Living the life of his concert hall dreams
WHEN you grow up in a place like Sebokeng in a family with not “a bone of music” in their collective body, fall in love with a white grand piano (perhaps being played by Liberace) on a TV screen, never see a real one until you are 14 and take a vow to become a concert pianist before the age of 10, you must be have a special passion to be a concert pianist.
That said, the effervescent young pianist John Ntsepe, one of South Africa’s rising stars in his late 20s, calls himself a “freak” and is as humble about this growing career as it is possible to be.
Ntsepe won a special prize among strong competition in the 2013 International Brahms Competition in Pörtachach, Austria, for artistry and originality, and it is a measure of his unorthodox even controversial style that three of the judges gave him virtually full marks and two didn’t like it, to the point of hating it. This, noted a close friend in Vienna, affirms that “you are weird”. It also showed that his gut feel to do it as he felt it and be true to himself worked.
Ntsepe will open the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra season on August 7 at the City Hall with Bernhard Gueller on the podium. He will play the Liszt Piano
Concerto no 2, and as Liszt provides much freedom in interpretation, he says, Gueller, the orchestra and the audience will have a ride. After his first rehearsal with a friend playing the piano reduction of the orchestral part, he is really excited about the piece.
An uncle bought John a keyboard with 32 keys and Ntsepe taught himself to play via his own form of tonic sol-fa in which C was 1 and B was 7. This scheme enabled him to score popular tunes and church hymns and he began to develop harmonies, all the time without a single lesson. At 14, Ntsepe went to a school that had a piano, and a choir teacher listened to him and took him to a teacher in Vereeniging, who “fell off her chair when I did her ear tests”. She couldn’t believe it.
Two years later, the teacher, Vanessa Burger, let him go, knowing there was nothing further she could teach him and he was accepted by the National School of Arts in Pretoria. There he realised he knew nothing, for he had never had firm tuition in the basics like the Chopin etudes or Mozart, and so his music tuition began in earnest.
A protégé of Lionel Bowman, after winning a prize in the Lionel Bowman Beethoven Piano Competition, he entered the University of Pretoria to study with Ella Fourie, graduated and then moved to Cape Town to do a postgrad with François du Toit at UCT.
“François taught me that there was no need for speed, and so I developed a feeling for freedom and space. This equipped me well for Vienna. I auditioned for the conservatory and was accepted in 2011. I needed to be in a place from where it was easier to enter competitions, but also I need to be in a place which has a feeling for the Germanic composers like Beethoven and Brahms. These ‘dead white composers’ so often disparaged by ignorant people are really alive here, the energy and environment enrich them and me.
“Being here has broadened my horizons, and instead of listening mostly to CDs I have been exposed to so many performers of the best – Pollini, Argerich and Barenboim. When Barenboim conducted the Brahms First Piano Concerto I was in tears to hear what he did with the orchestra. For the first time I didn’t listen to the piano.
“On the other hand, I walked out of a concert recently when the performer took a hammer in some contemporary music to the beautiful Bösendorfer…”
Ntsepe’s influences were the “oldtimers” like Horowitz and Arrau, and he is grateful to people like Wendy Ackerman and Ben Rabinowitz who believed in him.
What’s next? Graduation next year and then plans to do a Doctor of Music degree in piano at the Höchschule für Musik in Graz, Austria. He will see where the future takes him, but admits to a couple of projects like performances around Europe. He has also been invited to do solo and concerto performances and give masterclasses in a chamber music festival which takes place annually in Chile.
“I don’t think I will stop learning until I am in my 90s.”
The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra season runs for four weeks. The first concert, on August 7, features Ntsepe in the Liszt Piano Concerto no 2. The concert at the City Hall begins with the Mozart
Overture to the Marriage of Figaro and
concludes with the monumental Sym
phony No 2 by Rachmaninov. Bernhard Gueller is on the podium.
Get subscription and season tickets from Computicket. A RISE cocktail curtain raiser begins in the Sunken Lounge at 7pm, free to concertgoers. See www.cpo.org.za Call Artscape Dial-a-Seat at 021 421 7695.