She admits it freely, without embarrassment: she was super nervous. Not the polite, performative anxiety that competition pianists sometimes confess to in interviews, but the real thing, the kind that drains sound from your fingers and leaves you playing in a kind of internal silence.

Anqi, a French-Taiwanese pianist competing in the 2023 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, was giving herself no illusions about where she stood. She knew she was not among the frontrunners. She knew she had not played the Chopin étude as well as she wanted to the day before. And she knew, as everyone in that building knew, what was happening to the west of the country in which she was sitting.

None of it, in the end, was enough to make her stay home.

Q&A

Tang: Did you manage to do any sightseeing here?

Anqi: Not really, because we’re in competition. It’s quite intense.

Tang: How is your competition experience so far?

Anqi: Well, I’m super nervous. Of course, everyone can see it. When I play, it’s like super nervous. But it’s a great experience to play in that hall. The acoustics are good, I think.

Tang: Which piano did you choose?

Anqi: Kawai, which is rarely chosen this time. Actually, it’s funny, because there are four pianos, and I had the Chopin étude, which I didn’t play very well the day before. I tried every piano on the opening of the Chopin étude, the chromatic one, and I found Kawai works the most with me. And after, I found it louder a bit, because when I’m nervous I usually just have no sound.

Tang: Do you still feel nervous now?

Anqi: No, not really, since I’ve finished.

Tang: How did you travel to Moscow?

Anqi: From Paris. We changed at Istanbul, Turkish Airlines. In total, without the layover, it’s about seven or eight hours. But the connection was four or five hours, and we arrived very late — we got our flight at eleven in the morning and were here at about one or two in the morning.

Tang: Did you make any new friends here?

Anqi: Some, yes. I have a roommate, and there is also a Russian I sometimes meet.

Tang: You are competing on behalf of France, but I understand you are also Taiwanese. Are you the only Taiwanese competitor here?

Anqi: As far as I can tell, yes. But I feel no real difference from the others. There is another French candidate, so I feel the same as him.

Tang: Are you concerned about what is going on here, in the western part of Russia?

Anqi: Yes, I know. Everyone knows it. But the Tchaikovsky Competition has always been a dream since I was young. And I know I’m not a very strong candidate — obviously I know I won’t win prizes and things like that — but I think it’s still a great experience to participate, and that’s why I still applied.

Tang: Do your parents worry about you being here?

Anqi: Well, my mother is actually here with me, so I think it’s fine.

Tang: There are people who argue that by participating in this competition, you are in effect endorsing the Russian government. Do you agree with that?

Anqi: Personally, I don’t really agree. I think a competition is always a competition. I know it’s state-sponsored, but I don’t think participating in a competition means we support the President of Russia. It’s a prestigious competition, and that’s the reason. Music first.

Tang: About the repertoire — how much of it is prescribed and how much is your own choice?

Anqi: In the first round, they give you a framework — you need a classical sonata, but you can choose whether it’s Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven or something else. You need a Chopin étude but you can choose which one. So basically everything is within a category: you need Bach, you need a classical sonata, you need three études, and you need Tchaikovsky. Everyone plays the same categories, but with their own choices within them.

Tang: How do you feel about your performance so far?

Anqi: Of course I don’t like it, since I didn’t play well. But it’s still a great experience to stand on that stage.

Tang: How does this competition compare to others you’ve participated in?

Anqi: I feel much more nervous with this one. I don’t know why — maybe because the hall is so big, and it’s one of the biggest competitions I’ve ever participated in. That makes me feel super nervous. And with Tchaikovsky up there above you, and all the other composers looking at you —

Tang: They’re all watching you. And the audience — how do you find them?

Anqi: They are kind. They clap. Very kind.

Interviewed in June 2023 in Moscow.

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Episode Two

Song Qian arrived in Shanghai as a stranger. She had grown up in another city, and when she first walked the streets of the metropolis to buy something from a local shop, she found herself unable to follow the accent, unable to penetrate the particular pride that Shanghainese carry in their voices. The conservatory was famous, and getting in felt like an achievement. But belonging to the city was something else entirely, a process that took the better part of three years.

She had not intended to be a mezzo-soprano. Before her entrance examination at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, her teacher had not trained her strictly as one voice type or another. She sang some soprano repertoire. But when the audition panel assembled for the final round, her voice — broad, wide in colour — read as mezzo to most of the judges. There was also the matter of timing. That year, mezzo applicants were scarce. The panel needed to balance its intake. And so it was decided.

