Their tiny fingers fly up and down the keyboard eight hours a day and their fearsome dedication shows no sign of abating. These young piano students from China, South Korea, and Japan are driven by cultural and economic forces now transforming the U.S. and European piano worlds. Laid-back Western students just cannot compete.
The result? Conservatories and university music departments are filling up with fee-paying Asians as their parents pressure them to succeed in the West. They are winning top prizes in piano competitions and they are building careers in Europe and the U.S. Too often, according to some teachers, young Americans prefer computer games, the latest fantasy movies, rock bands, sports, or other less-demanding activities. The Asians are rushing to fill the vacuum.
The new world of winners tells the story best:
- Last year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition gold medal went to 18-year-old Korean Yunchan Lim, the youngest Cliburn gold winner ever.
- The Busoni Competition in Italy two years ago ended with three finalists, two of whom were Koreans.
- Chinese-Canadian Bruce Liu won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2021 and the three runners-up were Asians. Japanese pianist Sorita Kyohei placed second, the first Japanese to place so highly since Mitsuko Uchida 51 years earlier.
- The Cliburn Junior Competition just last weekend awarded the top two prizes to a Korean and a Chinese. Watch for them to grow up.
Where are the Americans? “Our kids just cannot not make it,” says U.S.-born William Grant Naboré, founder of the prestigious International Piano Academy, Lake Como, Italy. “For Americans, the piano is more of a hobby, not a vocation. We are not prepared musically.” He concludes: “The Asians are coming to Europe, in droves. The situation for Americans is tragic … tragic,” he said.
Some of us don’t quite know what to make of all this. The West is evidently on its way to losing its ownership of the instrument and its traditional classical repertoire. By far, the biggest piano manufacturers are in China. Some Chinese players warn me not to over-dramatize. But the drama is already there. Estimates for the number of piano students on the launching pad range from 20 million to 60 million. Reliable figures are not compiled but no one doubts that the numbers are in a range never before seen.
Michael Johnson
It’s not just about quantity. The quality of Asian talent is more evident with each passing year. London critics went wild over teenaged wonderboy Shunto Morimoto’s Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 (Shunto is a Naboré student). Wrote one respected London critic, “How is it possible that an 18-year-old can play like a mature adult at the peak of his career?”
A disconcerting fact is that the Asians often perform the traditional classical repertoire — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann — better than we do. Example: Yuja Wang doing Rimsky-Korsakov’s showpiece “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
And after facing criticism for their overemphasis on blinding fingerwork, the current generation of Asian students is making “soul” and background knowledge their priorities. This change in emphasis is overdue. One Juilliard professor reports that his technically perfect Chinese student mastered Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, in record time. The professor told him, OK, now let’s do Book Two. “Oh, there is a second book?” the student asked. “Nobody told me.”
Schubert star performer Ran Jia, after a successful career in Europe, has recently been appointed assistant professor of piano at Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She is taking home with her the lessons mastered in Europe. “Learning from each other is the best way forward,” she said. “We have only one planet.” And in perhaps the most important cross-fertilization initiative yet, Juilliard has just created its first overseas campus in Tianjin, 100 kilometers north of Beijing.
A pianist at one expensive and exclusive U.S. conservatory tells me the influx of Asians has the corridors buzzing over the motivations of some students. Many are basic careerists. Some are trying to find their way. But the girls who work hardest are often not there to become professional pianists but to enhance their marriage credentials. A music diploma from Europe or the U.S. can qualify girls to marry upward in Korean society. “Juilliard has essentially become a Korean girls’ finishing school.”
As London-based pianist/composer Ji Lui told me, his studies in China placed emphasis on very strong finger training. “I am grateful for my Chinese roots,” he says. “Yes, technique in general is important, but only as a tool.” He is so respected in London that he was hand-picked recently to record “The Richter Scale,” a new one-hour piano dramatization of an earthquake. He was recruited because the composer, German pianist Boris Bergmann, felt he could not do it justice.
In another case of cross-fertilization, French concert pianist and recording artist Lydia Jardon founded and manages a leading Paris piano school specifically catering to Asian children. She named it the Yaya-Lydia Jardon Piano School, one of several such private institutions in Paris. I asked her to evaluate the basic attitudes that help the Asians excel. “It’s in the virtues of self-denial, of pitiless, colossal dedication to hard work, which are inherent in Eastern civilization.… In Asia, the young are trained early in life to acquire a steely mindset similar to that of athletes of a high standard.”
Piano professionals worry that the force of the tsunami coming our way will be so powerful as to alter the Western music world unrecognizably. It is already starting.
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