It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new series on my blog. Pianist and piano professor Jan Loeffler teaches the piano at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK where he works in both junior and senior schools. A significant number of Jan’s pupils have won awards both domestically and abroad.
He reflects on a wide range of subjects relating to piano study in this series of four interviews. The differences between studying in the UK and Germany, the value of arts financing, pedagogical influences, piano competitions, and the connection between students and teachers are just a few of the topics covered. Jan’s training and background are the main focus of my questions today. I hope that these interviews provide an interesting glimpse into the life and career of a busy teacher and musician.
Tell us a little about your background and about your musical training in Germany and the UK?
I was born into an art- and music-loving family in the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Growing up in a small village close to the French border, my parents are both retired secondary school teachers who introduced me to music and art early on in my life. I started preparatory musicianship lessons for two years at the local music school, including singing, body percussion, movement to music, playing listening games, etc. I joined a youth choir in my village, singing gospel songs (a genre which is very popular in Germany) and traditional German folk and popular songs alongside each other in many local concerts, which laid the foundation of me being comfortable with using my own voice to express myself musically in different styles. I continued to sing in choirs until well into my mid-20s, performing all the major choral works of the canon.
I started piano lessons aged 9 at the local music school, studying with different teachers, until I settled with Karl-Heinz Simon, who is now the Dean of Keyboard Studies and Professor of Piano and Methodology at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden. Under his tutelage I learnt what practising ‘properly’ meant, analysing everything that goes into playing the instrument on a physical level. Of course, we also talked a lot about music itself, which helped me to develop appropriate and stylish interpretations, and to express myself in a communicative way, but I do remember vividly how good he is at getting students to devise their own exercises to solve technical problems, isolating issues within pieces, identifying the underlying causes, and then being creative in solving them. I would credit him with giving me a voice, my voice, on the piano since without that training early on in one’s life you’re always playing catch-up. His methodology is heavily influenced by the so-called ‘Russian School’ since he studied, amongst others, with Nikita Jushanin. The physical connection with the keyboard and the playing with a free arm and shoulder, feeling the arm weight, are core principles of his teaching, as was enhancing finger independence, and, maybe above all else, being able to really feel and guide the weight in a smooth manner.
This approach must have helped somehow, since my piano duo partner, who also studied with Prof. Simon, and I won First Prize in the national youth music competition ‘Jugend Musiziert’ in the category ‘Piano Duo’. I still remember walking into the concert hall, being greeted by the chairwoman of the panel. I can’t remember her name, but I do remember her disarming smile, her warmth, and I could literally feel my nerves and anxiety giving way to joy and positive excitement. At that moment I decided that that’s what I also want to provide for students if ever I was to be in a similar position.
I continued my studies with Prof. Silke-Thora Matthies in Würzburg for six years, who is also a phenomenal teacher. She seamlessly continued the work Prof. Simon had started with me, and I recall her introducing me to the concept of ‘hand choreography’. She knew about my passion for watching winter sports, and I particularly enjoy figure skating. She used that to get me to think about the physical aspect of our profession in a similar way, i.e. creating a sequence of movements which allows us to play in a relaxed and wholesome way without undue tension. She told me that Claudio Arrau said that it’s a fallacy to attempt to play without any tension at all since we need it to move our limbs. We should rather learn to relax actively at any given opportunity in order not to allow any residual tension to build up over time, hampering our movements. She was also very keen on me learning how to ‘re-route’ any rebound energy which naturally occurs every time we depress a key. A lot of tension builds up if we’re not careful, because we think that we need to constantly input more energy rather than learn how to use all of the energy that’s already in the ‘playing apparatus’ (for lack of a better word) before injecting more.
She was also extremely keen on teaching the principles of sound production and on me finishing phrases properly. I recall many a lesson where she would spend what felt like an eternity on the voicing of chords, removing harshness from my sound, and on ensuring that I had control over every note in a phrase. She would then have me play a phrase in several different ways in order to highlight that there is no ‘one’ way of playing something. I can still hear her say ‘ausspielen’ when I close my eyes, which means taking care over phrasing, not cutting things short, especially when our outer fingers play those notes.
Two further key phrases from her teaching would be that ‘pieces were written to be playable in some way, shape or form, so be confident that there definitely is a way to play them, you just have to find it’, and ‘when trying things out in practice and a passage has worked maybe only once, then that means that our body is indisputably capable of performing the sequence of movements necessary; so our job is to make that sequence accessible on demand’. She would often tell me that she didn’t care how long it would take me to master a piece or a passage, and that she was absolutely confident that I would get there if I just followed the process.
