Years of family support are paying off for Finghin Collins, writes Catherine Cleary
It was a first for the bishop in Goatstown that year. Brows wrinkled when the dark-haired boy with long-fingered hands presented his confirmation name at the altar in 1988. The way he saw it, you only get one opportunity to pick your own name. So Finghin James Amadeus Collins he became, and he weathered much playground teasing in the weeks that followed. Less than three years later the south Dublin schoolboy made his debut at the National Concert Hall, playing his hero Mozart's Concerto for Three Pianos and Orchestra with his teacher John O'Conor and the French pianist Philippe Cassard.
This pleasant, serious young man talks in crisp bursts that let you imagine the clarity of his playing. He has been called dazzling by one critic. Already this year he has played at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, in New York, performed with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London and played his first concert in Hong Kong. When he turns 30, next year, Collins looks set to shed the skin of "promising" and "young" and begin to evolve into an established international musician.
His youth has always featured large in anything written about him. When he reached up to tinkle the ivories on the family piano he was just three years old. His 14-year-old sister, Mary, did not brush his hands away from where she was practising but lifted him on to the seat beside her and began to teach him.
He took his first preliminary piano exam at the age of four or five, wearing a pair of green corduroys that became his music-exam trousers. So should parents start their toddlers on the piano? "My nephew just turned three. On his birthday I said, 'It's time to start him,' but, no, there's no need to start that young. I just did it because my sister was playing." Neither of his parents, who are scientists, played music, although they always encouraged their children. The music started with Mary and swept down through his sister Dearbhla, also a celebrated piano soloist, and brother Donagh to him.
"Dearbhla and I play a lot together, a lot of Mozart, because Mozart wrote quite a lot for two people at the one piano. He was very close to his sister, as I am to Dearbhla, so it's a nice link." The music-filled family home eventually housed three pianos: a grand and two uprights.
Next month Collins will be one of the musicians featured in an eight-part RTÉ television series celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. He will be playing and talking about one of the composer's most "dramatic and beautiful and popular" concertos, No 20 in D minor.
After studying under O'Conor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music from the age of six to 22, Collins went to Geneva to continue under Dominique Merlet. His biggest break came in 1999 when he won the Swiss Clara Haskil competition.
The competition scene is gruelling, he says. Judges sit impassively as each nervous competitor takes his or her place at the piano. "What I don't envy with people like tennis players is that their whole professional career is based around competitions. They have to always win. Musicians have to go through the hoops of competition, but once they come out the other side they're just playing concerts, so it becomes much more pleasant."
He spends between four and seven hours a day practising. Self-discipline is crucial. "You could just surf the internet or go shopping, and there's nobody going to say a word to you." When he is not in airports, concert halls or hotel rooms he lives between Dublin and his house in Kilkenny, on the banks of the Barrow, where he has started to love gardening and watching his roses grow.
Music was always going to be his livelihood. "As you go through your teens it dawns on you that you do have to make a living somehow. For me there was never anything else other than playing the piano." Unlike musicians who bring their instruments with them - sometimes nestled in their own first-class seats - pianists never know what awaits them at a concert venue. One of his favourite locations is a community hall "in the middle of nowhere" near Callan, in Co Kilkenny, where a local-authority-owned "beautiful, beautiful Steinway" sits silent most of time under its dust sheet. A number of other counties also have Steinways after availing of an Arts Council scheme some years ago. "They should be played more. An unplayed piano is a sad piano."
Is he careful with his hands? "Yes. Now I chop vegetables and I cut the grass. But I haven't got insurance. People keep saying I should get insurance, but I think you can overinsure yourself." His concert audiences typically consist of older people, although in Hong Kong the profile was much younger. But he believes that classical music should be seen as something for everyone.
"Everybody should have a chance to try music. Obviously, a lot of people will find they don't like it or it doesn't suit them, and when they get into adolesence they think it's so boring and dull, and they want to go out to dreadful mudfests and get dirty and listen to ridiculous music. And that's fine. But I think everybody should have a go. They shouldn't be forced if they don't like it. But there's a lot of untapped talent out there, I'm sure."
The Mozart Sessions start on RTÉ1 on July 16th, at 7.30pm. Finghin Collins has just completed a CD of Schumann piano works on the Claves label, available from www.finghin collins.com