Peter Tuite might have dropped off the Irish classical-music radar, but his work in the US has made him an even more accomplished performer, writes Michael Dervan.
For a while last year Dublin pianist Peter Tuite was the talk of the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition. He was getting the most flattering of attention. People were upset that he failed to make it past the first round. Many in the audience seemed to have expected him to go further than any of the year's other Irish competitors, yet he fell at the first hurdle. And there was support from the jury, too. There was behind-the-scenes action on this front: he left the competition with a number of concert engagements set up by jury members who liked his playing.
He took part in the AXA competition in 2000 (suffering another first-round exit), the same year in which he scooped the top prize in RTÉ's Millennium Musician of the Future Competition. He hasn't entered many competitions, and the results, he explains wryly, have tended to be extreme. Yet in spite of the major success in the RTÉ competition his profile in Ireland hasn't been that high. He's been out of the country, studying in the United States, at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, courtesy of a 2002 Fulbright scholarship.
Tuite is one of those characters that a musical biographer would love. In 1978, at the age of two, he climbed up on a piano stool and started to pick out tunes from the television. He began composing at the age of six or seven. "I quickly branched out into large-scale works. I wrote my first sonata when I was 11. I also wrote some nocturnes, which I performed at the Feis Ceoil. I was very taken with Stravinsky and Berg and those early 20th-century people, and I tried a large-scale opera, completing about three-quarters of it, and wrote the libretto for it as well." The major influence of his teens was his piano teacher at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the late Anthony Glavin, with whom he studied from the age of 12. "It's hard to sum up Anthony," says Tuite. "He was such a complex person, with such a brilliant mind, laser sharp. He could analyse and break things down with a clarity and coherence that was formidable. This gave him the ability to teach technique in the most extraordinarily systematised, clear way. He was also a published poet, a prize-winning poet, so he had a tremendous poetic sensibility. Some lessons would be focusing on the minutiae of technique. Others would be long explorations of the poetic. So even as a youngster he gave me a strong sense of both aspects, as they relate to performing and composition and music generally.
"Anthony I stayed with for nearly 10 years. He got very ill towards the end of those 10 years. He had very bad emphysema, and it was very difficult for him even to speak, so John O'Conor offered to take over."
Tuite seems to have been as interested in musicology and music criticism as in performing and composing. After leaving school he studied music at Trinity College Dublin - "I could still do lessons across the road at the academy, keep my performing going" - and specialised in composition in the last two years of the degree. "As I came to the end of the degree, I felt I wanted to re-focus my attention on performing. When you're younger, you're not so practised at moving between the different disciplines. I found it hard to focus on all of these different disciplines. And I found I now wanted to devote time to performing."
The RTÉ competition success soon followed, and "that gave me a whole different slice of life, a travelling, performing life, receiving reviews, receiving feedback. It was a whole different scenario to the privacy of contemplation in musicology or composition. When I finished my masters with John O'Conor at the academy I thought long and hard about what to do next." All the advice, he says, was to avoid England, and either go to America or to Europe. "Especially America. Because the major universities and conservatories have just such extraordinary people. I started to research that, and I became very intrigued by Peabody, because there were two people in particular there who I was very taken with.
"At Peabody there was [ Benjamin] Pasternak, who was a pupil of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. And there was also Leon Fleisher, who's part of the Artur Schnabel tradition, very different to Serkin, very different to Horszowski."
Being part of a university, he felt, meant that the academic, musicological interests would be very well looked after, too. "The balance was just right, and I was old enough to take it all on. If I'd gone sooner, I don't know if I would have been able for the workload. It's quite intense." He describes being "exhilarated" when being "torn apart" by "a whole load of tradition".
Tuite is greatly fascinated with this idea of tradition. "In piano playing there are things that cannot be written down, they can only be passed on through demonstration, one-to-one. I thought it would be great to become part of this tradition, it was so different from what I'd had.
At Peabody, he acquired another interest, teaching. "I'm quite passionate about this now, as well, very interested in the importance of passing down knowledge in music to the next generation, because it's precious. I think that's what made the Fulbright Award I was given so attractive to me, because one of the stipulations of Fulbright is that at some point in the future you give back to your home country. I was very taken with that, so maybe that's why I got the award.
Tuite has just finished a doctorate on theological symbolism in the work of Olivier Messiaen, and hopes to publish a short book of essays. "It's not really a derivation from my thesis. I wouldn't want to read my thesis, to be honest. It's all analysis, it makes for very difficult reading. But I've become very interested in Messiaen the man, in the life and times, and in the music, and in the grander problems. I've come up with avenues, 10 reflections; I call them 'dix regards' [ a reference to Messiaen's great piano work, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus]. They're really reflections on different aspects of this man's music, food for thought."
At the moment he's not active as a composer, although he still gets ideas for pieces, and wouldn't rule out returning to composition in the future. "I've had to ask myself if my compositions were really a motivation to bring me through the history of music, to explore my own understanding of music, as much as to compose and bring something to people."
However, the performing side of his life is "generating a kind momentum which I'm finding hard to keep in check. It's great. I'm not complaining. I've concerts in Italy, Austria, Germany, am still trying to negotiate one in Paris, and ones in the United States as well."
IT'S INTERESTING THAT WHEN he refers to tonight's concert with Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra he talks of presenting what Beethoven's First "might" be.
"I don't know for sure. I don't think anybody does. But I take a stand based on my understanding, my grappling with this composer and my own imagination. I hope it's stimulating for people." On those occasions when I've heard Tuite play, there's never been any shortage of stimulation. In concert he comes across as an individualist who strikes unusual attitudes, who reads music, as it were, from unexpected angles, and makes often idiosyncratic choices in his interpretative approaches.
In terms of technique he has shown a wealth of colouristic gift and a resourceful approach to piano sonority that make him unique among Irish pianists. Those exceptional gifts, and his willingness to pursue his chosen paths to their logical conclusions, may well be factors which proved his undoing in the AXA competition, where it's likely the flavour was just too distinctive for jurors of conservative taste.
The strength of character in his playing has led some listeners to regard him as wilful or eccentric, on the assumption that he's setting out to be different. That, however, is exactly the opposite of what he intends.
On the one hand: "Any great work is written with vision. You have to be courageous. You need integrity, determination and fearlessness. You put yourself out there, you might get shot down, sometimes you do." On the other hand: "I don't see my playing as free. I don't approach a composition from the point of view of being free. Instead, I try to construct an interpretation I see as being in harmony with the text, that is derived directly by the text, that is informed by tradition, and yet is alive with its own inexorable logic. It's funny, many people have said to me over the years that my playing is free, yet I see it as rigorous."
There's just one upcoming Irish engagement for the strange and fascinating musical cocktail that is Peter Tuite. It seems to have been the old story of out of sight, out of mind, that his years in the US have caused neglect at home. Apart from the Beethoven with the RTÉ NSO, his Irish diary is a blank. Perhaps this evening's performance will change all that.
Peter Tuite plays Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with the RTÉ NSO under Gerhard Markson at the National Concert Hall tonight
