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Emotion that isn't lucid doesn't have the right effect.

Article Excerpt
It is just under a year since the young Czech pianist Ivo Kahanek made his very successful debut in the Royal Albert Hall, performing Bohuslav Martinu's Piano Concerto no. 4 "Incantation" with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The recording is now offered as a download by the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon company. He is preparing for solo recitals in Rome and Tokyo. What has so impressed the public, the critics and the producers about Kahanek? In this interview he offers insights into his piano world.

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You gave your first interview to Czech Music Quarterly shortly after winning the Prague Spring International Piano Competition in 2004. How do you feel that your position has changed since then?

As I already guessed back then, the Prague Spring helped me a lot, in many respects. Back then I was just one of those talented promising students who have managed to shine at a competition, whereas now I have the sense that I've played a few times at least in various important concert halls, with large orchestras, and people already know my name, and I've already been invited to work with some concert organisers and orchestras on a more regular basis.

Has it changed your approach to compositions, to performance? For example do you now feel more freedom in your approach?

I've been forced to a certain change of approach simply by the fact that the sheer amount of work means that I have much less time. On the one hand this is a negative change, but it's also positive because I've had to learn to work more productively. But as far as approach to a piece is concerned, that hasn't changed much, because I've always tried to develop my own musical idea of a piece in as precise a way as possible and to do everything I can to embody it in my interpretation. And it never made any difference whether I was going to play it at a competition or in some small village on an upright piano.

What I meant was having to think about the people on the committee judging you and so on.

Of course. It's true that if you play Beethoven at a competition in Germany, for example, then you really have to take care to keep perfectly to the ur-text and make sure that all the ornaments are done just as they should be. Of course its the same elsewhere, but still, if you're going to play it in Spain you inevitably feel a little freer. You need to know the recordings, to know the international trends, but in the end it is always just you, alone, and the music.

You mention listening to recordings - are there some particular musicians you regard as ideal?

I've never thought in terms of having one or two models, of saying to myself that I want to play like Richter, for example. But as representatives of the highest standards that a pianist and artist can reach, apart from Richter I could mention Emil Gilels or Wilhelm Kempf, Dino Lipati, and among contemporary pianists Muray Perahi, for example, or Emanuel Ax. When I listen to recordings of a piece I don't know or heard long ago and I'm supposed to be playing it in the foreseeable future, then I might say to myself that one of them is fantastic, brilliant. But then I submerge myself in...