Dame Fanny Waterman: helping Leeds hit the right note

DAME FANNY Waterman has just come off the phone with Sir David Tang.

The successful Hong Kong businessman is a big supporter of the Leeds International Piano Competition and one of her many influential friends and contacts. Dame Fanny was talking to him about the competition for which she has been busy making the final arrangements ahead of its much anticipated return next week.

If that wasn’t enough, she has also been going through the proofs of her forthcoming autobiography, Dame Fanny Waterman: My Life In Music, and she shows me a picture of the front cover which features a photograph of her taken by the pioneering neuroscientist Professor Geoffrey Raisman.

If this was somebody else you might think they were name dropping, but these are the kind of people she speaks to on a regular basis - her contacts book is littered not only with the great and good of the classical music world, but those at the top of the tree in business, politics and academia.

Dame Fanny is the driving force behind the Leeds International Piano Competition for which she has become renowned. The ‘Leeds’, as it’s often called, has been going for 52 years and even at the venerable age of 95, Dame Fanny’s sense of excitement about it hasn’t dimmed. “I feel more responsible now because it is known by the international music community as the greatest piano playing competition in the world. It’s very difficult to get to the top and to stay there. But I am excited, who wouldn’t be excited to have the best thing in the world?”

She is proud of the competition, which she co-founded in 1963 with her friend Marion Thorpe, and the fact it has gained such global recognition. “We’ve got a perfect formula, my husband did the rules which are published for all to see, and other competitions have copied what we do.”

Although she has propelled the ‘Leeds’ to the elevated status it enjoys today, she’s quick to point out that she couldn’t have done it on her own. “I’ve had a lot of help and one set of people to whom I’m most grateful are our volunteers.”

Her own influence has been immense. Not only has she helped put Leeds on the international stage, but hardly a child in the world who sits down to learn the piano hasn’t at some point found themselves working through the volumes of Me and My Piano, the Waterman-Harewood Piano Series which she co-wrote.

It is now a decade since she was made a Dame, one of her many honours - in 1971, she was awarded the OBE and in 2000 the CBE - and Dame Fanny is herself as great an institution as the ‘Leeds’ which has provided the launch pad for some of the finest concert pianists of modern times, including Murray Perahia, Radu Lupu and Andras Schiff.

Despite all the accolades handed to her over the years she still harks back to the influence of her parents, Myer and Mary, who set her on the road to success, first as a concert pianist, and later as a gifted teacher.

You might assume, given all her many achievements, that she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but this isn’t the case. Her father arrived from Russia at the turn of the last century to work as a jeweller in Leeds. She describes her childhood as happy but “impoverished”. “We didn’t go on holidays, my holiday was to go to Roundhay Park and we were too poor to sit in a deckchair so we sat on the grass.”

But her parents appreciated music and when their daughter showed talent, they scraped together the money for her to have lessons. “I wasn’t a prodigy but I was musical and they gave me a priceless gift.” She began giving public performances in Leeds in 1941. Later that year, she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. After the war, her concert career flourished, but she decided to concentrate on teaching when she had a family.

Dame Fanny became one of the world’s most sought-after teachers and then came the ‘Leeds’, which she conceived one sleepless night. “No one was paid we did it for the love of it,” she says.

It quickly grew into the leading event of its kind in the world and even now she still takes a very hands on role. The CDs arrive by post and so begins the meticulous task of deciding who gets invited to Leeds to take part in the preliminary rounds. “I listen for eight weeks to every note of every beat of every bar. I’m looking for someone who can make that [she points at her piano] sound like an orchestra, can they make it sing?”

This year’s competition, the 18th, will be the last with Dame Fanny at the helm. “I just felt it was time,” she says, explaining why she has decided to step down. “Fifty years is a long time and I’ve got other things that I want to do.”

At the heart of these “other things” is her deep desire to introduce younger people to the joys of classical music. “When I go to concerts the audiences all have grey hair so we need more young people.

“My idea is to form a committee and take a big venue and invite children to come and listen to the rehearsals to hear people like Simon Rattle, who I’ve known since he was 14. This will need money, of course, so I’ll probably be fundraising, but music is something to enjoy not to endure.”

It’s no easy task given the prevalence among youngsters for pop, R&B and rock music. However, Dame Fanny isn’t one to shirk a challenge. “Once you hear these great works of art and they grab you it’s there for life, whereas pop comes and goes. We’ve just got to somehow imbue the children with a love of it and I know if you do that then you’re on the right road.”

Dame Fanny practically fizzes with energy when she talks about music. Such is her reputation that she still teaches gifted pianists from around the world who beat a path to the door of her elegant home, in north Leeds. “Music is a gateway to the world, it allows you to meet people you would never normally meet.”

She talks passionately about the brilliance of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, “gods” as she calls them. But while they are the greats who created the musical masterpieces we all know and love, there is genius, too, in being to able to make this music sing. “It’s like Morse Code. You need the great musical artists who can make it spring to life, people like Rubinstein and Horowitz and that combination of great music and great artists casts a spell and sometimes you get a glimpse of heaven on earth.”

It is the chance of experiencing this that makes the ‘Leeds’ so special. It’s a competition that has even illuminated some of the darkest corners of the planet, offering solace to Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s pro-democracy opposition leader, during her time under house arrest. “She has written a message in our programme saying that when she was incarcerated she listened to the competition on the radio.”

Not only does it show just how big this competition really is, it’s a reminder, too, of the innate power of music. As Dame Fanny herself says: “It opens all the doors of the world to you.”

The Leeds International Piano Competition runs from August 26 to September 13. For tickets go to www.leedstownhall.co.uk or call 0113 224 3801.

You can follow the competition on twitter using the hashtag #TheLeeds2015

Dame Fanny Waterman: My Life In Music, published by Faber Music, is out on September 6, priced £20.