Song Qian received the news without much in the way of strong feeling. She was not sure of the difference, not really. Her main thought, she admits with some amusement, was that at least mezzos do not have to sing so high. High notes required daily drilling. This seemed, at the time, like a reasonable arrangement.

The five years that followed were pleasant enough. She won scholarships, partly because she policed her dormitory with a ferocity that her classmates still remember — threatening anyone who left the room untidy with the loss of the communal grade-point average on which the scholarship depended. Her teachers were pleased with her. She ranked well among her peers. But looking back, she recognises that she did not yet understand what she was singing. The music and the soul, she says, had not yet collided.

After graduating she joined the Shanghai Opera House, then as now her institutional home, though in those years it was taking on young singers only into the chorus. Her motivation was at least partly practical: that cohort of graduates was the last for whom a Shanghai work unit could sponsor a permanent household registration, the coveted hukou. She wanted to stay in the city she had finally come to love. The Opera House was the obvious answer. Being a mezzo helped. Sopranos lined up to audition every year. Mezzos of quality were always in shorter supply.

The turn came a year into her posting, at one of the Opera House’s routine annual assessments. Sitting on the panel that day was Luan Feng, a celebrated bass who had spent more than two decades in Italy and had recently returned to China. He noticed a mezzo-soprano in the chorus. He asked to meet her. As it turned out, he had already seen her once before: she had attended a masterclass he gave at the conservatory during her fourth year, and her face had stayed with him without his quite knowing why.

Luan Feng was taking a small group of singers to compete in Italy and invited Song Qian to join. She was the only one from Shanghai; three others came from Beijing, two tenors and a baritone. They travelled to Pavia, Mantua and Busseto. Both tenors reached the finals but won nothing. Song Qian won merit prizes at two competitions. Being the youngest competitor, she also received a special encouragement award at one of them. She had spent the weeks beforehand drilling her Italian rolled r every morning the moment she woke up, having been told in no uncertain terms by Luan Feng that without it she would not get far.

After the competitions, Luan Feng was invited to give a concert at the Italian Embassy in Beijing. Song Qian performed. The Italian ambassador, watching her sing, turned to those around him and said this young woman should come to Italy to study. She had a future. He would give her a scholarship. She could not understand him — she spoke no Italian beyond ciao and buongiorno — and Luan translated after the fact. The scholarship turned out to be a joint arrangement between the Italian cultural ministry and the Chinese Ministry of Education, covering tuition, with a monthly stipend of 1,000 euros.

Her father was not entirely happy. He was not worried about money. He was worried about safety, about distance, about a daughter beyond his reach in a foreign country. Her mother took the opposite view: the opportunity was there, she was young, she had to take it.

The family talked it through. In the end they agreed she should go.

She arrived in Milan on December 31, 2005. The next morning was New Year’s Day 2006. She enrolled as a visiting scholar at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Music, the institution the public exchange programme had designated. A year later, having fallen in love with the city, the buildings, the air, the sound of the language, the coffee, and the particular elegance of the way Italians carry themselves, she realised she had barely scratched the surface. She resigned from the Opera House, severed the practical ties that would otherwise have required her to keep paying into the Chinese social insurance system from abroad, and went back to Milan to sit the entrance examination for a full master’s degree.

It was in that first year, buying student standing-room tickets at La Scala for about 15 euros a time — a fraction of tthe 100 or 200 euros a regular seat could cost — that something shifted in her understanding of what she was doing with her voice. She would queue at four or five in the afternoon for an eight o’clock curtain, collect her numbered ticket, and stand at the top of the house listening to singers whose sound she had never encountered anything like at home. The resources available to students in China at that time, she says, were simply not the same: fewer visiting artists, fewer concerts, little of the daily immersion in live opera that the Milan years gave her. Standing in that auditorium, she made herself a promise. If she could one day sing on a stage like that, even once, it would mean something.

It was also during those years, not at the Shanghai Conservatory but at La Scala, that she began to understand what bel canto actually was. And it was in Italy, in the third year of her time there, that she stopped being a mezzo-soprano and became a soprano.

To be continued…

This is a Chinese language programme without subtitles.

