Playing piano for keeps

As Dublin's international piano competition begins, it seems the instrument is as popular as ever, writes Arminta Wallace

Sleek as a killer whale, it gleams in the sunlight streaming through the showroom window, all soft white and high-gloss black. This is the ultimate in keyboard cool, a hand-built Steinway upright, sexier than any sports car and, with a price tag of €35,000, almost as expensive. Tough, too.

"Listen to this . . ." Henry Gillanders thumps the keys, producing sounds that linger in the air, so mellow you can almost forgive wine writers for waxing lyrical about "bass notes". We are standing on planet piano - at least, that's what it feels like - the jaw-dropping new home of Pianos Plus, the company Gillanders owns with the piano tuner John Holland. This is piano purchase for a new generation, all chrome, glass and designer chic. The next Steinway to hit the showroom, which sits off the M50 in west Dublin, will be a limited edition designed by Karl Lagerfeld, of all people, for the German manufacturer's 150th anniversary.

In the meantime, this floor and the two above are crammed with handsome Seilers encased in sequoia with floral inlay, Yamahas neater and nippier than motor-bikes and the Kawai Anytime, whose digital wizardry allows you to listen to yourself through headphones, sparing your neighbours' sanity. Clearly, pianos ain't what they used to be. Gillanders laughs and shakes his head.

"The basic design of the piano hasn't changed since the beginning of the last century - and it won't change now," he says. So what's the difference between the cheapest upright he sells and that Steinway? "Quality. The quality of the material: the felts, the strings, the leathers, the timbers. The finer the materials, the better the touch. Touch and tone. That's all a piano is about."

It sounds simple, but it isn't. Touch, for example, depends on who's doing the touching. Felts and hammers are notoriously fickle. A piano can have all its bits and pieces in perfect working order and still be a horror to play. On the other hand, a bashed-up old Broadwood can sound like a million dollars.

The piano is an enduring enigma, and not the least of its mysteries is that, in an age of small houses and large-screen televisions, an awful lot of people still want one. Last year, Kawai and Yamaha sold, between them, about 200,000 pianos. And this week, Dublin will see a major outbreak of piano fever as the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition gets under way.

For Pianos Plus the competition is a major undertaking. The company will deliver three concert grands to the National Concert Hall for the final, a half-dozen practice grands to the RDS for the preliminary rounds and another 20 practice grands into houses around Dublin where competitors are staying with host families. Pianos Plus doesn't charge for this service; if it did, the competition simply couldn't afford to pay. Instead, there'll be a big piano sale in the RDS after the competition is over. But that's at the end. This week, with pianos zooming around Dublin and 62 competitors jetting in from 27 countries as far apart as Korea, Lithuania and Venezuela, including four from Ireland, the fun is only just beginning.

The buzz is hard to resist, says John O'Neill, chief executive of the competition's sponsor, despite the fact that he's a fan not of classical piano but of country music. "I like the stories country music tells," he says, unabashed. "And I've been to Graceland, so I suppose that's a bit of a giveaway." He says the Piano, as the triennial competition is known around the AXA building, tells its own story.

AXA Insurance inherited it from its predecessor, Guardian Royal Exchange. It has now sponsored four in a row, with a commitment to the 2006 event. "It's a fantastic thing to be involved in. There's a huge amount of community input, from families who have competitors to stay and the drivers who ferry people around to a host of backstage organisers. To me, it's all about doing something that's good, even though in accountancy terms it probably doesn't add up."

On the other side of the Atlantic, Mikael Eliasen, one of the competition's 15 judges, is packing his bags - and taking his vitamin pills, for round one will see all 62 competitors strut their stuff in three days. "Yeah, it's a marathon," he says, sounding uncommonly cheerful about the prospect. "But we are dealing with music, after all. What you have to figure out is how to stay focused and still be in good humour. You're listening to many different pianists, and some of them will bore you, but they're all giving their lives as you sit there. You have to remember that."

As head of voice and opera at the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, the Danish-born teacher has spent the past week listening to 400 singers audition for next year's courses - and this will be his third time on the Dublin jury. How does he do it? With a Popstars-style score sheet, marks for this and marks for that? "With me it's a very intuitive thing," he says. "I'm not a solo pianist, as many of my colleagues are, and I don't teach piano. I mean, I am a pianist and I do play many concerts with singers, but the first time John O'Conor [the pianist, who was one of the competition's founders and is chairman of the jury\] asked me to come, I said: 'What do you want me for?' And he said: 'Well, the fact is that you won't be sitting there looking at their fourth finger and worrying about their technique. You will be sitting there listening to music.' And it's very much about making music, this competition, rather than how fast can you play."

What will Eliasen be looking for from the young musicians at the RDS in the coming weeks? "You take for granted that everybody who comes out on to the stage is going to be able to play the notes," he says. "But, you know, when you sit with colleagues and discuss a performance afterwards, it's like we've all heard different performances. This is where words like 'charisma' and 'personality' come in; what strikes me as being powerful and overwhelming might strike one of my colleagues as being boring and horrible."

Ah, yes. That well-known feature of competition juries: the fight. A peal of laughter rings down the phone. "Oh, no, I'm not going to tell you about that. No. We're not going to fight. But one can speak up about what one believes in as a musician. I think one of the great pianists of the 20th century is Martha Argerich. I'm sure there are people out there who don't think so, but what are you going to do? Shoot them?"

Don't shoot the jury: keep them interested. O'Conor, who is also artistic director, believes in giving competitors a free hand when it comes to repertoire, a rare treat in a competitive world where prescribed pieces are the norm. "When you give first prize to somebody," he says, "you're really asking them to tell you what sort of a pianist they are. So we have a totally open choice in terms of repertoire, apart from the concertos for the final and the compulsory piece by an Irish composer at the semi-final stage."

This year, the competitors can choose between four pieces commissioned from Philip Martin, Michael Holohan, Frank Corcoran and Ian Wilson. "Philip's piece for the first competition [in 1988\], The Rainbow Comes And Goes, is still played by loads of people around the world," says O'Conor. "And the piece he has written this year has been chosen by, I think, 75 per cent of the competitors." Is there a type of piece that works well at piano competitions? O'Conor chuckles.

"I remember a composer once saying to me: 'What should I write?' And I said: 'Without being facetious, if it looks easy enough and it's very grateful to play on the piano, most people will choose it.' That composer actually wrote one of the most difficult things ever written, and only one person has, I think, ever played it. So much for my advice."

One competitor who plans, should he reach the semi-final, to play Martin's In A Thousand Valleys Far And Wide is Sasha Anissimov, the 18-year-old son of Alexander Anissimov, the former principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. One of two competitors representing Belarus, Sasha says he is preparing as he would for a series of concert performances. "The difference, of course, is that there is a limited number of places in the next concert," he says with a grin. With a programme that includes Bach, Scriabin, Liszt and Shostakovich, Anissimov aims to demonstrate a wide-ranging musical personality.

"The more different faces you might have, the more intrigue you create around you," he says. "But the most important thing about any pianist, after all, is whether you want to hear them again. There are many, many good pianists in the world - too many. Some of them have won competitions, some haven't. I would like to show the jury my ideas about the pieces at this point in my life, to share what I find interesting about the music. If they decide my ideas are interesting, well . . ." An enigmatic smile, an eloquent Slavic shrug. And there are 62 of these guys? Intriguing is putting it mildly.

• The AXA Dublin International Piano Competition begins at the RDS on Friday. At the NCH on May 22nd and 23rd, six finalists will each perform a concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra, broadcast live by Lyric FM and Network 2