George Harliono, the former Indonesian-British piano prodigy who has been astonishing concert hall audiences in Europe, the US and Asia, is set to impress Manila on Aug. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Ayala Museum with a program that ranges from Beethoven’s “The Tempest” or Piano Sonata No. 17 Op. 31 to Stravinsky’s Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka.
He will repeat the same program at Luce Auditorim in Dumaguete on Aug. 25 on the occasion of Silliman University’s 150th anniversary, according to concert organizer Joseph Uy.
When asked by lifestyle journalist Refa Koetin for the online publication Prestige how he goes about picking his repertoire, the 23-year old pianist answered, “I always have a list of pieces that I want to perform, I choose the ones that fit with the way I am feeling at the time when I am ready to begin a new piece.”
Koetin traced how Harliono grew up pursuing music as his path when he first saw an older brother playing the violin. He thought it was fun “so I also started playing too. In our home we had a very old upright piano, I think it cost £100. It was really terrible, almost untune-able. My brother and I would play around on it, making a terrible noise until my mum got so fed up with it that she found a local piano teacher to help tame us! I found that I enjoyed playing piano and would spend hours practicing and trying out new things. My parents are not at all musical so they didn’t really know what to do with me when I began to become more and more interested in playing.”
Thanks to the piano teacher Claire Swainsbury, he was shown how much fun piano playing could be. She introduced him also to “some beautiful pieces of music.” Other musical influences are the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy and the conductor Alexander Sladkovsky. With Sladkovsky leading, Harliono is proud of his performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2 in Kazan, Russia. He admired Russia for making music a part of daily life.
Koetin asked whose compositions he played best. Harliono cited Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Liszt, saying “I think that if you enjoy performing a piece of music you will usually play it well. I’ve always been fond of performing the great Russian romantic composers, although I’m never sure if I play these pieces the best. But I do know that I really enjoy this kind of repertoire.”
Harliono’s partiality for the Russians is also reflected in his preferred venue: the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory “mainly because of the acoustics but also because of the long history behind this amazing concert hall and the many legendary artists who have performed there.”
His biography stated that in 2016, his performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 at the Great Hall of The Moscow Conservatory was broadcast live on Russian national TV and streamed live on Medici TV.
As for his favorite musician, his choice is pianist Vladimir Horowitz, “who, when he first started performing, was paid in butter and chocolate… Sounds good to me!”
His most unforgettable experience was when he was to perform with conductor Valery Gergiev. They only had a 10-minute rehearsal for an entire concerto. That rehearsal ended five minutes before the curtains rose.
Koetin asked him to define success in music. He answered that it “isn’t something that you can ever really achieve or reach. Certainly I try to improve my understanding of a piece of music, but I am not sure if I will ever succeed in doing so completely.”
For tickets to the Aug. 23 concert, text or call the Cultural Arts Events Organizer at 0920-954-0053 or 0918-347-3027. Or email us at josephuy2004@yahoo.com or log on to Ticket2Me.Net.