The pop pianist who entered the Chopin Competition
NewsNikkei Asia has a feature on the Japanese pop pianist Hayato Sumino (popularly known as Cateen) who, beneath the eyeline of classical curators, made it to the semi-finals of this year’s Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
… The 18th edition of the competition was postponed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During that year, Sumino kept pushing the envelope with unconventional performances. He played the keyboard, the harmonica and even a toy piano in a concert with a professional orchestra. He also played at Blue Note Tokyo, a famed jazz club. “I was discovering my identity in free music,” he says.
Sumino was still uncertain whether he should enter the competition at all. He felt classical music was “moving toward the past.” The Chopin contest, in particular, seemed to symbolize authority and tradition in the classical world.
What tipped the balance for Sumino were episodes from the lives of Frédéric François Chopin himself and his close friend, Franz Liszt. “They arranged opera music, which was the pop music of its day, performing in salons and often doing improvisations,” Sumino says. That encouraged him. Sumino realized that it is important to “play mazurkas and waltzes as if they were created on the spot — as if I were speaking them in my own language.” …
Read on here.
He is a delight, in both his worlds, classical and pop. Plus,
he shares his time with some
very laid-back cats.
All types of music should be viewed as on a continuum IMO.
No.
So clearly he has good piano chops. And if he has a career, and a following – and education and skills in something in addition to music – he’s doing better than most of the people who finished ahead of him. Good for him.
Fair enough but people will still take the likes of Trifonov, Grosvenor, Cho and Rana more seriously.
He’s also had jazz lessons from an early age alongside the rigorous classical upbringing, so he can improvise and sight-read with equal fluency. He can also compose and arrange.
A high-calibre, well-rounded musician if you look up his work, and calling him a pop pianist based on his decision to play outside core classical repertoire / put himself on YouTube is to do him a disservice.
I wasn’t expecting a more nuanced description from this website, but thought I’d stick up for him here anyway because he’s good and deserves it. Watch him play Chopin études to a high standard, watch him play video game music; it doesn’t matter.
Improvising is something that has been mostly lost somewhere along the continuum of traditional training.They still did it in the 19th C. Along side Czerny’s many volumes of etudes are entire method books devoted to the art of improvisation and its related skill, arranging. They had intentional training then, and we could now if we wanted. Sumino is curious and intelligent and independent-thinking enough to have connected a few readily available historical dots which show that his entire approach has very deep historic and traditional roots.
I fully agree that future teachers ought to try and get it back in. I did an early music module at music college and was struck by the similarities to jazz teaching, and simply how ‘in touch’ the teacher was with his musical style and instrument, away from any written music.
Shouldn’t have been a moment of awakening, because as you say it should already be there in core classical teaching, but it was nonetheless. Now I ignore the score a lot more (respectfully), and my ability to improvise and write has improved too.
I’m reminded of my progress in French where for a few years I could read, write and speak well enough but couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. It all starts with listening!
He is an extraordinary musician with a phenomenal technique and a huge youtube following. Listen and watch his version of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” at ten levels of difficulty. Amazing!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hQhImw7YHwA
Hmm… well, I’ve just listened ..again.. to his first round performances, and they were awful, particularly in respect of persistent and gross overpedalling, in disjointed, broken phrasing in the G minor Mazurka, in truly horrible rolled chords in the C minor Nocturne, and in a ” Winter Wind” where there was hardly a single bar where the sustaining pedal was not held down through much of the bar. Mechanical finger technique there aplenty, but nothing else
This illustrates the problem of taking other people’s word for the quality of a performance without listening to it, a subject which has caused much controversy on this board in relation to West Side Story
I’ve just listened again to his first round performances. They are awful, with gross and persistent overpedalling in all the works, most damagingly in the C minor Nocturne and Winter Wind, together with broken phrasing in the Mazurkas. Finger technique aplenty, but nothing else .