RENOWNED pianist John O'Conor believes it is vital to help younger musicians. An inspired and enthusiastic teacher, he has served on international juries and as artistic director of the Guardian Dublin International Piano Competition. He has also helped to put Dublin on the musical map.
In 1994 he was appointed director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Fifty this year, is there anything left for this charismatic musician to achieve?
"I would like to put dramaback into the academy," says O'Conor. "I remember hearing about theatrical productions, but by the late 1970s that had all died away. I would like to see the sort of joy that I had in drama classes. I think it helps every musician to know how to move every actor needs to know how to sing; every singer needs to know how to act. I think there should be a tremendous amount of cross pollination between the disciplines, and I think the academy should be the academy of music and drama.
Wonderful Teacher
"We have a wonderful teacher who is doing extraordinary things. I hope that students will start flocking in, and if the classes get too big, we'll expand," he shouts, throwing his arms, around in excitement.
"I want to hold classes in the mornings for women whose children are at school, and I think every mother should give her child drama lessons when he is six years old."
O'Conor adored drama as a child and learnt "how to express words in a certain way; to paint a colour". He had trouble following his mother's instructions to choose between drama and piano before he entered secondary school.
"I loved them both," says O'Conor. "But one day after drama rehearsals, Joe Dowling, a good friend at the time, saw an Abbey actor walking up the road and he got terribly excited, having seen him on stage. If it had been the pianist Veronica McSweeney, I would have been as excited, and I realised that for me, music was my burning ambition."
Arrogant Wish
O'Conor still adores the theatre. After school he endured a "dry academic depressing music degree," as a compromise for his parents, who were desperately disappointed by his decision to make music his career.
"They saw it as a terrible waste," says O'Conor. "I was good at everything as a teenager and it was taken for granted that I would take over my uncle's accountancy firm." At UCD he joined the dramatic society, taking part in several productions.
"That was where I found college," he says. "Where I found friends; parties; people who could talk about things you should talk about when you're at university life and finding your personality.
"You have to be born with a wish to be on stage," O'Conor says, and when you're young you need to have this arrogant wish to attract people to notice you. How else could you walk out in front of 3,500 people?"
The first time John O'Conor played to that number, his only worry was the distance from the wings to the pia. "I thought people would get fed up with applauding before I got there," he says. "It was such a giggly moment. I though, my God maybe someone has a skateboard.
"I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but I still love walking out on stage and sharing this phenomenal music with anybody who bothers to turn up,"
he says. "I play the most exalted, exultant, transcendental melodies and," he sighs, "ah!
And emotions and ideas that don't need words.
"And people can take what they want out of it. If you're performing say, The Appassionata for the 150th time, you must always approach it from the fact that there is somebody in the audience who has never heard it before. And you have, to open that book so that it has the same magic for that person, as it had for you the first time you heard it."
"I sometimes feel like an egotistical penguin, dressed up as I am," admits O'Conor. "There are people round the country who are leading people to music, and they're the heroes, because they're unsung."
Black Despair
About 12 years ago, O'Conor lost his joy in music. "I was doing an awful lot of new repertoire and I planned my programmes badly," he says, "and I really had a black despair. I felt I should give up playing the piano and go and live in Africa. What help was playing the piano to anybody? I was doing a recital at the RDS, It wasn't too bad.
"Afterwards a lady came back to me and she led me to believe - that she'd been contemplating suicide. She said: `I don't know why I came to the recital to night. I didn't even think I could walk out of my door, I was feeling so bad. But when you started playing, from the first note the cloud lifted.
"I don't know what you did, and I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I know I'm going to be able to do it. And thank you.' And she'd gone. I have no idea who she was," says O'Conor with a shrug. "But I never questioned walking on the stage after that."