Our pedagogy teacher, Prof. Inge Rosar, introduced us to the teachings of Willy Bardas, an Artur Schnabel student. His work ‘Treatise on the Psychology of Piano Technique’, edited by none other than Artur Schnabel, holds many fascinating insights into piano playing. I found the notion of distinguishing between musical and technical phrasing particularly helpful, especially since he posits that the unnoticed, but inevitable, regular divergence of the two can lead to many a problem, both musical and technical. As soon as I had been able to wrap my head around this concept, so many things became much easier.
Eventually, even the most fruitful student-teacher relationship must come to an end. With my parents both having taught English as a foreign language and having even honeymooned in the UK, I have always been an Anglophile and looked to the UK with fondness, which made me want to do my Masters in the UK, and so I auditioned for the four major conservatoires in London – and got in everywhere. I’d met Ian Fountain in Germany and was very happy when he accepted me as his student at the RAM, where I spent two happy and very fruitful years with him. He opened my mind and ears further for sound, layering (‘think from the bass upwards’), tonal colours, and generally instilled a more poised state of mind in me, building on the foundations my previous teachers had laid. His musical mind is incredibly active, his technique impeccable, and he can just sit down and play you an excerpt from e.g. a Schumann Symphony: ‘Oh, doesn’t this sound a little bit like this…’ He taught me to think out of the box, to make connections with other genres and other works. I’m not saying that my other teachers didn’t do that, but I think there’s a place and a time for when what you’re being taught really resonates with you and really sinks in, so I feel that when I studied with him, I was ready to learn about sound and music in broader terms, opening up my musical horizon and helping me consolidate my own artistic approach.
I also remember a lesson with the great late Hamish Milne, who Ian used to occasionally swap students with on an ad-hoc basis. Hamish told me to “deconstruct music into its constituent parts as they’ll be easier to understand and execute. It’s putting them all together that’s often the issue, nothing else.” ‘Easier said than done’, I thought… but it worked.
Who was most influential in your musical training and why?
It’s difficult to answer that question because ALL of my teachers, I know, have contributed immeasurably to my development, as you can read above. It is impossible, I think, to single out individual influences because everything amalgamates and forms us as artists. It’s happened many times in my life that I would, years after the event, suddenly recall a lesson or a piece of advice from a previous teacher, and it all suddenly made sense.
Musical and technical development go hand in hand, and without proper technical foundations we cannot express accurately what we want to. But without being connected to our emotions and without an understanding of how the music we play is constructed and what it might be about, we don’t have anything to express, even with the greatest technique in the world. Having good technique and nothing to express is just as unalluring as having great ideas but insufficient means to communicate them. The art of interpretation is to find out what there is to communicate and to then find ways of achieving it, which includes developing your technique accordingly.
With that in mind, the ‘Open Coaching’ sessions at the Royal Academy, where students play to each other, being supervised by Neil Heyde, Peter Sheppard Skærved, Daniel Ben Pienaar and Roderick Chadwick, were incredibly helpful in bridging the gap between technique and musicianship, and in realising how they mutually inform and influence each other.
I also feel privileged to have worked with Krystian Zimerman’s teacher, Andrzei Jasiński, in a masterclass and I remember how ecstatic I felt afterwards because he’d really liked my Chopin. Zimerman is one of my all-time piano heroes, if I may call him that, and I have heard him countless times in concerts. To have received even that small sign of approval from his teacher made me very happy and helped me grow confidence in my interpretative ability. The same goes for Ruth Nye, with whom I had a couple of lessons, and she seemed to have liked my Beethoven and Brahms. Having grown up listening to Arrau’s (Ruth Nye’s teacher) recordings almost on repeat, and with my teachers extolling his virtues, her feedback meant a lot to me and boosted my self-confidence. Unlike in sports, without clear and objectifiable targets, young and aspiring musicians seek out and crave approval from role models, so those examples were important for me in my own development and artistic growth, but I wouldn’t want to place any hierarchy on any of these influences: my regular lessons were just as important as the shorter-term musical encounters as each one addressed specific aspects of my development.
Do you feel it’s important for a teacher to be, or have been, a performer?
When working on this interview, I found some letters people wrote me over the years; one read: “They [the students] have noted the remarkable elegance and facility with which you were able to help them improve – from minute details of technique to larger elements of proper music-making and understanding. […] I was continually impressed by the dramatic changes students were able to make in a very short time, whether in technical skill, tangible sound of the instrument, or simply in the psychology of approach; this is a tribute to your adroit instruction. […] it was especially helpful for our students to see first-hand that you apply the very same tenets you espouse in your teaching to your playing. Your beautiful, careful approach to the Brahms Intermezzi in your solo recital was a clear example (as was the stunning Beethoven!).”
