'I don't feel that playing the piano for a living is a tremendous achievement'

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: JOHN O'CONOR:Even after retiring as head of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, John O'Conor is as passionate as ever about educating 'the audiences of the future'

THE NEWS THAT John O’Conor is headed for Shenandoah conjures up a wonderfully bizarre image: our most cherished classical pianist seated on a white horse, Stetson and all, riding off into the American sunset as Lee Marvin growls “I was born under a wand’rin’ star” on the soundtrack. But hold on a minute. That can’t be right, surely? If there’s going to be a soundtrack it has to be Beethoven, of whose music O’Conor is a renowned interpreter. And, though he retired as director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music this year, O’Conor is not leaving Ireland. Instead he will divide his time between teaching at the academy, on Westland Row in Dublin, and teaching at Shenandoah University, in the state of Virginia, where he has been appointed “distinguished visiting artist”.

The bit about being born under a wandering star fits quite well, however. O'Conor has been a wandering star for decades. I remember, as a penniless student in the late 1970s, fighting my way into a free recital he gave at the National Gallery of Ireland. It was crammed; many of us ended up sitting on a marble staircase around the corner from the piano. Nobody minded. O'Conor was just back from Japan, where he had been mobbed – mobbed! – on the street. It was all a far cry from dark, gloomy Dublin, and O'Conor was a musical ambassador for Ireland long before U2, Enya or, God help us, Boyzone.

Since then he has played with all the big orchestras and given solo recitals in prestigious classical venues. He has been invited to judge piano competitions from Shanghai to Sydney. He is just about to embark on a seven-concert tour of Ireland, beginning in Galway on Monday week. But it is as a teacher that O’Conor’s achievements really start to run off the scale. He is sought after in Seoul and Seattle. He gives the annual Beethoven course in Positano, the Italian home of the legendary pianist Wilhelm Kempff. Which is an eye- wateringly-prestigious gig.

When you meet him, O’Conor mentions none of this. He must speak faster than anybody else on the planet, and he never hesitates to express an opinion, even if it’s going to be one you won’t like much, but he doesn’t dwell on his own success. “I don’t feel that playing the piano for a living is a tremendous achievement,” he says. “Or that it’s the be all and end all. I think doing music is the most important. If you end up being a performer, fine. If you end up being something else in music, fine. I have produced more doctors than pianists. One of the things I’ve always said to the teachers in the academy at the beginning of each academic year is that we’re here to educate the audiences of the future. The main thing is to give people a love of the arts, which they’ll have for the rest of their lives.”

As part of his Irish tour he’ll be doing a series called Training the Trainers, which combines student masterclasses and teacher’s workshops. It’s partly to give young Irish pianists a heads-up in advance of the next Dublin International Piano Competition, in 2012, but mainly to show that learning to play can be enjoyable. “For me, piano lessons were always fun. I could never understand the fellows in school when I was in my teens who said, ‘You mean you’re still taking piano lessons? You haven’t learned any better?’ I still have people coming to me and saying, ‘You teach piano? God. You poor thing.’ It’s their idea of absolute hell. And I absolutely love it.”

WHEN IT CAMEto his own children O'Conor pursued pretty much the same no-nonsense line. "I brought the kids to concerts when they were very young on the basis that they got a Coke at the interval and then we went home. So they didn't have to listen to the whole thing." Hugh did piano and clarinet but gave them up to pursue his interest in acting – he made his first film, Lamb, with Liam Neeson at the age of nine.

“Keith did the piano until he was 10, then announced that he wanted to do the violin. It was excruciating. After about 18 months the teacher in the academy came to me and said, ‘John, can I be very frank with you?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ He said, ‘Your son is incredibly untalented at the violin.’ And I said, ‘That’s such a relief.’ He took up the trumpet and had a ball – played in the National Youth Orchestra, went to college, got into jazz, played at gigs. They listened to everything. Hugh went through a Stockhausen phase. I don’t even like Stockhausen.”

O’Conor inherited his open-ended approach to music education, and to learning in general, from his own parents. “My mother was the sort who sent us to everything to see if we were good at anything. I did tin whistle. I did elocution. I did Irish dancing. I did piano, viola, singing at one stage. My sisters did ballet and cello and violin.”

This in an ordinary Dublin family. Well, maybe ordinary isn’t the right word. “My father was an orphan. His parents died when he was two, and he was brought up in Vincent’s orphanage in Glasnevin. He was the youngest of 11 kids. There were two sisters who, as soon as they could, bought a house – and as soon as any of the kids came out of an orphanage they took them in and became surrogate parents for them. Aunty Molly and Aunty Aggie. They were quite formidable ladies.”

O'Conor's father – "his name was Henry, but he was always called Harry" – went out to work at the age of 14. "He worked all his life in a timber provider's on D'Olier Street. He loved going racing. I used to go with him; nobody else would. He always backed number four in the races, and they're all still running. Not one of them won. Not one."

O’Conor bubbles over with delight at the memory. “I was fantastically fond of my father,” he says. “He was incredibly supportive. He was awed by everything we did. He thought we were great.” Until, that is, his youngest son announced his intention to become a professional pianist. “All hell broke loose. It was dreadful, it really was,” O’Conor recalls. “My father wanted me to become a bank manager. That was the epitome of respectability.” He pauses. “Hah! Not any more.”

The family reached a compromise: O’Conor would take a degree in music, thereby giving himself a fallback. “I didn’t enjoy it at all,” he says. “It was very musty and fuddy-duddy and academic. I remember a professor saying to me in second year, ‘When are you going to stop piano-playing and study for your degree?’ That was the attitude.” (It was also why, as director of the academy many years later, he was instrumental in introducing a series of hands-on performance degrees.) After his graduation O’Conor wrote to the Arts Council to ask for a grant to study abroad. He got no reply.