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Xu Leyi is 15, from Guiyang, and a flute major at the Secondary School Affiliated to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She was originally destined for piano until a stern teacher frightened her into switching instruments. A gentler flute teacher sealed the deal, and she has never looked back.

This summer she spent nearly a month in the United States on her own, taking masterclasses at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and at the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal flutist, who also teaches at Curtis and Juilliard.

She watched Brazil versus Norway at the World Cup in New York, caught an Augustin Hadelich and Seong-Jin Cho recital at Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood after a rainstorm drove the lawn audience inside for free, and improvised a duet of the New World Symphony and Danny Boy with a Harvard mathematics professor she met at a roadside motel with a grand piano in the lobby.

She is also a serious aviation enthusiast who has visited the cockpits of eleven international flights, sat in the pilot’s seat, and that glasses once ruled her out of a piloting career. Her ambition is to earn a private pilot’s licence alongside her music. She reckons that during cruise altitude, there ought to be time to sneak in a few notes on the flute.

This is a Chinese language programme with bilingual subtitles.Filmed and interviewed in Shanghai on August 7, 2026.

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Jane Eyre the Musical was staged in Shanghai over the weekend at the AIA Grand Theatre.

This is a Chinese language musical sung with pre-recorded music.

Here're the encores.

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The third instalment of KLASSIKOM’s conversation with composer and postdoctoral researcher Ni Chenkang turns to two works that round out his shortlist of Chinese piano music capable of competing at the highest international level: Ye Xiaogang’s piano concerto Scent of Green Mango, and Ni’s own solo piece Night Fantasy.

Ye Xiaogang’s Scent of Green Mango: Freshness as a Compositional Principle

Ni opens with a word that he returns to repeatedly when describing Ye Xiaogang’s music: fresh. Not fresh in the diminutive, decorative sense that the word sometimes carries in Chinese popular discourse, but fresh in a genuinely substantive musical sense.

The quality is rooted in Ye’s approach to modulation. Working within pentatonic modes, Ye modulates with unusual speed, frequency and variety of colour, shifting between tonal centres in ways that are at once Chinese in material and wholly distinctive in character. Ni calls it pan-tonal, then adds that fresh and transcending the ordinary captures it more vividly for a general audience than any technical term could.

Scent of Green Mango is a concerto, which places it in a different category from the solo works Ni recommended in the previous two sessions. A concerto means the final round, and Ni is direct about its fitness for that context. In scale, technical demand, expressive range and personal musical language, he considers it fully capable of standing alongside the standard final-round concertos, Liszt and the rest. The balance between piano and orchestra is, in his view, perfectly proportioned. The cadenza is present. Many of the textures share a recognisable kinship with Liszt and Chopin, but everything has been thoroughly absorbed into a Chinese and specifically Ye-esque idiom.

The difficulty, Ni explains, lies precisely in that duality. A performer must command the Western harmonic transitions embedded in the work’s modulations while simultaneously inhabiting the Chinese modal sensibility that gives those modulations their particular colour and freshness. He describes the effect as watercolour: delicate, luminous, capable of extraordinary colour change. Getting that quality into the sound, rather than merely playing the notes correctly, is where the real challenge resides.

A practical point follows. Both Ye Xiaogang and Zhang Zhao are published by Schott, which means their scores are commercially available outside China. For an international competitor or jury member, obtaining the music is straightforward.

Ni Chenkang’s Night Fantasy: Silence, Eruption and the Sounds of Shanghai

When the conversation turns to younger composers, Ni is candid about the difficulty of the terrain. The volume of piano music being written by Chinese composers in their twenties, thirties and forties is enormous, largely unheard even by specialists, and very hard to promote. Rather than attempt a survey he cannot honestly make, he speaks to one of his own works.

Night Fantasy runs to approximately eight minutes, long enough for a competition context, and Ni describes its technical demands as substantial. He adds, with evident self-awareness, that he would need a very long time to get it to the standard the work requires. A Russian professor has performed it. A pianist from the Shanghai Conservatory has played it. Neither, in Ni’s judgement, has yet fully realised what the piece demands.

The work was composed during the period of Covid-19 lockdown, when physical confinement produced, paradoxically, a state of heightened mental activity. Night Fantasy is Ni’s attempt to give that contradiction a musical form: stillness on the surface, eruption underneath, a tipping point held in suspension.

