A key figure promotes the city
Spanish pianist, who made the bustling metropolis his home, named as tourism ambassador, Zhang Kun reports.
Spanish pianist Mario Alonso Herrero has been appointed as ambassador in the promotion of Shanghai as an international tourist destination. Having lived in the city for more than seven years, he believes Shanghai is the perfect home for a musician like himself.
In the role, he recently witnessed China’s first domestically built cruise ship depart on her maiden voyage, and attended the lighting ceremony of the lantern show at Yuyuan Garden during the city’s Chinese New Year celebrations. He speaks and reads fluent Chinese, cooks authentic Chinese food and, in playing more than 30 concerts around China every year, he always manages to include some Chinese music into his repertoire.
One of Spain’s most internationally renowned pianists, Alonso Herrero was described by Audio Classical magazine as “a pianist possessing the talent and intelligence necessary for piano interpretations and endowed with the maturity and professionalism needed to overcome any technical difficulty”.
Alonso Herrero has received awards in 15 national and international competitions in Cagliari, Parma, Valencia and San Sebastian. He was winner of the first Grand Prize and a gold medalist in the International Piano Competition Panama in 2006. In 2005 and 2008, he received the prestigious Juventudes Musicales award in Madrid from Her Majesty the Queen Sofia of Spain.
The 41-year-old musician used to study music and has lived in the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Having traveled to more than 50 countries, in 2017, he chose to settle down in Shanghai.
“After a week in Shanghai I felt like I belonged here — I didn’t feel that way living three years in the UK,” he says, and attributed that to the friendliness of people in Shanghai, and common values between Spain and China.
Another important reason why he feels at home in Shanghai is that, as a musician in constant need of inspiration, Shanghai offers a rich cultural life, with colorful theater shows, museums, art exhibitions and a multicultural landscape that integrates both the old and new, and Chinese and Western elements.
In Shanghai, he has played at the 97-year-old Shanghai Concert Hall, the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center in Pudong, and the Poly Grand Theater in the suburban Jiading district. Next month, he will play in another new concert hall, the AIA Grand Theater, a 1,715-seat hall sitting on the northern tip of the Western bank of the Huangpu River that officially opened in September.
Alonso Herrero notes that, in the past decade, new performing arts venues have mushroomed not only in Shanghai, but also the secondand-third tier cities in China. Equipped with modern facilities, they have nurtured wider public interest in classical music and, as a result, he has found that audiences are more knowledgeable about music, compared to 2014, when he played his first concert in Shanghai.
Next week, he will embark on a recital tour to 15 cities around China, playing a repertoire of Bach, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev, visiting cities such as Changsha in Hunan province, Fuzhou in Fujian province, Zhengzhou in Henan province, and Hefei in Anhui province.
Later this year, Alonso Herrero will collaborate with Shanghai native and violinist Wu Zhengyu, recording Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s complete works for the violin and piano. The duo will also play several concerts in Europe including performances in Madrid and Granada in Spain, and Salzburg in Austria.
On March 30, he will collaborate with the Suzhou Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Chinese conductor Liao Guomin, performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2, a difficult piece that is both emotionally demanding and technically challenging.
The pianist explains that Prokofiev composed the piece after Max Schmidthof, a pianist friend of his, took his own life. The original score was destroyed in a fire and reproduced two years later, when the Russian composer, an accomplished pianist himself, premiered it as the soloist in 1924.
Alonso Herrero believes that the technique is the easiest part of the performance, because all it takes is muscle movement. “The really difficult part is the cultural background and message behind the music,” he says. “Only when you really understand the piece can you play it well, and transmit the rich cultural and emotional meaning to the audience.
“When playing a piece of music, you try to express the composer’s ideas, as well as your own interpretation — that’s what makes a performance unique,” the Spanish pianist continues. “There may be something different every time you play a piece, because you have different thoughts on your mind, so playing the music is a perpetual process of searching for the truth in the piece.”
There can never be a 100 percent perfect rendering of a composition, he says. “As you age, your life experience becomes a treasured asset that can help you interpret music better and find more depth.”
He also believes that living in a different culture offers an important opportunity to enrich a person’s experience. For the encore piece at his concerts, he always tries to learn some local music, often transposing traditional Chinese melodies to the piano.
Another way to embrace the culture and lifestyle of China is cooking. Alonso Herrero has enjoyed Chinese food since childhood, when his Chinese schoolmate would throw birthday parties at the local Chinese restaurant. Moving to China he learned to cook authentic Chinese food. He cooks yellow croaker with rice cake, and makes dumplings from scratch. He even created a vegetarian version of the Sichuan cuisine Mapo Tofu, swapping out the minced meat for chopped mushrooms.
As well as all this, Alonso Herrero is an avid runner and yoga practitioner, with his best marathon time registered at under four hours. Something athletes and pianists have in common, he says, is endurance. It takes long hours of practice every day to be a capable performer, just as it takes hours of training to be a marathon runner.
There is also the breathing element, which is equally important in both running and playing the piano. “You need to find the intricate points in your performance to catch a breath, and relax your muscles just a little, just as finding the right rhythm of breathing while running. In that way, you can communicate with the audience and better convey to them the meaning of the music.”
As you age, your life experience becomes a treasured asset that can help you to interpret music better and find more depth.”
Mario Alonso Herrero, Spanish pianist and Shanghai tourism ambassador