Zhu Xiao-Mei

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Zhu Xiao-Mei (2013)

Zhu Xiao-Mei ( Chinese  朱晓玫 , Pinyin Zhū ​​Xiǎoméi ; born 1949 in Shanghai ) is a Sino-French pianist .

Life

Zhu Xiao-Mei grew up in a former middle-class family who owned a piano in Communist China. Her parents moved to Beijing in 1950 . She received piano lessons from her mother, performed as a child prodigy in concerts and on the radio at the age of eight and attended the Central Conservatory in Beijing ( 中央 音樂 學院  /  中央 音乐 学院 , Zhōngyāng Yīnyuè Xuéyuàn ).

During the time of the Cultural Revolution , as a Red Guard, she willingly followed Maoist re-education , broke off her training and denounced her “bourgeois” teachers. However, she was re-educated by the Red Guards for five years by working in camps on the Inner Mongolia border . There she rediscovered playing the piano for herself. In 1974 she was able to return to Beijing, where she gave her first concert in 1976, and in 1977 the conservatories in China were reopened.

Zhu fled to Hong Kong in 1980 and went to the USA , where she initially fought as a cleaning lady and waitress in the Boston red-light district and entered into a marriage of convenience in order to obtain a residence permit . At the New England Conservatory of Music made her a diploma and became a teacher at a music school and organist at Christian Science . In 1985 she auditioned for Marian Rybicki in Paris and applied for French citizenship. Since then she has lived in Paris.

Her first concert in Paris in 1994 was Bach's Goldberg Variations and was the beginning of an international career. In addition to her concert appearances, she teaches at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP).

Her repertoire includes works by Scarlatti , Haydn , Mozart , Beethoven , Schubert and Schumann . At the center of her work is the piano works of Johann Sebastian Bach : The Well-Tempered Clavier , the Six Partitas , The Art of Fugue , and the Goldberg Variations , which she performed over two hundred times.

In 2007, Zhu wrote an autobiography which, following the example of the Goldberg Variations, is divided into thirty chapters and an aria that opens and closes the book. In the penultimate chapter, Zhu Xiao-Mei explains her own interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, op. 111 based on Laotse . André Leblanc wrote the illustrated youth book Le piano rouge about Zhu , which adheres closely to the events described in the autobiography.

Fonts

  • La rivière et son secret: des camps de Mao à Jean-Sébastien Bach; le destin d'une femme d'exception . Laffont, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-221-10526-9 .
    • From Mao to Bach. How I survived the Cultural Revolution . Translated from the French by Anna Kamp. Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88897893-7 .

literature

Recordings (selection)

  • CD: Bach: The Art of Fugue , 2014, Accentus Music
  • Vinyl (double LP): Bach: The Art of Fugue , 2015, Accentus Music
  • DVD: Bach: Goldberg Variations , also contains the documentation by Michel Mollard: The Return is the Movement of Tao , 2014, Accentus Music

Web links

Commons : Zhu Xiao-Mei  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sascha Lehnartz : How JS Bach saved a pianist from Mao. In: The world . May 14, 2009 .;
  2. ^ Pascale Pineau: Le piano rouge. In: Ricochet. (Review).
Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Zhu is the family name here, Xiao-Mei is the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Zhu, Xiao-Mei
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sino-French pianist
DATE OF BIRTH 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Shanghai