The folk sources woven into it are drawn from his immediate surroundings in Shanghai, principally Suzhou pingtan, the distinctive storytelling and musical tradition of the Yangtze Delta region, along with melodic fragments from the film scores of the old Shanghai Film Studio that he absorbed in childhood.

Taking Stock

Four works have been recommended in this programme for major competition, three solo pieces and one concerto, by four composers spanning two generations. Chen Yi and Ye Xiaogang are in their seventies; Zhang Zhao is a senior figure of the preceding cohort; Ni Chenkang represents the generation that came after. The four works are Duo Ye, Nuoma Amei, Scent of Green Mango and Night Fantasy.

The body of Chinese piano music is vast, almost certainly comparable in volume to the Western repertoire accumulated over centuries. What the conversation has offered is a first stone thrown, a few works selected from within the limits of two people’s knowledge and perspective. The question of which Chinese piano works deserve a place on the major competition stage or any world’s concert stage is one that the repertoire itself will ultimately answer.

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Soprano Song Qian is the prima donna of the Shanghai Opera House, singing titleroles in operas by Puccini, Richard Wagner and Carl Maria von Weber, to name but a few, as well as in symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler.

In this first episode, she talks about her family in Panjin of Liaoning province, her first musical experience and years at high school in Weifang.

An article based on the interview appeared on Modern Family Life magazine in April 2025, whose English highlight could be found here.

This is a Chinese language programme without subtitles.

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The question sounds simple enough: which Chinese piano works are actually good enough to compete at the world’s top piano competitions, to stand alongside Liszt, Chopin and Tchaikovsky in front of an international jury that may never have encountered Chinese contemporary music before?

Composer and postdoctoral researcher Ni Chenkang has a clear answer. Recorded at Parsons Music in Shanghai on August 8, his conversation with Rudolph Tang cuts through the noise and arrives at two works in particular, with a precise account of what makes them exceptional and why that exceptionalism travels across cultural borders.

The Filtering Problem

China produces a remarkable volume of new piano music every year, far more than most people realise. The vast majority disappears. What survives is a small fraction of the total, and within that fraction, the subset capable of entering a top international competition is smaller still.

Ni identifies three criteria any such work must satisfy simultaneously. It must achieve sufficient compositional depth, musically and intellectually. Its technical demands must be comprehensive enough to give a competitor a genuine opportunity to show everything they can do. And the score must be obtainable abroad, a detail that tends to be overlooked but represents a hard prerequisite.

Against these criteria, he proposes three works: Duo Ye by Chen Yi, Nuoma Amei by Zhang Zhao, and Scent of the Green Mango, Op. 42 by Ye Xiaogang. He stops short of calling them the absolute summit of Chinese piano writing, but places them firmly in that territory.

Chen Yi’s Duo Ye

Chen Yi drew on the music and dance of the Dong ethnic minority of southern China. The work operates on two levels.

At the rhythmic level, its rapid and irregular metre changes bear a clear kinship with Stravinsky’s approach in Petrushka, itself a landmark of folk music absorbed into the concert hall. Like Petrushka, Duo Ye uses rhythmic instability not as decoration but as a structural principle, the engine that propels the whole.

At the pitch level, Dong folk scales introduce a melodic character that reshapes the harmonic framework from within rather than sitting on top of it. The result, Ni argues, is a fusion in which the folk element and the pianistic element are genuinely inseparable.

Technical fluency is only the entry point. Above it sit phrasing, structural understanding and musicality, each demanding progressively more. And underlying all of these is something that cannot be acquired through practice alone: an understanding of how the Dong dance actually moves. Without that embodied knowledge, a performer will produce the notes but not the feeling.

Zhang Zhao’s Nuoma Amei

If Duo Ye represents a breakthrough in rhythmic and melodic integration, Nuoma Amei addresses a deeper and more stubborn problem: the harmonic limitations of Chinese musical tradition.

The pentatonic scale, which underlies so much Chinese music, is inherently consonant. It generates relatively little internal tension. Orchestration can compensate by differentiating timbres and registers, but the conflict this produces is weak. What music needs for genuine dramatic tension is sharpness at the intervallic level, and the pentatonic by nature does not supply it.

The solution, Ni argues, lies in going deeper into Chinese tradition rather than away from it. Regional opera forms, with their seven-note scales and specialised modal inflections, carry exactly the dramatic charge that the pentatonic lacks. Qinqiang opera, for instance, distinguishes between a bitter tone and a joyful tone, colourings with real emotional weight. This is the nourishment composers must draw on to write music of genuine dramatic range.

