JAMES STRECKER: If you were asked for 50 words for an encyclopedia to summarize what you do, or have done, in the arts, what would you say?
HANNA SHYBAYEVA: Classical pianist by education who is strongly influenced and inspired by other genres of music such as electronic, contemporary, jazz, rock and more. Equally active in every musical setting form from solo to a large ensemble performance.
JS: What important beliefs do you express in or through your work?
HS: I believe music can heal, educate and change people, and I hope I play my little part in bringing this belief over to them.
JS: Name two people, living or dead, whom you admire a great deal and tell us why for each one.
HS: Admiring people for me is easy, since there is so much talent around and I always admire people who did or do the best with their gifts and talents and let them flourish to the maximum for the benefit of all of us and the world. But there are too many of them to mention here.
JS: How have you changed since you began to do creative work?
HS: Life experiences made me more daring and less insecure about what I do and I guess this brings more colour, form and depth into my playing. I also at some point realized that I have to do what I believe in and like and not do what others think is right for me. That realization opened a totally new level of ways and forms to be creative in classical music.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
HS: To be a business lady. To be a good sales/PR agent and sometimes my own accountant. Next to what I do, these are for me extremely hard to combine.
Also, to be social and be at my best when I am not. People who paid money to hear me play shouldn’t care if I haven’t slept for two days or have a 39 degree fever.
Also, to somehow still have a ‘normal’ life sometimes which includes cleaning, buying food, going to see parents and friends.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life.
HS: Leaving my home town and country for good at the age of 18 made an impression. Though I travelled a lot through Europe since very young age, it was one of the major turning points in my life, a point that lasted for 1.5 years since I couldn’t find a place where I felt I wanted to stay and study further. At that stage I questioned everything I had done with my life before and didn’t know how I wanted to go further and even if I still wanted to go on playing piano.
Meeting my teacher and therefore moving to The Hague was the second big turning point, since it gave me a second musical life, a strong wish to live with music again and that was the start of what I am today.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about what you do?
HS: This after the concert question: ‘Your piano playing is great, but what do you actually do for living?’
Some people think we just do this for fun, as a hobby, because we’ve got a good job aside that pays the bills and they don’t realize that this 1.5 hours’ program I just played for them is a full-time job with months of preparation.
A lot of people don’t realize how physically and mentally demanding what we are doing is. Physiotherapists compare piano playing (and not only piano, of course) with a heavy sport training and sometimes I know for sure I lose a kilo or two after a solo recital.
Another point which is hard to realize for an outsider is that we basically don’t have weekends and ‘evenings off after work’ since that is when most concerts take place. That being a musician is not a job, but an existence, and that we don’t have working hours, we work on music and live music all the time.
JS: How and why did you begin to do creative work in the first place?
HS: My mom is a conductor and there was always music in the house. We also had an upright piano which my mother played for me regularly, so naturally I started touching the piano keys early enough and apparently was learning very fast< which brought me to the special music school soon after. So, you can say that my parents decided for me to be a musician, but I am glad now that they did.
JS: What haven’t you attempted as yet that you would like to do and please tell us why?
HS: I have to learn how to really improvise and I want to be able to play real jazz…It fascinates me how different jazz musicians’ brains work and I believe it would do a lot of good to my creativity as a classical musician. Maybe in my next life….
I want to open a music centre with practice rooms and a recording studio with a small concert hall for musicians to gather and meld ideas, where all genres of music are going to be equally welcome. I know a place, but have no money to buy it, so if somebody wants to donate, please let me know.
I also want to attempt to learn how to dance flamenco I have always danced a lot and it’s an amazingly liberating feeling.
JS: What are your most meaningful achievements?
HS: I don’t know how meaningful it is for the rest of the world, but I think my last recording production was the most important and made the most sense to me. I made my first LP production which was recorded live with an analog ‘direct-to-2-track’ system, and this meant no edits and corrections were possible, what you hear is what you get. I believe it is important to stay real in what we do and don’t agree with the nowadays fashion of recording in classical music where everything has to be perfect, with no possible wrong note or a pedal squeak allowed. In the end, we end up with a lot of recordings that are so perfect they all start sounding the same. I believe we should take a step back, relax about our imperfections, and let the public hear real music which is played once and once only.
I also for the first time used a recording technique with the microphones very close to the instrument and almost without reverb. My sound concept is the opposite of what is common in classical piano recording where the piano often sounds loud but far away and an ambiance of a big concert hall is being created. I believe in a close and more intimate sound where the listener should feel like I am playing in his living room. Basically, I think I am reaching out to the old recordings’ sound and this was my first attempt, and I know there will be more experiments in this field for me and can’t wait to try again!
JS: What advice would you give a young person who would like to do what you do?
HS: First of all, ask yourself if you really love music or is it that you love yourself in music. The difference is crucial and can make you either happy or a very frustrated person for the rest of your life.
JS: Of what value are critics?
