![]() ![]() Just four years after his first lessons, Irfan made his concerto debut with the Malaysian Philharmonic, playing a work by the teenage Beethoven (outside the canon of the five numbered concertos). I need to hear it inside me before I start practising, so that I know what kind of atmosphere I am looking for.” I am a strong believer in knowing the piece first, because then I internalise it in my ear. “Love for reading music is what made me a conductor, even at a time when I had no plans to wave my hands! I know a lot of pianists dive in at the piano and start playing, but I’m different. Once he had acquired the rudiments of theory, Irfan found reading a score as satisfying as playing it. © Jack Yam | Singapore Symphony Orchestra Composition became a natural extension of that.” Filed in the library of pre-recorded tracks alongside Scott Joplin and Star Wars, it was the Waltz Op.64 No.2 by Chopin that set Irfan on a path of dedicating his life to music. “When I was practising, I would lose concentration after a while, and I liked to switch around the notes in the pieces I was playing, improvising on them. My parents never had to tell me to practice.” Making his own music soon evolved from playing the notes in front of him. I didn’t have a really strict teacher – it was more self-motivated. Lessons were arranged, “but for some months I was working it all out for myself. And I became curious, and my musical journey started with this keyboard.” I began to play around with the keyboard at the age of six or seven, listening to the pre-recorded tracks, following how the keys lit up as well as making sounds. “There were several instruments in the house, though my parents didn’t force me or my siblings learn them. “My mother is a lawyer and my father is a doctor,” he says. Irfan came to music, or music came to him, unprompted, via the modest channel of a Yamaha digital piano in the family home. The expectations are certainly there.” The line of composer-pianist-conductors is a long and distinguished one, spanning at least Beethoven to Adès it’s rather soon to place Irfan in such company, but a conversation with him discloses the makings of a thoughtful as well as a prodigiously accomplished musician. Even at 25, he has experience on his side.Īll the same, a full solo recital at an established piano festival brings its own pressure. Another video online shows him at the age of 12, improvising a short piece with an orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi, no less. Tengku Irfan performs Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.Īny soloist coming to the Fantasy for themselves inevitably feels the weight of the composer pressing on their shoulders, but as a composer and conductor as well as pianist, Irfan may grasp better than most the kind of improvisatory spirit which the Fantasy – and much else in Beethoven’s output – embodies. ![]()
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