Zhang Zhao’s achievement in the opening of Nuoma Amei is, in Ni’s assessment, a perfect solution. Chinese modal sensibility and Western harmonic writing are fused in a way that feels neither forced nor decorative. The opening passage, where harmonic layers, heterophonic counterpoint, bass and melody proceed simultaneously with independent dynamic trajectories, represents a fusion fully achieved rather than merely attempted.

The Universal Measure

If these works appeared at an international competition before a jury with little prior exposure to Chinese music, would cultural unfamiliarity become an insurmountable barrier?

Ni does not think so. The qualities that make these works exceptional are not culturally specific. They operate at a level any experienced musician can perceive. When four simultaneous voices are in play in the opening of Nuoma Amei, a pianist either brings out all of that layering in its full complexity or they do not. An experienced jury will hear the difference immediately, and that difference has nothing to do with whether the music sounds Chinese or Western. It has to do with the sophistication of the musical expression, which is universal.

This, Ni suggests, is what the well-worn phrase about music knowing no borders actually means. The universality does not lie in the surface character of the sound. It lies in the level at which the music operates and the level at which it is performed. Whether that combination can move a jury encountering it for the first time remains, as he freely acknowledges, an open question. But the barrier, he insists, is not cultural. It is musical. And musical barriers can always be crossed.

Interviewed and filmed in Shanghai at Parsons Music on August 8, 2026.This is a Chinese language programme with bilingual subtitles.

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The music of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen is the last thing one would expect at a swing party, the last thing a band will play at a jazz club, and the absolute last thing couples will tangle with in a ballroom. It is music written for the end of the world, not for the end of a pleasant Saturday evening with a gin and tonic in hand.

And yet what seems categorically, cosmically, structurally impossible was made possible by a seemingly crazy experiment from Alec Haavik, jazz musician, teacher, saxophonist, clarinettist, arranger, occasional singer and enthusiastic accumulator of brass instruments, on the night of August 8 at the JZ Club in Shanghai, just before a typhoon system was about to remind the city that the apocalypse, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one, was very much on the agenda.

Why is it that every time something truly unhinged happens in this city, a typhoon is involved? There must be something in the barometric pressure that loosens the grip of reason and allows ideas like “let’s perform Messiaen at a swing dance” to pass from the realm of the certifiably lunatic into the realm of the actually scheduled. Shanghai residents know this phenomenon well. The storm rolls in from the Pacific, the sky turns that particular shade of yellowish green that meteorologists call “unsettled” and locals call “here we go again,” and somewhere in a jazz club below a pool, a man with a clarinet announces a world premiere.

To appreciate the full audacity of what Haavik pulled off that evening, one must first understand what the Quartet for the End of Time actually is. Messiaen composed it in 1941 while interned as a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany, a detail that suggests the composer had already decided, quite reasonably, that things could not get much worse, so he might as well write something about the literal end of temporal existence.

The work is scored for violin, cello, clarinet and piano, runs to eight movements, and draws on the Book of Revelation for its structural and spiritual architecture. Its sixth movement, the one Haavik chose to arrange, is called Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes: the furious dance of the seven trumpets, those being the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse that herald, among other cheerful events, the cessation of all time. It is music of ferocious rhythmic asymmetry, obsessive unison passages and an almost geological sense of duration. It is not, in any conventional sense, a tune you can swing to.

Haavik knows this perfectly well. “I just imagined that it would not even be possible to arrange this music for a swing dance,” he says, with the equanimity of a man who has spent more than two decades playing jazz in China and has long since stopped being deterred by impossibility. “But I decided, even if it’s not possible, I’m going to do it anyway.” This is, one suspects, also the attitude that led him to spend twenty years learning to teach jazz history in Mandarin, which is its own particular category of unreasonable ambition.

The story of Haavik in Shanghai is itself a kind of extended improvisation. He arrived here with a jazz musician’s background, a semester’s Chinese from a college exchange in Taiwan, and a determination to build his jazz vocabulary in the language from scratch. He succeeded well enough that roughly 90% of his teaching at JZ School, which he joined not long after it opened, is conducted in Mandarin. This is the sort of biographical detail that makes other expatriates feel slightly inadequate at dinner parties.

