PETA STEWART
If there is one word that partially sums up the 25-year-old German-Italian pianist Sophie Pacini it’s independent.
She was eight when she took a stand with her parents … two years after having her first piano lesson. She told them that not only would she make her orchestral debut in the morning playing the Haydn Concerto by heart, but she would play her first competition that same night. Her debut was outstanding, and she won that competition. Naturally.
With this kind of determination, her undisputed talent (she won the Young Artists’ Award at the International Classical Music Awards in April in Leipzig, voted by a jury of 16 representatives of the world’s most famed music magazines) and her stunning good looks, she is really going to the top. Fast.
First Piano Concerto by Chopin
Ms Pacini is in Cape Town to play the First Piano Concerto by Chopin with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, opening the CPO’s Summer Symphony season, on November 9 at The Cape Town City Hall.
We are lucky she had the time to stop off in Munich on her way to Cape Town from Hong Kong to repack her luggage and change her concert dress, for her schedule is that tight! She leaves us to play in the Lucerne Piano Festival and catch up with her friend of the last eight years – her idol, who is now her mentor, “piano mother” and confidante: Martha Argerich.
She had gone on holiday to Tuscany with her father, a retired professor of Italian literature. In his home town of Pietrosanti, they discovered that a new festival would feature Ms Argerich. Sophie, aged 18, began to nag her father to find a way of meeting her and playing for her. Her father didn’t know anyone there who knew the festival director so he found a bad picture of him and, on their way back from the beach, went to the piazza and he looked around.
By sheer chance he found him!
The director was quite prosaic about Sophie’s chances of meeting him – she may or may not be there; she may or may not see her, she may or may not want to hear her…. Undaunted, they went back to their hotel, showered and got dressed in less casual apparel and went to her hotel.
Sophie waited three hours. No Martha. She began to play the piano supplied especially for her idol. An hour later Ms Argerich emerged. “In a bad mood! The director had told her about me and she thawed when she heard who my teachers were.” But Ms Argerich had to practise and told Sophie to wait. So Sophie waited for another two hours in the lobby before Ms Argerich returned, surprised she was still there. “She was really angry and I got the impression that she thought it best to let me play because only then could she send me away.
“I played the Liszt B minor sonata. She thought I was crazy. But at the end, she ran to me, hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, told me I am a great pianist and apologised for her behaviour. I just cried.”
Sophie also nearly cried when she talked about her interpretation of the Chopin.
Sweet, kitchy, soft, emotional, set in pastels
“The meeting with Martha was sheer Hollywood,” she says, “and some people think Chopin is also Hollywood – sweet, kitchy, soft, emotional and set in pastels. He’s not. He has a dark, angular realistic side and the fragile and divine melodies contrast with that so well. The second movement of the concerto I will play always brings me to tears. Chopin means so much to me. I grew up with his etudes, nocturnes, preludes… and always found the dark side speaks to me. He has a huge spirit and this is conveyed from the opening chord of the concerto. It’s a story, an autobiography.”
Others agree – she won the ECHO Award in 2015 for her Chopin album, which will be on sale at the concert.
Unlike many musicians, Sophie didn’t grow up in a musical house. Her father had played the piano as a boy and decided that he wanted to take lessons again and would take his little girl with him. Her mother, a doctor, supported it. There had always been a “dark, shiny” piano in the house and Sophie realised very early that the piano was an extension of herself and when she went to her first concert (with Yevgeny Kissin) a year after her first lesson she was hooked. She fell in love with the sound and the stage. Of course, the natural competition that developed between Sophie and her father lasted just two years when he realised that she was already, at the age of eight, better than him and so he gave up.
At the age of 11 she knew this would be her career.
“The piano means everything to me. I can express my thoughts, my fears, my happiness. And I don’t need anyone to help me do it, unlike most other instruments which require accompaniment. Of course I love playing with an orchestra! I also had to work hard at school so as to be able to get away to master classes. Sometimes I just didn’t have enough sleep. ”
It was good discipline, though, and she did find the time to take up the cello for eight years as a second instrument and is grateful for that, since it taught her about phrasing, breathing and the use of the left hand to develop its own interpretations.
Sophie is also grateful that she has a normal life in a normal environment, if you can call it normal!
“I am an only child and because my parents were not musicians there was no influence on my interpretations. We talked music but we talked politics and people even more. My father was more of a constant in my life because, older than my mother by a couple of decades, he had retired and happily became my driver, cook and friend. He was also the only man amongst the many Tiger Moms who accompanied their children to master classes! He loved it! We were a good team and talking Proust and Dante, poetry and all literature did a lot for my all round cultural education.
“My heart beats for the piano.”
She will be taking that heart with her after the CPO concert to Italy, Paris, Madrid, Vienna ….
What: Summer Symphony Season concert
Where: The Cape Town City Hall
Who: Sophie Pacini with Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Martin Panteleev
When: 9 November at 8pm
Pre-concert talks: 7.15pm open to ticket holders
Sophie Pacini book tickets: http://bit.ly/SophiePacini, Artscape Dial-a-Seat 021 421 7695
WS
