. At that time, Russian people could travel around the world, so many went to Europe, studied there, and there were quite a few pupils of Liszt, and Leschetizky who came back to Russia and continued the traditions. That has all been passing through the generations.
"Actually, I've got a direct link to Nicolas Medtner. When he was teaching in Russia before he left for the West, one of his pupils was Abram Shatskes, an extremely gifted pianist. There are several extremely beautiful recordings by him, and his pupil was my first teacher." Anna Kantor, the lady who guided Demidenko through his early years, was also the teacher of Evgeny Kissin. "So some link is certainly there, when it comes to the phrasing, the way you treat the sound, the way you keep your general attitudes to the music. Certainly, that was a great influence.
"That's probably what makes most of the differences. On the surface, I would say that in Russia, pupils are more encouraged to use the natural weight of their arm, which gives you a much bigger variety of sound and different depth of sound, more things to play with. But it's only a thing on the surface. It's a way of thinking which we are really talking about."
For Demidenko, the great strength of that way of thinking is structural, and he doesn't feel that there are any national limitations to it.
"Almost any piece of music is cosmopolitan, on the grounds that it's the international language, it's feelings, it's what we can understand without an interpreter. Only when it comes to the 20th century, some other kind of music exists, when you are supposed to enjoy the construction more than the emotions, almost like mathematics. It's absolutely dead for me. I'm not sensitive to that. It doesn't mean it's bad, or it doesn't mean that I'm bad either. It's just an incompatibility. We all live in a democracy. We all have a freedom of choice."
In the post-Soviet era, he sees the differences between Russia and the West diminishing. "I would say there are differences, but there would be less and less of them. Consider how many skilful teachers left Russia in the last 15 years. And there they are in the West, teaching successfully, so, by now, there are lots of results of that teaching. And we'll see more and more of that. And that's a perfectly natural historical process of different schools coming to some next step."
When I ask about the general state of piano playing, he replies with a long sigh before saying: "As always, evolving," and then he cautions against looking at certain periods in the past as a sort of golden age. When we look at the past, he says, we tend to see a distorted reality in which only the peaks are visible.
"Nowadays it's impossible to play the way people played in the 1930s. It's even impossible and unthinkable to play the way people played in the 1960s. We are all a reflection of our time. That's why when some students try to imitate, say, recordings by Glenn Gould from the 1960s, it's pathetic. It can't succeed. It was a different time. If they tried it in the 1960s, they probably would have had more success. Now, they can only enjoy it at a distance. They have to create their own way.
"Life goes on."
Nikolai Demidenko tours a programme of Philip Hammond (The Island Beyond the World), Beethoven (Sonatas in F, Op. 10 No. 2, and D minor, Op. 31 No. 3) and Chopin (Preludes, Op. 28) to Blanchardstown (today), Castlepollard (tomorrow), Dublin (St Werburgh's Church, Wednesday 10th), New Ross (Friday 12th), Drogheda (Saturday 13th), Carlingford (Sunday 14th), Clifden (Tuesday 16th), and Downpatrick (Saturday 20th). Details from Music Network at 01-6719429.