His relationship with Messiaen’s Quartet goes back further still. He first encountered it as a young musician in Boston, just out of college, when someone pressed a cassette tape into his hands and said, essentially, you’ll like this.

He did.

Years later, newly arrived in Shanghai, the idea of performing Movement VI took hold, initially in a rock fusion arrangement involving two drummers, an organ player, a pianist and himself on tenor saxophone. That was 2007. The clarinet part, which sits at the heart of the original’s unison writing, had to be transposed upward to accommodate the instrument he was playing. It was, he concedes, an unusual setup. Nearly 20 years passed before he came back to the piece.

The gap, he explains, came down to swing. In the intervening years, Haavik had thrown himself into the swing tradition with the wholehearted commitment of a convert: performing it, teaching it, choreographing the intersection of music and dance with his band the Shindiggers.

Swing, by its nature, demands something from the body. It is music built for motion, for the love affair bewteen sound and movement, for the specific pleasure of two people navigating rhythm together on a dance floor. Messiaen’s Quartet, with its ferocious asymmetries and its theological ambitions, is built for something rather different, namely for sitting very still and reconsidering your assumptions about the nature of time.

And yet. The sixth movement does, after all, bear the word danse in its title. It is the furious dance of the seven trumpets, not the polite standing-around-contemplating-eternity of the seven trumpets. If Messiaen himself called it a dance, Haavik reasoned, perhaps it was at least theoretically danceable. Whether the swing dancers at JZ Club that evening would agree was, as he acknowledged beforehand with admirable candour, another matter entirely. “I cannot guarantee it,” he said, “because this is quite outside the realm of what swing dancers would normally dance to. But I warned some people.”

The typhoon, naturally, was outside the realm of what most people would normally schedule a concert around, and yet there they all were: the band and the dancers and the audience, in a jazz club in Shanghai, collectively deciding that the end of time, or at least its furious dance, was a reasonable way to spend a night. By the end of the premiere, Haavik was calling for applause for the band that had played this extremely difficult music, and also for the dancers who had taken a chance and ventured to move to it.

It is hard to know what Messiaen would have made of any of this. When I suggested to Haavik that the composer would probably be very happy about the arrangement, Haavik’s response was diplomatically noncommittal: “I’m not sure about that.”

The composer was, after all, a deeply serious Catholic mystic for whom time cycles and apocalyptic prophecy were matters of genuine spiritual weight, not raw material for a swing arrangement in a Shanghai jazz club the night before a typhoon. Then again, Messiaen also spent time in 1976 in the American West, listening to the birds of Utah and composing Des canyons aux étoiles, a piece conceived as a signal from humanity to outer space. A man who thought on those terms might well have found something to appreciate in the sheer brazenness of what Haavik attempted.

This year marks the semiquincentennial of the United States, a fact that gives the Messiaen connection an additional symmetry. When Messiaen visited America for its bicentennial in 1976, he went not to its cities or its industrial heartland but to the Grand Canyon, drawn by the landscape, the silence and the birds. The piece he wrote is a meditation on deep time and cosmic scale.

Fifty years on, an American musician living in Shanghai chose the same composer’s most eschatological work as the vehicle for an experiment in swing dancing, on a night when a typhoon was bearing down on the city. The cycles do tend to rhyme.

The time cycles in the Quartet itself, Haavik explains, are so large that within the space of the piece they never actually coincide. The end of time is always theoretically approaching but never quite arriving, which describes the situation in Shanghai on a typhoon evening rather precisely. The storm was coming. The end of time was a subject of active musical inquiry. And in the middle of it all, against every reasonable expectation, people danced to The End of Time.

Messiaen, one feels, would at minimum have understood the impulse.

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Part I

The starting point interview is a piece of news: in July 2026, the Leeds International Piano Competition lifted its restriction on repertoire, placing no preferences whatsoever on programme choice.

When KLASSIKOM covered the story, its founder Rudolph Tang wrote to the competition director and received a reply confirming that Chinese piano works, whether by composers no longer living or those active today, were warmly welcome. The response prompted a larger question: what would it actually take for Chinese piano music to make a meaningful entry into the world’s major piano competitions?

To explore this, Tang invited Dr Ni Chenkang, an avant-garde composer and postdoctoral fellow at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, to discuss the structural, historical and cultural obstacles involved at a concert hall sponsored by Parsons Music in Shanghai.

