Pianist Freddy Kempf was a child prodigy, but his path to an adult career was far from smooth, writes Michael Dervan.
Freddy Kempf has all the appearance of having been a typical child prodigy. He played a Mozart piano concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of eight. He won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 1992. And he rocketed to fame through the International Tchaikovsky Competition of 1998.
But hold on. He didn't win the Tchaikovsky competition. He came third. His distinction in Moscow was that everybody expected him to win, the audience was on his side and the final verdict was seen as the sort of twisted outcome that people often accuse competition juries of but can rarely prove. The winner, Denis Matsuev, is not the person anyone remembers from Moscow in 1998. Kempf, who plays in Dublin tomorrow, is.
Meeting Kempf in his immaculate north London home, he comes across as a reluctant celebrity. That's not to say he has any shyness about performing. The relationship he establishes with audiences, the communication of things otherwise incommunicable, the thrill of the act of performance and the juggling with risk as he allows himself to venture into spur-of-the-moment decisions on the concert platform are obviously the experiences that bond him to a career as a performer.
He loathes flying, an almost unavoidable concomitant of an international career, enduring it because he feels he shouldn't shy away from difficulties. Driving, however, is a pleasure, and he's happy to trek up and down Britain's motorways, and even along the autoroutes of France, in the line of work.
Yet much as he likes being in the spotlight while at the piano, he seems otherwise almost bemused by the attention he gets. He may appear on CD covers looking svelte and composed, with credits inside for hair (Ilium), clothes (Harrods) and piano (Yamaha), but in person he is reserved, a private man willing to engage earnestly with the inquiries of the outside world but not altogether comfortable with the exercise.
He doesn't really see himself as having been a prodigy. "You could call me a child prodigy in the sense that I was an early developer. But my parents did try and shield me from the typical path that a child prodigy would take," he says. "They tried to keep me in normal academic schooling. I wasn't constantly only doing music. By mid-teens, music naturally took over, of its own accord. By the time I went to music college, I was already very different from the other people. It was almost as if I hadn't had a musical education. I was very behind on my knowledge of repertoire outside piano music. I was very behind on my knowledge of chamber music.
"For me, piano was just a hobby. I wanted to do tennis, and my parents said no. I wanted to do karate. My parents said no. Eventually, piano popped up, maybe from a film that I'd seen, and they did say yes. And I did have a natural affinity and liking for it. I got good at it very quickly. After that, just the fact that I was good at it was plenty of motivation for me to keep trying to improve it. Playing a concerto was just something else I had to learn."
And that experience in concertos marked him off at college: it was an advantage most of his fellow students had never had.
The success in the BBC competition launched what he calls a small, junior career. But the progression from that to an adult career is not necessarily smooth. They are, he says, two careers. It's the same, of course, in one of the hobbies he never got to follow up - not all junior tennis champions succeed in the transition to the professional tour.
"The hardest thing for me was accepting that, no matter what I'd achieved as a child, all that was useless in my pursuit of an adult career. I think that's probably the most depressing thing for someone to accept - that, even though they've had this amazing head start, by the time they're 21 they're at the same point as all their friends at music college. You all start from pretty much the same place. You've got the advantage of having had experience. You're aware what a career is. The disadvantage is that you often wonder, why am I back here again, where I was when I was 12 or 10?"
He's sanguine about the inadequacies of teachers in advising about career management. Many of them are teachers, he says, because their careers never took off. They simply don't have the knowledge or understanding of how careers are really made. Others may be reluctant to give the best advice to students who might go on to squeeze them out of the market. Yet although he says becoming a professional performer is not a decision he consciously made, his analysis of his situation seems always to have been extremely astute.
The BBC and Tchaikovsky competitions are the ones normally associated with his name. But there were many others, a number of which ended in first-round exits. He had difficulty pacing himself: he peaked too soon or too late or was simply not ready in time. He remembers his performances at the Ferruccio Busoni International, William Kapell International and Leeds International competitions as being the low points of his professional life.
"I played so badly I didn't get through any first round. It was coupled with nerves and just ridiculous repertoire choices. It was a desperate decision to do three so close together. It made me learn what I was capable of, and after Leeds I regrouped and thought, no more messing around, you're going to get yourself a career."
In 1997, he made what he calls his first proper attempt, at the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition, in Japan. "I did get to the final and played Rachmaninov's Third. I thought it went very well, and I was the lowest-placed finalist. I couldn't understand how that happened, and then I heard the tape the next day. It sounded so much worse than I'd remembered playing. It wasn't that it was full of errors. It simply didn't make any real impact as a piece of music. That was another shock.
"Then, finally, in June 1998, I did the Tchaikovsky. And this time I decided, I'll go to Christopher Elton" - professor of piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London - "to prepare for this and I'll go to Hamish Milne" - also of the academy - "to prepare for this. I went to three very different teachers in order to get all kinds of feedback, so that I had the best chance of producing an overall refined performance. I was very well prepared for it, and that's what kick-started the career."
He feels nothing but gratitude to the Tchaikovsky competition, pointing out that there are very few contests in which you can launch your career by winning third prize.
In a sense, of course, the Tchaikovsky was no more than the opening up of possibilities. "As I said, you rarely find teachers who tell you what's important with a career. And you keep thinking, as long as I play well, that's it. But there are so many things. You've got to perform well. You've got to form close friendships with conductors."
Return engagements, he points out, can depend on how the conductors like you as well as how they like your playing. They're not going to invite you on a tour if they find you dull or boring.
Dull and boring are obviously the last things Kempf would want to be. He's a romantic at heart, and he purposely plays differently at different rehearsals for the same concert, to alert conductor and players to the possible unpredictabilities of the concert itself.
"I'm terrible in first rehearsals," he confesses. "I often come back, fuming, saying I really did not enjoy that, and complain to my agent, saying I never want to work with this person again. But usually when that happens, after the concert I'm saying, wow, I really enjoyed that, it really worked. Now, after about two years of this happening, I've decided to shut my mouth." Accommodation and adjustment are clearly key to his romanticism.
In Dublin, he's playing Mozart's concerto in E flat, K449. It's an area of repertoire he feels fully at homewith, as he's been playing Mozart concertos in public from the start. What that means in terms of the unexpected, you'll simply have to go along to the Helix tomorrow to find out.
Freddy Kempf performs with the European Chamber Orchestra at the Helix, Dublin, at 7.30 p.m. tomorrow. Also in the programme are Mozart's First Symphony, Flute and Harp Concerto (with William Bennett and Marisa Robles) and Adagio And Fugue In C Minor. Bookings at 01-7007000. You can get more details from www.thehelix.ie