HS: You mean people who write bad things about others and get paid for it? Just joking.
They can be of a great value if they know the subject and are able to remain objective. In this case, you read really interesting meaningful reviews and it doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative. However, too many of them are using the motto ‘I don’t like it and therefore it’s not good’ or they just praise whatever is in fashion at that moment.
JS: What do you ask of your audience?
HS: I love my public and I hope they like me back. I don’t ask much of them, because it’s my choice to play for them and I am happy to see them when I come out on stage. I ask of them to forgive me if I have a bad day.
Maybe sometimes I want to ask of them to be a little more understanding right after the concert when I am still trying to catch my breath and not to be invasive or only want to talk about how their far away family member also plays piano and want to know how many hours I practice per day.
JS: What specifically would you change about what goes on in the world and the arts?
HS: What goes on in the world and the arts is unfortunately the same: egoism, vanity and greed.
To change these things I guess is impossible, since it’s never been different in history, or has it?
Hypothetically, I would force the whole world to start its day with one obligatory hour of dancing and singing together on the streets where presidents would be forced to dance as a couple with a cleaning lady and a Muslim person together with a Christian!
If I could change something really in arts, I would erase music competitions from this planet, because they give very wrong ideas to young musicians about what’s important in art and why we choose to do what we do. In music, it’s not about being better, faster, stronger, greater, or prettier.
JS: If you could relive one experience from your creative life, what would it be and why would you do so?
HS: No, I don’t think I want to relive any, I only want to make and live new ones.
JS: Tell us what it feels like to be a figure who is presented somehow in the media. What effect does this presence have on you?
HS: None whatsoever. I am not that much in the focus light that it would start to become disturbing. In my case, it actually helped me a little since I was always very shy and introverted. Having to deal with media taught me to be more present and express myself better also in words and not only through playing piano.
JS: Name two places you would like to visit, one you haven’t been to and one to experience again and briefly tell us why.
HS: I have to go to Iceland one day, I find everything about that country extremely intriguing.
I want to go back to that place in the middle of nowhere in the countryside somewhere between Berlin and the sea where a little pretty house stands, hear and feel again that strong wind and warm sun on my face, and experience that peace of mind I haven’t had in years.
JS: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on, are preparing, or have recently completed. Why do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
HS: I am always busy with ideas inside me, they have to grow and take shape and sometimes it takes time. Every solo program I come up with is a project for me, to think it, cherish it and make it blossom in the end. The important thing for me is to always have a surprise element in every program I make, and let’s say even if I have a quite conventional program there always will be a piece that nobody knows or expects. In every program I make I try to bring in a little educational aspect, to not only let my public hear what they already know, but always integrate an element of the new and unexpected, maybe then it becomes more meaningful for all of us.
Recently I am also preparing a contemporary tango project which might turn into a recording as well. I love dancing, as I told you before, and tango is one of my passions too. I found a lot of contemporary composers who apparently felt the same way and I think it’s interesting and also entertaining to bring this out as one project.
Another exciting project to come is a theatre piece I and my colleagues are working on, based on improvisation in music and also in acting. We are trying to expand our boundaries and show our public totally different sides of us as musicians.
I am always busy with my two-piano duo, Pianologues, with an amazing jazz musician Gianluca di Ienno who taught me so much about jazz. Based on improvisation and mutual feeling of the moment on stage, this project is growing into something that I cannot tell you yet.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
HS: I have the feeling that the arts, including my field, somehow are coming to standstill at the moment.
We are pressed by promoters, concert halls and all other mighty parties to come up with new ideas and exciting projects to make the arts move further, but I feel that under a lot of pressure, and especially time pressure, those ideas don’t have time to form themselves into something real.
On the other hand, the same promoters are quite scared to see something new or something they personally don’t know in our programs and the phrase ‘Our public will not understand this’ or ‘This is too difficult for our public’ is what I hear so often. How do they know if they never tried??
We end up repeating the known repertoire over and over again because today things have to sell and preferably sell easy and fast, but there is so much interesting and exciting music still to find out and perform! I have nothing against the great repertoire of the past and will never stop playing it, but I also feel it is almost the duty of my generation of the younger players to not forget to look around and embrace the repertoire that is being created for us right now.
Also, what always sells is sex appeal, I find it dangerous for young artists when a label or a powerful promoter gets them to dress up and behave in a certain way just to sell a lot of tickets and CDs. There should be no place for that in what we do, in my humble opinion.
The hope is that there are enough young greatly talented musicians who don’t go with this philosophy and stubbornly go on creating new interesting things, music and projects, at all costs, without thinking only about how to make a fast and glamorous career.
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising thing about you?
HS: I am surprised myself that I am breaking a lot of barriers for myself and am not afraid to go out of the framed image of ‘a classical musician,’ something I never thought I would be doing.
The intriguing and the exciting thing is that I don’t know where else this will bring me.