“And then, after fighting with me for four years, Tony Hughes from UCD was the one who rescued me.”

He recommended O’Conor for an Austrian government scholarship, which is how he ended up in Vienna as a pupil of Dieter Weber. “He showed me exactly what to do with every part of my body,” says O’Conor. “For the first time in my life I was taught how to use my shoulders, use my fingers, use my elbows.” It was extraordinarily liberating, but it was also hard work. “I had to do Hanon finger exercises for eight hours a day. But it was my first chance to be a full-time pianist.”

As a teacher Weber was central European to the core. “I played the opening of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata for him,” says O’Conor. “And I got to the end of the phrase and all I heard from behind me was ‘Tchhhh’. I turned around and said, ‘What do you mean, Tchhh?’ He said, ‘You Irish Catholics. All this Virgin Mary rubbish.’ So we had a 45-minute argument about religion. He saw Beethoven as part of the German Lutheran cultural tradition which had produced Goethe and Schiller and all the rest of it.”

O’Conor hadn’t been studying in Vienna for long when he concluded that there were, in those days, three ways to make it big as a classical pianist. “Either Daddy had $1 million to put into publicity, or you were the protege of somebody very famous – well, coming from Ireland, I didn’t know anybody – or you won first prize in an international competition. Not second or third. First.”

In 1973 O’Conor was duly awarded first prize at the hugely important International Beethoven Piano Competition – and his life as an international soloist had begun.

Weber died three years later but remained an indelible influence. So did Kempff. “I spent two summers with him at his house in Positano. When I’d see him playing I wanted to jump inside his eyes to see how he could feel the music that way. He would do something that was not necessarily written in the score, and yet he would make it sound right. It taught you to search for what’s possible and not just to accept what’s there.”

FAST-FORWARD TO 2010and O'Conor's retirement as director of the academy. "I thought maybe I'd teach a bit in Germany, because it's close. Then, out of the blue, this letter arrived from Shenandoah." Not quite out of the blue: he had been teaching there part-time for several years. "I've turned down most of the major conservatoires and music schools," he says. "I was offered Juilliard, Boston and Indiana, and I said no, because I'd have to live there. I have one life to live, and I want to live in Ireland."

But isn’t Shenandoah all romantic and leafy and straight out of a classic Western? O’Conor does his fortissimo-dubious look. “It’s very much, I would say, the Balbriggan of Washington. A lot of people live there and work in Washington.” On the plus side it’s close to Dulles airport, and, he concedes, the drive from airport to campus takes you through “some of the most beautiful countryside you’ll ever see”.

His attachment to Dublin notwithstanding, O'Conor will also keep up his occasional visits to Asia and the Antipodes. It's good for us Irish, he says, to get outside our little bubble, especially now the bubble has burst into a sticky mess. "All of us in the arts are really worried about what the Government is going to do," he says. "It has been shown time and again how much money the arts brings into Ireland, from tourism and everything else, and I don't think we're being rewarded for it. Some of the ways that music is administered in the country also worry me. People with immense expertise applying to, and being turned down by, twentysomethings just out of college: I worry about that. I'm very worried about the change of policy of The Irish Timeswith regard to music reviewing."

He is also unhappy about the amount of coverage given to classical music by the media as a whole. "By all means give lots of coverage to sports and pop music and all the rest of it. But any Irish sportsman who gets 25th in a golf tournament or a tennis tournament, it's always in the newspaper. Whereas an Irish pianist . . . I had to fight like crazy, when Finghin Collins won the Clara Haskil competition, to get any mention of it into The Irish Times. I mean, the first ever Irish musician trained solely in Ireland to win a major international competition. That's something we can all be proud of, surely? But I'm not going to change the world. I've butted my head against the wall often enough. But it's still in one piece."

Battles with The Irish Timesand all, he has made his musical life sound effortless. But a life in music is anything but easy. He nods vigorously. "No. It wasn't easy. It's a very difficult life. Lots of times you want to give up. I remember once doing a recital in the RDS, in the late 1970s, and I was in a very black despair. What was I doing, strutting out on stage looking like a penguin and expecting people to adore me? I thought maybe I should go off to Africa and do something good with my life. Do something you could see.

“And at the end of the recital, before anybody else came backstage, the door opened and a woman stood there whom I’d never seen before in my life. She said, ‘Mr O’Conor, I’m really sorry for coming round, but I just had to come and tell you. I’ve had such a terrible week, and I really didn’t know how I was going to go on. I don’t know how I even managed to pick up the energy to walk out of the house to come to the concert this evening. But as soon as you started playing all my worries went away – and I just wanted to say thank you.’ And she was gone. I was left there with my mouth hanging open.”

It’s hard to imagine John O’Conor reduced to silence. Happily for us, he has been gloriously noisy ever since.

Curriculum vitae

BornDublin, January 18th, 1947.

EducatedBelvedere College, University College Dublin.

FamilyWife, Mary; two sons, Hugh and Keith.

CareerWon the International Beethoven Piano Competition, Vienna, 1973. Director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music for 16 years. Co-founder of Dublin International Piano Competition, which will next be held in 2012.

HonoursHe has honorary doctorates from Trinity College Dublin and the National University of Ireland; is an officer of the French government's Order of Arts and Letters; holds the Austrian government's decoration for science and art; and has also been decorated by the Italian and Polish governments.