It is always encouraging and motivating to receive feedback like the above, and I am glad that my playing and my teaching appear to mutually inform each other, however, on a more analytical level I find this question difficult to answer, since we cannot possibly extract meaningful data from historical evidence. I would hazard a guess that any musician will have had lessons, at some point in their careers, from someone who didn’t perform, and I don’t think we can say that those lessons were somehow less important by default. It’s impossible to say which lessons were the most formative in our development, and even if we think that someone had the most impact on our development, that may not necessarily be factually accurate, it might just be our perception. For instance, most early-years training is likely carried out by teachers who don’t perform that much, but I think their importance and impact cannot be overstated! Equally, when musicians seek the tutelage, further along in their own careers, of someone who doesn’t perform, as was the case with Leon Fleisher and Dorothy Taubman, for instance, there’s usually a good reason for it, so someone who doesn’t perform can absolutely be important in a pianist’s education. Kodály famously said: ‘It is much more important who is the music teacher in Kisvárda than who is the director of the opera house in Budapest’, which I think highlights my point above.
By the time countless students, who would become some of the world’s foremost performers, flocked to teachers including Renate Kretschmar-Fischer, Martin Krause (a Liszt student and the teacher of Claudio Arrau and Edwin Fischer), Solomon Mikowsky, Bruno Seidlhofer, Eleanor Sokoloff, Klaus Hellwig, and Maria Curcio, to name but a few, they had established careers as teachers, and their performing pedigree, whilst certainly one aspect, probably wasn’t the main reason for those students to seek their advice, but rather their track record of helping students achieve their full potential and establish a career. Whether this input was more important than the instruction they will have received much earlier in their careers, I can’t say; I think all instruction is formative in some way, shape or form.
We have an expression in German: ‘die eierlegende Wollmilchsau’, which roughly translates to ‘the egg-laying, wool and milk producing pig’. It is meant to illustrate that rarely can one person satisfy all the needs. The same, I think, applies to teachers, performers or not, for they will each have a lot of value to add to a student, if they are good teachers.
What I do feel strongly about, though, is that teachers should understand the biomechanics involved in playing the instrument in minute detail, and, most importantly, that they are artists, not merely instrumentalists. Not every performer is an artist, and not every artist is a performer, so I think we would do well to judge the value of the contribution teachers make on a case-by-case basis.
Ignaz Friedman said in his edition of the Chopin Études:
‘Based on his own experience, [the editor] is completely convinced, that also in one’s piano studies one cannot swear by the words of the master, neither can one swear by the absolute validity of one system alone. Even the best teaching will only be useful to the thinking, self-relying musician. There are good and bad students of Liszt and Leschetizky, no matter how great their respective instructive systems.’
I tend to agree with him: a thinking and inquisitive student is, in my experience, the foundation upon which good instruction will flourish.
Tell us about your experience as a performer?
I loved performing from a relatively young age, and whilst I initially performed solo most of the time, I grew to really love chamber music as well. I think when I grew up, playing solo meant that I could shape music exactly the way I heard it in my mind, but as I’ve matured as a person (as I hope I have), making music with others offers experiences which elude you as a soloist. Some of the most exhilarating performing experiences I have had are playing with an orchestra, as I love hearing that full-bodied sound behind me, carrying the sound of the piano with it into the auditorium, and I also just love the fact that there are so many people on stage, all striving for the same goal, sharing the responsibility for making the music come alive.
What matters to me as a performer is to reach people’s souls. It sounds like a cliché, and maybe it is, but being able to create a connection for a period of time between the composer and the audience is just mind-boggling to me. I said it elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating: it’s like time-travelling. When I played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op.111 in Italy, a pianist colleague from the US came up to me afterwards and told me that she clung onto every note and that she loved everything I did, except that she wasn’t sure about one of my phrasings in the repeat of the first half of the second variation in the Arietta. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated her comment, because it showed that she knew the piece inside-out and truly listened to my interpretation. It was also fascinating to hear her say that, since I remembered having briefly lost focus in the very spot that she pointed out. It wasn’t a memory slip, or a technical error, or a voicing mix-up, I just didn’t internally sing along as I normally do. Apparently, my losing focus for a split second was enough for her to realise a drop in the intensity of my playing. Fascinating!
It is also very rewarding when newspaper critics pick up on something you’ve been working hard at for months: after a performance of Brahms’s first piano concerto, a newspaper wrote that “you cannot but notice the fact that he is a very experienced Lied accompanist and chamber musician, which shows in his very nuanced pianism. The extremely dense texture was beautifully crafted with a lot of attention to detail, whilst getting rid of some of its potentially overbearing power. The artist […] found his ideal hunting ground in the dark sonic landscapes that characterise Brahms’ music”. I had spent a lot of time working on my voicing, so when this very aspect was highlighted, it was a little ‘life win’, as my wife would call it.
