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ceo/cfo
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
By STUART ISACOFF
Fort Worth, Texas
The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition's final rounds were in full gear earlier this month, as Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko edged toward the gold prize. But an afternoon break brought the opportunity to leave the ruckus of Bass Hall behind to meet with jury member Liu Shih Kun in a quiet lounge in the nearby Worthington Hotel. The 74-year-old Chinese pianist—who had not seen Van Cliburn for more than 50 years before visiting last March for the competition's silver-anniversary celebration, and once again in the fall to be at Cliburn's side following the news of the American pianist's terminal illness (Cliburn died on Feb. 27)—seems remarkably vigorous. There is no sign of the years of imprisonment and torture he suffered at the behest of political operatives back home.
Enlarge Image
Liu Shih Kun
Mr. Liu stands as erect as a bamboo stalk, and in conversation he is animated, punctuating the dialogue with emphatic hand gestures or robustly vocalizing Mozart concerto melodies. His demeanor is serious, but he smiles easily. He says that he is happy. Yet the pianist, who tied for second prize in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition—the event at which Cliburn stunned the world by winning first place in Moscow at the height of the Cold War—underwent an odyssey that would have broken most men.
He was born in Tianjin, a port city where, Mr. Liu explained through his interpreter, very few people played the piano. But he developed a love for the instrument early on. "My father, a baritone who graduated from Shanghai Music College, loved music and wanted me to become a musician," he reports. It helped that his family was rich—"without money, you couldn't study music at that time. We had more than 10,000 records at home, and I listened to them every day," he recalls.
His affinity for music became clear while he was still an infant—when he repeatedly reacted with intense emotion to a Mozart lullaby—and his father began training him by the age of 3. Early lessons focused on only his ear and memory; he didn't learn to read music until he was 8. Yet those initial skills served him well. By 6 he was performing Mozart concertos; at 10 he won first prize in a national competition.
Along the way, he studied in Shanghai and then Beijing with Russian teachers, and by 1956 he was entered in a Liszt competition in Hungary, where he garnered third prize—a result, he asserts, skewed by political chicanery. "My receiving only third place was a shock for the public," he says. "After each of my performances, the jury—which included such great pianists as Emil Gilels, Alexander Goldenweiser and Annie Fischer—stood up. But Hungary was in the Soviet orbit, so they gave the first prize to Soviet pianist Lev Vlassenko. And they had to give the second prize to a Hungarian. The government, to calm down the public and the press, gave me an additional special prize—a lock of Liszt's hair."
A year later he was in Moscow, studying with pianist Samuel Feinberg in preparation for the newly announced Tchaikovsky Competition. "The first time I met Feinberg, he asked me if I played various pieces and I answered no to each one he named. 'You play nothing,' he sighed."
But the Chinese pianist worked hard, practicing 11 or 12 hours a day. "I didn't even go out of the hotel room," he remembers. "It was a bitter winter, and the windows had double panes of glass. So I put food between the panes to keep it cold." This time, he tied for second place with Vlassenko—it was another political compromise, he says, though he has no doubt that Cliburn deserved to win.
But there were greater troubles ahead. "When I returned to China after the Tchaikovsky Competition," he reports, "the culture had changed. Common labor was valued above art, and I had to engage in physical work for two months to serve as an example. Meanwhile, Mao Zedong was promoting the idea that music and art must be based on folk traditions, and if I wanted to compose I had to follow those principles. I thought this wasn't a bad idea. So in 1959 I wrote a piano concerto—it was called 'Youth Concerto'—and for the first time China had a piece that utilized both Western and Chinese instruments."
While he returned to Moscow for two years to further his studies, the climate at home continued to worsen. He became a professor at the Beijing Conservatory, and performed for both Mao and Zhou Enlai. The two criticized his playing as not suited to Chinese audiences. By the time the Cultural Revolution was under way in 1966, he found himself under arrest, and shifted from prison to prison.
"There were two reasons," he says. "Officially, I was under suspicion, both because I played classical music and because I had studied in the Soviet Union—China and the Soviets were no longer on good terms. They accused me of being a Soviet spy. But the real reason was that Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, was trying to force me to give false testimony against my father-in-law, who was a man of some political standing."
He cleaned toilets. Guards repeatedly struck his right arm with a military belt—fracturing the bone. In the notorious Qincheng Prison, he was tortured. "In summer and winter I had only one shirt. There were no showers. For food they gave me some moldy bread and rotten leaves with insects, loaded with lots of salt. I had to spend hours bowing to a portrait of Mao."
When he finally gained release in 1973—by surreptitiously cutting letters from a newspaper and pasting them together with the mold from his bread to form a note to Mao about his innocence (smuggled out by his wife)—he spent months in the hospital before resuming his career as a pianist, now performing such officially sanctioned works as the "Yellow River" concerto (which he learned by listening to the piece over loudspeakers while in his prison cell).
Remarkably, there is a happy ending. In 1990, the pianist immigrated to Hong Kong, where he taught piano lessons 10 hours a day. After two years, he had gathered enough money to create his first music school. Liu Shih Kun has now founded more than 100 such schools in more than 32 cities, serving a total of almost 70,000 Chinese students. He is flourishing. And, once again, so is music in China.
Mr. Isacoff is at work on a book about the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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