She is tiny, elegant, dignified. Her hair, immaculately bobbed, glows like silk. Her silk outfit, charcoal with a touch of saffron at collar and sleeves, is a masterclass in understated style. Her hands, oddly, are not stylish at all; for a pianist her fingers are a bit on the stubby side. They touch the piano and each hand produces a single note. Then another. Then a trill. G, G, A, G, B, D. Bach's Goldberg Variations is one of the most difficult pieces in the keyboard repertoire, and it all grows out of the artless simplicity of that opening bar.
So there's one paradox. And here's another. Check out Zhu Xiao-Mei's website and you can see that clip of her at the piano. She is one of the most celebrated interpreters of the Goldberg Variations, yet you may well never have heard of her. That's because she gives very few concerts and, when she does perform in public, plays the work of just a handful of composers.
However, she is coming to the 2015 Kilkenny Arts Festival as part of Eternal Harmony, its mammoth celebration of the music of Bach, to perform a piece she has played 200 times in 25 countries. She will also give a talk, The Tao of Bach, which will explore the ways in which Chinese philosophy has informed her approach to western classical music.
Labour camp
Zhu has lived in Paris for more than 30 years. Born in Shanghai, she was a child prodigy who was performing on radio and television in Beijing by the age of eight. Then came the Cultural Revolution. Her family was split up, and the 17-year-old was shipped off to a labour camp in Inner Mongolia.
She doesn't like to talk about this now. It was such a long time ago, and she has written about it at length in her autobiography, La Rivière et Son Secret, published in English as The Secret Piano. She trots dutifully through the essentials of the story: a spinet piano smuggled inside a pile of blankets; a cowshed in a remote part of the camp; a criminal who allowed her to hide the instrument among the animals. "I went there every night after working in the fields to practise. At the beginning I played Rachmaninov. But it was so cold in winter time. There was no heating, and I could not play. Then I remember my teacher told me, 'The best way to warm up your hands, you play Bach.' So at the beginning I just wanted to warm up my hands. I played fugues, of course. Later it was not just the hands warming but my heart: everything is warmed up."
It was the start of a relationship with Bach that half a century later has seen her record The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Art of Fugue and the Six Partitas BWV 825-830. She's preparing to record the French Suites. "When I was young, just like everybody I played all the composers," she says. "Ten years ago in my programme I had Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Haydn, Scarlatti. But now it's almost left only Bach."
Why?
“I just feel nobody can do better than him. What he has written is very, very precise. There is not one note extra or not useful.”
Of all Bach's keyboard works it's the Goldberg Variations that draws her back again and again. The compositional architecture of the piece is dazzling in its symmetry and complexity. Thirty variations based on the bass line of the leisurely, introverted aria. After every third variation a canon.
As the piece progresses the interwoven melodies of the canons shift through a series of ever-more-distant key relationships. Think Frère Jacques as sung by an infinite number of voices, in one of MC Escher's four-dimensional paintings.
Many pianists are mesmerised by this mathematical virtuosity. But for Zhu the essence of the Goldberg Variations lies elsewhere. It's all about emotion. When she plays that first note something special happens. "I feel something came out from silence," she says. "Something very peaceful. Something that makes me calm and gives me courage. So I want to share that feeling. It's something like a miracle."
She laughs. The piece doesn't just work its magic on her, she says. When she first moved to France she had no money to rent a place of her own, so she was living in someone else's house. "Well, they had to work, they had to study, they cannot stand somebody to practice all the time. But I find out when I play the Goldberg Variations they don't say anything. So I play, play, play – and I like more and more."
Recently she returned to China at the invitation of the authorities, which have been chasing her for a decade to play the Goldberg Variations there. "I said, 'No, no, no – it's impossible. The Chinese people, they are not ready for that piece.' But I cannot wait any more: I am getting older and older. I must go. So last year I went to China. It was amazing."
A beautiful hall packed with young people. Absolute silence. Total absorption in the music. For Zhu it was a long way from that cold cowshed – and another kind of miracle.
We should talk about the work’s notorious technical difficulties. “Ah. Because he has written for two keyboards? So when I play on one keyboard it’s really very hard.” When Zhu says “very hard” what she really means is “nigh on impossible”. A flurry of hands crossing back and forth; a shower of high-speed fingerwork.
“With practice, I think, if you like the piece you just don’t feel it difficult any more,” she says. Then she laughs again. “When I close my eyes everything is okay,” she says. “When I look and try to find my note, then it’s disgusting. I just have to close my eyes and everything is smooth.”
It sounds like bragging, but it’s not; it’s another of the paradoxes beloved of Chinese philosophy. For Zhu the whole point of performing this piece is not to draw attention to herself as the performer – “Look at me! I can do it with my eyes closed!” – but to melt away, leaving only the music.
Forget myself
“I have been meditating for 20 years, so that helps me a lot to forget myself. I think that is really important for the performance. When I forget myself I play better. When I’m aware that there are people, how I play, if I can show the best of my technique or my feelings, then it’s getting worse. Meditation helps me to let the composer’s feeling come through.”
That’s the aim, she stresses. “I work on that feeling. Not always works,” she says, with another laugh.
It’s a rare lapse in her flow of soft, quick, French-inflected English. But as we laugh together the whole Tao-of-Bach thing snaps into focus. Taoism’s blend of profundity and spontaneous silliness is mirrored in Bach, where one minute you’re listening to music of high seriousness and integrity and the next you’re dancing. But it’s not a change of gear; it’s all part of the whole. Joy emerges from the music itself, like bubbles in a glass of spring water.
No surprise, then, that water is one of Zhu's favourite musical metaphors. "For me, as for that most famous Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, something most important in my life is water," she says. "And I feel Bach's music is like water. His name actually is water – it's no accident," she adds, referring to the German word "Bach", which means "stream".
"The Goldberg Variations is like the water in a river. At the end it's not finished: it goes back to the beginning. The water continues to flow."
But it’s not quite the same. And having listened to it, having lived through all those tiny, subtle changes, neither are we.
Take three Goldbergs: Kilkenny Arts Festival’s Bach banquet
There is a lot of Bach at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival (kilkennyarts.ie). From the Mass in B Minor to the Cello Suites, from cantatas to Brandenburgs, it’s a Bach banquet of gargantuan proportions. And, true to form, there are no fewer than three very different interpretations of BWV 988, aka the Goldberg Variations.
First up, and most radical, are the young German trio Sax Allemande. Their lively arrangement of the piece for three modern saxophones seems to take its inspiration from Bach’s title page, where he declares the work to be “prepared for the soul’s delight”. Friday, August 7th, 9.30pm, in a candlelit Black Abbey.
On Tuesday, August 11th, the Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani will take a more traditional route by playing the piece on the instrument it was written for. Esfahani brings his own brand of eclecticism to the music, however: in a talk on the Goldbergs at the University of York he managed to get Johnny Cash’s song Daddy Sang Bass into the mix. Long Gallery, Kilkenny Castle, 10 pm.
Finally, Zhu Xiao-Mei will give her Goldberg Variations (Wednesday, August 12th, Black Abbey, 7.30 pm). Her talk The Tao of Bach is at Rothe House on Tuesday, August 11th, at 6 pm.
