Junyan Chen: 'It did feel like a family at Leeds International Piano Competition'
Junyan Chen has come a long way from the four-year-old who refused to touch the keys of the family piano in Shanghai to winning the silver medal at last year’s Leeds International Piano Competition.
But now her career looks to be going from strength to strength with a series of solo recitals in her diary – including Harrogate International Festivals’ Sunday series – and the world premiere of a work by Héloïse Werner at three concerts with the Manchester Collective.
Reaching the final of ‘the Leeds’ was, she says, a surprise as she had not taken part in many piano competitions since graduating with a first class honours MA degree from London’s Royal Academy of Music. “At least the way I was looking at it was I want to be able to play and I just want to have the platform for people to see me play, and I was pleasantly surprised that I really showed myself, and the jury and the audience really appreciated who I am,” she says.
“The experience was definitely stressful, it was practising non-stop all the time, we couldn’t really sleep, we couldn’t really eat, but at the same time everyone – all the competitors, all the jury members, all the staff – were extremely helpful. All the competitors talked to each other, we helped each other with our stressful mindset, and it did feel like a family.”
Fostering young pianists’ careers had become part of the Leeds’s ethos under its former artistic director Adam Gatehouse, and Junyan attests to the support she continues to receive. “We’re still in touch now with Adam Gatehouse and also Fiona Sinclair and they are extremely helpful with my career,” she says. “Also, because of my time with Askonas Holt the classical music management company), we are talking to each other and building up my concerts. It feels like everything I was doing before is going in the right direction.”
“Incredible” streaming figures of some eight million for the competition certainly helped raise her profile internationally.
As her 2022 album It’s Time revealed, Junyan has a keen interest in working with living composers and has collaborated with the likes of Mark Anthony-Turnage. “When I recorded one of (Turkish composer) Fazil Say’s pieces on my first album, I didn’t know him personally, I just liked his music, I love the way he puts in jazz in his playing...and he texted me after my album was out, he said, ‘I really enjoy your way of playing my music’ and that really made me even more love performing contemporary music when the composers are alive because you feel like you have these similar connections with other people when we’re living in the same society, when we can actually talk to each other,” she says.
At Harrogate, Junyan will perform works by Bach, Beethoven, Bartok and Liszt. “All of them, their music speaks to me very deeply, they’re very intimate for me, and also they have a lot of character,” she says.
The connection with Manchester Collective was formed when its music director Rakhi Singh mentored Junyan and other students at the Royal Academy of Music. To be asked collaborate with them, Junyan says, made her “really happy because one of my passions is to do ensemble music and to do new music, this is exactly what I want to do”.
Junyan Chen plays at The Old Swan, Harrogate on Sunday January 26. https://harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/whats-on/junyan-chen-26-january/
She will perform with Manchester Collective at Howard Assembly Room, Leeds on February 6. https://www.operanorth.co.uk/whats-on/manchester-collective-hidden-mechanisms/