I recently spent 10 days on the jury of the Scottish International Piano Competition, a triennial contest attracting players from all around the world. This year, 40 pianists were invited to Glasgow. Only three were from Britain, though one, Tom Poster, was the eventual winner. Most were from south-east Asia, Russia, the Baltic states and North America - from outside western Europe, in other words, where most of the piano music originated.
I hadn't really been looking forward to listening to six hours of piano each day. Yet the experience was unexpectedly touching. First, the standard was incredibly high. Pianist after pianist stepped onto the stage and gave a recital that, at the very least, was note-perfect and stylish. But their playing was also committed and heartfelt. It was inspiring to hear 200-year-old western music played with burning intensity by young people from the other side of the world, at a time when pundits keep telling us that such music is fading away.
This was the second startling musical experience I've had recently, the other being the Prom concert given by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Here, too, young people who are highly accomplished as well as streetwise gave us a lesson in what classical music can mean.
I asked a few of the Asian contenders why western classical music means so much to them. The Chinese musicians told me that not so long ago their parents and grandparents were banned from even listening to this kind of music, let alone choosing it as a career. Today, they and their peers are racing to make up for lost time. Every year, 200,000 students compete to enter Chinese conservatoires that are awash with brand new Steinway grand pianos. Many parents see this training as a way out of poverty for their children, whose hardworking ethic makes them formidable competitors on the international scene.
A Japanese pianist told me that in her country, the performance of music associated with Kabuki and Noh theatre is traditionally the preserve of certain families. Such highly refined traditional music is daunting even for Japanese listeners. By contrast, European classical music is considered "universally appealing", and offers an unrestricted way forward. I was also told that oriental cultures benefit from their veneration of teachers and ancestors, their ingrained respect for the achievements of the past.
We often hear that because classical music is notated and "fixed" it is therefore stuffy and stale. But it is also one of the world's most rich and complex musics, the result of a unique historical stew. Its complexity is inseparable from its being written down, which also means that it can be transmitted to people far away both in time and place. Most other kinds of music, embedded in oral tradition, rely on known forms that can be elaborated and improvised in performance, with local variation.
Listening to Beethoven, Chopin and Ravel performed by pianists from these countries gave me a strange and hopeful feeling. It made me realise that my view of what's happening to classical music may be insular. These young people have not been through our experience of seeing long-established classical music sidelined by pop. They come to it freshly and like it for itself. Musicians in other parts of the world are embracing it with energy and appetite. As one of the Chinese pianists said to me: "How can we not love it?"