In our musicians’ lives nowadays, with ever-increasing competition and decreasing opportunities, versatility is paramount, which is, incidentally, why we actively encourage our students at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire to include chamber music in their Masters recitals, and why we include chamber music tuition and assessments throughout our BMus degrees, even when enrolled as solo pianists.
I myself enjoy collaborating with fellow musicians immensely, and after we’d performed Schubert’s Winterreise at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, we took the cycle to the USA, where I received this comment:
“Loeffler’s performance of the Schubert ‘Winterreise’ cycle was one of the most moving musical experiences in the twenty years I’ve been presenting these concerts. It was well beyond technically accurate – it was musically sensitive and expressive. His collaboration with the singer was more than complementary; it became an essential and critical part of the message of the text.”
I had the pleasure to world-première one of Howard Skempton’s compositions together with my wife, but I also played some solo repertoire in the same concert, which Howard commented on as follows:
“When I heard Jan perform, it was immediately clear that he had a formidable technique. We could listen enthralled to his playing of the 4th Chopin Ballade, fully confident that he would meet its heroic demands. More importantly, his performances were immensely thoughtful and imaginative. There was virtuosity in his touch, and in his ability to colour sound: evidence, I would argue, of a fine ear and keen attention to detail. He is interested also in contemporary music. One of my ambitions is to write a concerto for Jan. He is a fine artist, with the sensibility and intelligence to be an invaluable teacher.”
I find it somewhat uncomfortable to talk about my own playing, so I chose to let others do the talking, as it were. I hope to pass on to my students those attributes mentioned above: using our technique not for its own sake, but to serve the music, listening intently to our own playing, using our imagination to shape it and to communicate it to an audience, and to blend into whatever ensemble you happen to make music with, without compromising your own artistic personality and individuality.
Which past concerts have been important in your career so far, and what are your future concert plans?
Playing Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto with the Camerata Europeana under the amazing violinist and conductor Radoslaw Szulc, was certainly one highlight. He is the 1st concert master of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and guest-led the LSO under Bernard Haitink and Sir Colin Davis in several recordings. He has also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and collaborates with Hélène Grimaud, Daniel Lozakovich and Lisa Batiashvili, so having had the opportunity to experience this extraordinary musical mind at work was a formative experience for me and one that I still cherish, even after all those years.
Collaborating with Nathaniel Anderson-Frank, leader of the BBC Concert Orchestra, in some of the Beethoven Violin Sonatas was another highlight. Developing our interpretative approach together taught me a lot, and it was fun and exciting to perform together.
I also very fondly recall performing the Schubert Fantasy for piano four hands with Luis Sanchez, an Argentinian-born Steinway Artist from Texas. We just clicked, and it seemed as if we knew what the other was about to do before we did it.
Personal circumstances and the pandemic have shifted the balance in my professional life; my teaching load has increased, thus resulting in the inevitable knock-on effect on my own playing since practice time is limited. Having said that, I practise more efficiently than I ever have, which allows me to still learn some repertoire I want to get under my belt, and work towards increasing my performing whilst remaining firmly committed to my students’ education.
The Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata is one of those pieces, which I will perform with Ruth Boden, a US-based cellist. It’s the piece that I have most wanted to learn in the past decade, I think. I feel completely drawn to this music, and I don’t think there’s a single dull bar in it! It is very much work-in-progress, though, since it is rather challenging, but I’m hoping that I’ll have enough time over the coming months to finish learning it.
I’ve also just been asked to collaborate with Allison Brewster-Franzetti and Carlos Franzetti, a New-York-based pianist-composer couple. Carlos Franzetti’s music is fantastic: he’s won 5 Latin Grammy Awards and was nominated seven additional times for one. His wife is a consummate pianist and artist – and a multiple Grammy Award nominee herself, highly versatile and professional. It’ll be repertoire for one, two and three pianos, and we’re currently looking for performance opportunities on this side of the Atlantic.
Find out more about Jan, here.
In our next interview session, Jan offers his thoughts on piano pedagogy and its development.
Publications
Melanie Spanswick has written and published a wide range of courses, anthologies, examination syllabuses, and text books, including Play it again: PIANO (published by Schott Music). This best-selling graded, progressive piano course contains a large selection of repertoire featuring a huge array of styles and genres, with copious practice tips and suggestions for every piece.
For more information, please visit the publications page, here.
Melanie Spanswick 