KEYS TO SUCCESS
Pianist Cho set to play NAC
For concerts, I become much more free than in competitions. I express freely what I think and what I feel.
For someone who has come out on top at some elite international piano competitions, Seong-Jin Cho takes a pretty dim view of playing for a jury panel.
“Actually, I hate competitions,” says Cho, a 23-year-old native of Seoul, South Korea.
At 14, in 2009, he became the youngest-ever winner of Japan’s Hamamatsu International Piano Competition.
In 2011, Cho, then 17, won third prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
“I didn’t enjoy at all the competition, because I was so nervous on the stage, and it was really stressful,” he says.
His career has truly taken off since the fall of 2015, when Cho won the prestigious Chopin International Competition in Warsaw, ahead of its silver medallist, Montreal pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin.
“The Chopin competition I didn’t enjoy at all,” Cho confesses. “It was October, it was really cold in Warsaw, I nearly caught a cold, and the atmosphere at the concert hall was really, really cold.
“Luckily enough, I won the first prize.
“I was so happy because I don’t have to do any (more) competitions in my life,” Cho says.
His win in Warsaw raised his profile and truly launched his career, as it previously boosted the careers of such great pianists as Martha Argerich, Garrick Ohlsson and Krystian Zimerman.
Cho, who is based in Berlin, now plays about 100 concerts annually, instead of the 20 or 30 that he previously played each year, and he plays better venues and with great orchestras.
A nine-concert run through North America between now and early March will see Cho perform works by Beethoven, Debussy and Chopin next Tuesday at Southam Hall — under less pressure and with more liberation than in competitive circumstances, he says.
“During a competition, I really try to play for myself, not for jury members, and for the audience. It is really, really difficult. They are judging me. I try to forget about that,” says Cho, who speaks Korean, English and French, and hopes to learn German.
“For concerts, I become much more free than in competitions. I express freely what I think and what I feel. Of course, I’m a little bit nervous before the concert, but compared to the competition, it’s nothing.”
Raised in a suburb of Seoul, Cho began piano lessons when he was six.
“Just as a hobby ... I wasn’t that serious,” he says.
While his parents aren’t musicians, they did have “classical music mania,” he says.
It felt very natural for Cho to play piano and to listen to his parents’ collection of classical music records.
When he was 10, Cho became more serious about piano and practising.
He gave his first recital at 11, and a few years later, his win at the Japanese competition gave him a taste of life as a classical pianist, sparking a run of more than 20 concerts in Japan, Korea and Europe.
At 18, Cho moved to Paris, where he studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Michel Béroff, and took in concerts galore by his classical piano heroes.
He also visited Chopin’s grave in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.
“Culturally, Europe, for a classical musician, is more fascinating,” he says.
“I wanted to experience European culture and many things. That’s why I moved to Paris.” Last year, Cho moved to Berlin. “Honestly, I can say that the classical music market in Korea is very small compared to Europe or America,” he says.
“There are few opportunities, so it’s much, much better for a musician to be living in Europe or in the United States, I think.”
Still, Cho’s debut album, a live recording of highlights from his victory in Warsaw, was a top seller in Korea. It even reached No. 1 on his homeland’s pop album chart.
Koreans, Cho says, “were really excited ... because I was the first Korean winner (of the Chopin competition).”
Regarding the program that he will play in North America, Cho says that he’s pleased to present two Beethoven sonatas, in part because “Beethoven is the composer I respect the most, I can say, because he was really adventurous, and his music is full of imagination, and he was really a progressive composer.”
Also, the contrast between the C minor “Pathétique” sonata (1798) and the E major sonata (1820) is a fruitful one to make, Cho says. The C minor sonata, Cho says, “is rather youthful, there’s some kind of young spirit and adventure,” while the E major sonata “is quite romantic.
“It’s like (the work of ) two different composers,” Cho says.
In his recital’s second half, Cho will pair works by Debussy and Chopin because both are “poetic and very colourful.”
Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 in B Minor “is very, very grand scale, the most grand scale music by Chopin,” says Cho, adding that it’s a new piece for him that he only began learning last December.
The pianist calls the second book of Debussy’s Images, which he will also play, “one of the most difficult pieces by Debussy, technically and musically.
“But I can relate to painting with sound with Debussy’s music,” Cho continues.
“And the second piece is Asiatic, so it feels close to me.”