The pianist discusses with Jessica Duchen the importance of musical outreach, and about his new recording of works by classical music’s most celebrated love triangle PHOTOGRAPHY: MARCO BORGGREVE
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
It’s 2004 and on the TV a small boy is playing the living daylights out of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major. The performance has everything, from musical insights and gorgeousness of piano tone to a razzmatazz of glittering fingerwork, yet the pianist is barely 12 years old. It is the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year, and eventually the title goes to a 16-year-old violinist named Nicola Benedetti – but we will be hearing more of that little pianist. He hails from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, and his name is Benjamin Grosvenor.
Now 30, Grosvenor saunters in to our lunch date, still with a slight air of boyish wonder about him. Not all prodigies make it to adult international stardom with head so intact and feet so firmly on the ground. Grosvenor has both. The youngest of five brothers – a Benjamin in every sense – he is the son of a piano teacher who was not only able to start him on the instrument, but also knew where to take him for first-class training and how to protect him from any potential lure towards doing too much too soon.
The BBC competition seems a long time ago. ‘I’m very happy that I did it,’ Grosvenor says. ‘I think if I hadn’t had that experience of understanding what it meant to be a pianist, I might just have gone and done something else. It helped to show me the way.’ Working with a professional orchestra made an especially powerful impression: ‘It was mind blowing! I’d only ever played with the school orchestra before. That was probably the most memorable aspect, and it showed me what goes into putting together a concerto performance. Ilan Volkov [the conductor] was amazing, providing just the right kind of support for a little kid to play the Ravel.’
Grosvenor’s path was unconventional; he went to his local school in Westcliff-on-Sea until he was 14 and was then homeschooled for two years before entering the Royal Academy of Music to study with Christopher Elton and Daniel-Ben Pienaar. ‘I tried the Yehudi Menuhin School for three days when I was nine,’ he remembers, ‘but I didn’t like boarding.’ His closeness to his nearest brother in age, Jonathan, who has Down’s syndrome, also made him want to stay in the family home.
Sensibly having avoided the limelight immediately after the competition, he released an album called This and That on a small label in 2009, revealing quite astonish
