The chords of imagination

Winning competitions isn't all that important for the talented young Ukrainian pianist Alexej Gorlatch, whose burgeoning reputation is built on his rare ability to forge a relationship with his audience, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

ALEXEJ GORLATCH was no novice to international music competitions when he took the top prize at the Dublin International Piano Competition in May 2009. He won the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in Japan in 2006. And after Dublin he went on to compete in Leeds (where he took the second prize), and was the first prizewinner at the Anton G Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Dresden in September 2009.

Audiences at piano competitions don’t always agree with the jury’s verdict. The Guardian reported “sighs of disappointment” at the news of Gorlatch’s second prize in Leeds. So, when I meet up with the young Ukrainian at his home in Münster, Germany (he’s lived in Germany, though not in Münster, since the age of three), I ask him first what he thought had singled him out as the winner in Dublin?

“I wish it was my performance,” he jokes. “But of course many things are important in a performance – your appearance, the way that you communicate with the audience and the jury. And you always have to have a little luck as well as your preparation in order to win a competition.” What was his luck? “My luck was that I played at times of the day that suited me very well. I played rather late, and that’s the time when I feel most inspired, when I don’t have too many other worries and I can just concentrate on what I’m doing.

“It was also rather great luck to play at the end of each stage. It just happened that way [it’s decided by lottery]. That’s not just because the last one might stay in the memory of the jury. But also because there could be more people in the audience at the end, because they want to listen to the results later. It was great that I could build a relationship with the audience. I could really feel that they supported me. It was also luck that I played after an Irish contestant [Fiachra Garvey]. Some people came specially to hear him, and then stayed to listen to me. And they liked both of us.”

He enjoyed the fact that he got feedback from members of the public from the start of the competition, and was touched by meeting a woman on the street outside the competition, who told him how wonderfully he had played, and gave him a St Theresa medal, “for luck and to support me mentally”.

You don’t have to spend long talking to Alexej Gorlatch to realise that he has got a very wise head on his 22-year-old shoulders. His appearance, however, is boyish, in a timeless rather than a contemporary way, and he also has a boyish fondness for word games and mind games. But he’s a rock of sense when it comes to thinking about music and his career.

He explains the essentials for winning a competition. “Your preparation is very important. You also have to stand out in the crowd if you want to make a good impression. You have to have something about you that makes people notice you and want to listen to you. This can only lie in the music you play. There always have been cases where participants try to dress very” – he hesitates, to choose his word – “interestingly, or make impressions in other ways. But for me it always boils down to the fact that I always play with honest and sincere feelings and that I don’t pull back on any emotions, in order to play safe. It is much better for me to give it all I have.”

Yet, in spite of giving it all he has, he hasn’t won every competition he’s entered. He’s sanguine about this. “If I am satisfied with my performance, then not getting the prize doesn’t disappoint me that much.” And he points out that “in many competitions I really have been satisfied with my performances”.

“I know some people think that, in the final of a competition, everybody is very good, and it’s only a political decision, because every one of them can play. But I have a very different opinion on that. The person who said this is very well known, a very important person who has achieved many things in life, and I think he’s one of the most intelligent people on Earth. But I disagree on this. It also can happen that a very good contestant isn’t allowed to enter the second stage. Anything can happen. We never know what happened or why it happened, but we can only hope that everything is fair, from the beginning to the end.”

He doesn’t identify the errant thinker he’s talking about, and I later learn that his mother Galina, a computer scientist, sees him as someone who’s always been the perfect diplomat. Even as a child, she tells me, he could always find the diplomatic way out of really awkward situations. And she also made clear just how important audiences are to his playing. If the lighting in the auditorium is too dark, she says, so that he can’t see and feel the audience as he wants, he simply can’t play well.

The strangest note in my conversation with Gorlatch is struck when he talks about how intensively all players work during the run of a competition. I mention Vladimir Ovchinnikov practising on the only piano he could find during the Leeds competition, an instrument with a keyboard, but no strings, and therefore no sound.

Gorlatch lights up at the mention of this, and says that getting possession of one of those dummy, silent keyboards that used to be manufactured for practising on is one of his goals. He gets palpably excited as he talks about the idea of being able to experience all the physical and technical aspects of a piece, but without the sound.

“For me,” he says, “it shows a new side of the music. You learn something about the music because your expectation is even more important than when you play in the normal way.

“Before you produce a sound on a piano, you hear it in your inner ear. You can’t play something without knowing what you want to hear. This would be the ideal thing – to expect the sound, to imagine it, to produce it. But the moment you produce a sound, the reality of it affects your imagination of the next one. That’s also a good thing, because you need to make it organic. It needs to be interactive.”

But when you play on the silent keyboard, you don’t have that interaction and, paradoxically, the effect is liberating. “The imagination of your chord becomes your chord.”

In other words, you fill the silence with a sound you mightn’t otherwise have imagined, and you have to prepare physically to match it with whatever you do next. “This is a great experience.”

It’s not hard to see why Alexej Gorlatch is one of those players who can take you into areas that others just can’t reach.

Alexej Gorlatch plays Beethoven, Bartók, Bill Whelan and Chopin at the NCH on Wednesday