Music that Changed Me

Pianist

Pianist Charles Owen

Charles Owen enjoys an international player as both a soloist and as part of a piano duo with Katya Apekisheva, with whom he is co-artistic director of the London Piano Festival. He celebrates three successful decades as a performer with a 50th-birthday recital with actor Simon Callow at Kings Place on 15 September. His performance of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, recorded at the Menuhin School during lockdown, is released on Avie on 17 September.

Iwas born in Cambridge and my mother used to push my buggy into King’s College Chapel to hear the choir rehearsing. Musical standards were certainly set high early! We later moved to Hampshire, where my father was a vicar, so my early memories are connected with church music and the organ. My mother had a little Bosworth cottage piano on which I spent hours improvising.

After lessons with the local organist, who charged 50p, my first proper piano teacher was Anne Butterworth, who helped me get a place at the Menuhin School when I was 13. At the end of my first week, the pianist Imogen Cooper came down to play an ALL-SCHUBERT programme. I was sitting about two metres from this imposing presence, and I can still see her steely strong fingers carving the dramatic A minor Sonata from the keyboard. Little did I know that she would invite me to study with her and would become an important presence in my life. Imogen’s teaching has been revelatory – her sharp ears, her attention to detail, style and sound colour. In a world awash with marvellous pianists, her playing stands out because she communicates a real message.

I saw Yehudi Menuhin’s incredible face and violin on the covers of my mum’s LPS. Again, I never imagined I would experience coaching and discussions with him when he was in his 70s, then watch him roll around on the floor demonstrating yoga positions during the school meetings. Years later, I found his recording of ELGAR’S Violin Concerto, made aged 16 with the 60-year-old Elgar conducting. My family moved to Elgar country when I was 17 and I adore that landscape. So with the combination of Elgar and Menuhin, Worcestershire and the elegiac nature of that concerto, I find myself moved to tears.

And hose long lines: Menuhin sounds as if his bow is ten metres long, and his high notes are like the larks above the Malverns.

I went to the Royal College of Music to study with an amazing Russian teacher, Irina Zaritskaya. Another of her students, Katya Apekisheva, is now my duo partner – we are also co-founders of London Piano Festival held at Kings Place. It seems all the important influences of my life as a pianist have been strong women. During those years, a friend took me to hear the mezzo Brigitte Fassbaender and pianist Graham Johnson at Wigmore Hall, and I was captivated by her presence and the powerful range of her extraordinary voice. I collected her recordings almost obsessively. Fassbaender’s SCHUMANN is intensely emotional and her word-painting so colourful that she turns Frauenliebe into an utterly visceral and direct experience.

When I was younger I rather dismissed HANDEL – I didn’t connect with him as a performer. But in the 1990s I saw the film My Night With Handel, presented by Jonathan Keates on Channel 4, and was blown away by the emotion in those arias – the sensuality and depth of expression. I had no idea how great and varied a composer he was. His pastoral ode L’allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, setting Milton’s poetry and Jennens’s words, is extraordinarily powerful. I listened to it a lot in early lockdown, when we were allowed to take walks in the countryside and reconnect with the natural world.

That brings me to JANÁ EK’S wonderful opera The Cunning Little Vixen, which is so joyful and funny but also contains a profound sense of loss. All Janá ek’s hallmarks are there – the searing lyricism and nostalgia, the short motifs, little rhythmical cells that underpin the entire work. I adore this late masterpiece, with its deep understanding of the earth, of the seasons turning and ultimately a sense of hopeful rejuvenation.