The repertoire lock

Ni begins by mapping the terrain. International piano competitions typically organise their required works into three categories: études, which showcase pure technique; fugues and polyphonic works, which demonstrate the piano’s capacity for multiple simultaneous voices; and a broader category of pieces, where competitors have more freedom of choice.

The first two categories, Ni argues, are effectively closed to Chinese composers. The étude has been defined by Chopin and Liszt’s Transcendental Études, which pushed finger technique to an extraordinary level. Ligeti’s Études opened new pianistic possibilities, but since then no composer has meaningfully extended the form. To surpass what already exists would be to transcend the physical limits of the human hand.

The fugue presents a different problem: it is rooted in Western counterpoint and tonality, major and minor keys, harmonic and melodic modes, church modes, a system that evolved over centuries from Gregorian chant through Palestrina and the Renaissance. For a Chinese composer to work within this system, the modal framework alone presents an immediate and fundamental obstacle.

That leaves the third category, pieces, as the only realistic entry point for Chinese works. Here the scope is broader: a piece can run to ten or fifteen minutes, encompass a wide range of musical material, and showcase musicality rather than technique alone. But even within this category, constraints apply. The structure cannot be too simple, the content cannot be too one-dimensional, and the work must demonstrate the full range of the piano’s technical possibilities in a comprehensive way. These filters, applied together, make the selection of suitable Chinese works an increasingly refined process.

The notation limitation

A deeper issue underlies the question of repertoire: the limits of musical notation. Ni argues that when music is written down, it loses the vast majority of its original content up to twenty percent or more. When a second person then interprets that notation, another layer of distance is added. What is produced compared to the original diverges further still.

The implication for performance is significant. Listening to previous recordings is necessary but not sufficient. What a performer most needs is an understanding of the cultural context of a work like the composer’s own experience, the environment and society of the time, the artistic life of the world in which the composer lived. Only with that understanding can a performer’s musical instincts and sensitivity genuinely deepen.

Ni develops the cultural argument with a concrete example: Chopin’s Polonaises. The Polonaise is rooted in Polish dance, and if a performer has never seen how that dance is actually danced, they will never capture the essential quality of the music. The three beats as notated are not the same as the three beats as actually felt. In the dance, a specific movement of the foot produces a displaced accent, where the expected ONE-two-three becomes one-TWO-three or one-two-THREE. Without understanding this, the feeling cannot be reproduced at the keyboard.

The same principle applies to the Baroque dance forms like the courante, the gavotte, the tarantella which were real dances before they became musical forms. The notation records the notes but not the physical gesture from which the rhythmic character originally came.

This, Ni suggests, is precisely where subtle distinctions emerge at major competitions. Tang recalls that Fou Ts’ong, competing at the Chopin Competition, did not win first or second prize but took the award for the best Polonaise performance. Ni’s response is immediate: that must have come from a deep understanding of the work’s background and a genuine identification with its culture, something he regards as even more important than piano technique itself.

The Chinese advantage

The argument arrives at its conclusion: if Chinese pianists entering international competitions could bring Chinese piano works with them, they would possess a natural advantage that no outsider can easily replicate. A pianist who has grown up in China, who speaks Chinese, whose cultural formation is rooted in that tradition, will be better placed to tell a Chinese musical story than someone approaching it from the outside.

Tang is careful to qualify this. He is not arguing that Chinese pianists have no advantage playing Chopin — clearly they do, just as Polish pianists can play Tchaikovsky superbly and Russian pianists can play Chopin brilliantly.

The point is more specific: when he hears the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto or the Yellow River Piano Concerto, he feels it in his blood immediately, in a way that non-Chinese listeners may not. The real question, and the one Ni finds most worth exploring, is whether Chinese pianists playing Chinese works can make those works stir that same visceral resonance in audiences of any cultural background.

That question has no ready answer. It depends on the works themselves, and on the courage and confidence of the performers willing to bring them to the international stage.

Interviewed on August 7, 2026 in Shanghai.To be continued

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Internationally renowned conductor and Mozart expert Ivor Bolton travelled to Shanghai in April for a concert with the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra and pianist Chen Sa in an all-Mozart programme presented at the Shanghai Concert Hall on April 11, 2026.

Here he shared his insights with Chen Sa and anchor Rudolph Tang in a live-streamed public talk at the HQs of SPO on April 9.

This is an English and Chinese programme.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit klassikom.substack.com