Becoming a star against the odds helped Simon Trpceski keep his feet on the ground, writes MICHAEL DERVAN
SIMON TRPCESKI IS a man in a million. Well, in two million actually. He is the best-known classical musician to have come out of the Republic of Macedonia. But his leap to international fame was brought about in England, by the London International Piano Competition in 2000.
He didn’t actually win the competition. Finnish pianist Antti Siirala, who later went on to win the competitions in Dublin and Leeds, was the first prizewinner. And Trpceski wasn’t expecting to win. So he played to enjoy himself. After all, he had just turned 20, and he was on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time in his life. What was there to lose? His playing won the attention of one very important listener, a talent spotter from the international agency IMG Artists. He was quickly signed up and, basically, he hasn’t looked back since.
Ending up as a classical pianist seems to have been something of an accident. His first instrument was an accordion, and the repertoire was folk music. Neither of his parents had any classical training – his father is a judge, his mother a pharmacist – and his older brother and sister studied law and economics. His musical talent was clear to everybody, but he couldn’t take up the accordion at the primary music school. It simply wasn’t taught there. So he chose piano as the closest and next best thing.
“I was very lucky at the beginning of my education. It coincided with the coming of the Russian teachers, Ludmilla and Boris Romanov, from Moscow. It was a stroke of great luck for the whole country of Macedonia. It’s a small country, but it has a lot of talented people. The Russian teachers really raised the level. They brought a new way of thinking from the old Russian school. Boris Romanov was part of the Moscow Conservatory, studied with Konstantin Igumnov, who was in close relation with Rachmaninov, and with Jacob Milstein, who was a close friend of Sviatoslav Richter.”
Getting to study with the Romanovs, he says, was “priceless”. He always worked hard, and refuses to countenance the word prodigy. “Nothing was falling from the sky,” is how he puts it. And he’s very grateful that the Romanovs were such hard taskmasters. They pushed him, never in a negative way, he says, through huge swathes of repertoire, and even though he may not always have appreciated the burden at the time (playing football was a major distraction), the experience now stands him in good stead.
Resources were always limited in his family, he says. Their apartment was small, they shared it with his grandmother, and money was tight. The breakup of Yugoslavia was underway, and life was full of uncertainties. He quotes Pavarotti, “We had so little, but no one had more than us.”
“I was so happy to live in such a wonderful, supportive family.” They supported him in entering international piano competitions when air fares were high and visas difficult to get. Getting out of Macedonia was not easy, and even today, international travel involves far more visa-related headaches for a Macedonian than it would for a citizen of the EU – including quite a few, as it turns out, for Trpceski to visit Ireland from England to play with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall.
He regards himself as fortunate in the way he chose to approach competitions. His interest was in finding out what he was worth, what his talent amounted to, when compared to his international peers. He wasn’t out to win, and he had no reputation to lose. He has one now, of course. He has been a BBC New Generation Artist, his first CD in EMI’s Debut series was such a success that the second disc was issued at premium price, and he regularly appears with leading orchestras in the world’s major music centres. Maintaining that reputation by satisfying the expectations of listeners who’ve heard him before, he sees as one of the major challenges of this stage in his career.
He’s just played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto for the second time in London, and he’s clearly delighted that the audience seemed to enjoy his approach in 2009 every bit as much as they did back in 2004. In this best-known of pieces, he says, he has no interest in trying to be different. He wants to sound natural. He wants the lyrical passages to have a singing quality, and the dancing passages to dance. And he reaches into to his experience with Macedonian folk music for inspiration.
He limits the number of engagements he accepts, because money is not a primary concern. He’ll stop, he says, “if I feel that the machine is taking over”. Paradoxically, he writes pop songs from time to time, he says, and has had some hits in Macedonia. So he does have a musical fallback.
The biggest thrill of his career, he says, has been the pure pleasure he gets from performing, not just with the great orchestras but also the lesser ones, not just the big halls, but also the smaller ones, especially in his native country. And the pleasure, he says, comes from sharing his audience’s feeling of “this pure magic and love for the music itself”. It’s a pleasure he can’t really express in words. “If I could put it in words, I would be a poet.”
Simon Trpceski plays Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the RTÉ NSO under Gerhard Markson at the NCH tomorrow
