In the final recital of his European Piano Masterworks series at the National Concert Hall, Hugh Tinney will perform the music of Ravel, Debussy and Fauré. Here, he selects nine pieces of music that have had a profound effect on his career
1 CHOPIN Barcarole
When I was about 14, my teacher gave me this to learn – very ambitious for that age, but it turned out to be a breakthrough piece for me. I swept the board in the Feis Ceoil and other competitions; anywhere I played the Barcarole, I won the prize, which was very nice. But more importantly, it had huge emotional resonance. It’s such a rich piece, with a coda which is astoundingly moving – especially for a young man going through adolescence and all the emotions that that entails. My mother used to play Chopin waltzes when I was very young. These things leave a deep emotional impression on you, which is wonderful because they give you a very firm base somewhere deep down in your psyche.
At 14, I had a very difficult decision to make as to whether I was going to be a musician at all.
At that stage I thought I was going to be a scientist. But music had a stronger emotional grip than science, and a wider variety of emotions, and this piece helped me to realise that. It gave me enormous musical joy.
2 BEETHOVEN Hammerklavier Sonata
In my teens I had a big interest in science fiction, and I read a novel by Fred Hoyle called The Black Cloud. It’s about a large life-form – an interstellar cloud – which surrounds the solar system because it wants to draw energy from the sun. And the Earth people, being clever (and being from Cambridge) manage to contact the cloud while it’s refuelling. Among the group of people involved is a concert pianist, and she’s playing the Hammerklavier, which I didn’t know at all. In the book you learn a little bit about the piece – how it’s very extreme for Beethoven, how it stands apart in terms of length, difficulty and speed markings. It’s the only one that he gave metronome markings for, and they’re very, very fast – almost inhumanly fast.
So they broadcast a rendition of this sonata up to the cloud, and the cloud listens, thinks a little bit and then sends back a request for the tape to be played – sped up by another 50 per cent! I started to learn the sonata and, many years later, I played it for the first time. But not until I was about 40.
3 BACH Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ
I couldn't pretend to be knowledgable on Bach cantatas, but this is another film/sci-fi connection. In Tarkovsky's Solaris, he uses this chorale-prelude as a leitmotif, and when I first saw the film, it swept me away. At the time I was studying piano in London. I didn't have a score, but through my scientific connections I did have access to the library in King's College in the Strand. So I dug out this thing on an LP and wrote it down by ear. Some time later, I discovered that there was an existing piano transcription by Busoni. But I stuck with my own one.
4 SCHUBERT F Minor Impromptus
Again, in London, I happened to hear one of my teachers reviewing some CDs on the radio, and he singled out Radu Lupu for his rendition of the Impromptus. So I promptly went out and bought them. That recording, its depth of feeling and emotional response, had an enormous effect on me. My father was a good amateur singer, so myself and my two sisters used to play through pieces from Schubert's song cycle Die Schone Mullerinfrom a young age, and either my dad would sing or we would sing ourselves. Some of those songs are emotionally very, very powerful and left a deep impression on me. I think what happened was that it kind of went latent: and then the Impromptus rekindled it.
5 MOZART A Major Concerto K488, and Elvira Madigan concerto K467
The A Major concerto was so difficult to master – all those arpeggios in the last movement. I was playing big romantic pieces at that time, and suddenly finding that to play apparently simple arpeggios fast and accurate was really difficult. The Elvira Madiganconcerto I associate with going into great detail – into all the little phrase marks and so on – which I wouldn't have been as conscious of before then. It really gave me a sense of Mozart's operatic connection, and the vocal techniques he uses in his phrasing and articulation. It was also a process of falling in love with Mozart through those experiences.
6 MUSSORGSKY Boris Godunov
On the subject of opera, this just crept in: I really fell in love with certain scenes. And if you want something that will reduce you to tears, the opera’s final scene – the death of Boris – will always do it.
7 RAYMOND DEANE After-Pieces No 1: By the clear, dark fountain
I first heard this in the mid-1990s. I was in a phase where I had a lot of doubts about whether contemporary music had left the piano and gone on to other instruments, and electronics, and so on. This piece changed my mind. Something about it caught me, and I’ve gone on to play and record quite a lot of Raymond’s pieces since then. In a broader sense it also helped convince me there’s an exciting field of repertoire out there to explore.
8 DEBUSSY Reflets dans l’Eau and Pelleas et Melisande
I studied this with Louis Kentner – he was my first teacher in London – when I was about 20. He was celebrated for teaching Liszt and Chopin but I specifically remember him saying, rather loftily, about that piece: "I can find no fault in it." He felt it was a perfect piece of music – and it's true that pretty well everything Debussy did from a very young age has an extraordinary finish on it. I also include Pelleas and Melisandebecause about three years ago, Opera Theatre Company asked me to participate in a two-piano production, along with my good friend Mairead Hurley, which took place in the City Hall and up in Queen's in Belfast. It's the only time in my life I've been involved in an opera, and we had great fun.
9 SCHNITTKE Piano Quintet
I first heard this piece in Bantry Music Festival with the Vanbrugh Quartet and Joanna MacGregor, around 1998 or so – another piece of contemporary music that struck me out of the blue. It’s a very dark piece, famous for having been written in the wake of his mother’s death. It’s grim and obsessive for much its length, and then there’s an extraordinary ray of sunlight at the end. The end of the piece has a kind of repeating chime which goes on and on, with the dark stuff still underneath. I’ve now played it twice, and both times it actually brought me to tears while I was playing – which is very unusual.
Hugh Tinney is at the National Concert Hall on April 27th at 8pm
