周善祥访谈丨不想当钢琴家的作曲家不是好数学家

Kit Armstrong八岁弹琴视频

Interview: Kit Armstrong

concert pianist, composer and mathematician

周善祥访谈丨不想当钢琴家的作曲家不是好数学家钢琴家周善祥丨我来自”一个让音乐作品告诉演奏家如何诠释的音乐传统”

The nearest Kit Armstrong has ever come to visiting Scotland was the time he boarded the wrong train from Carlisle. “I was heading for Whitehaven, but ended up going in the wrong direction,” recalls the 20-year-old American-born concert pianist, whose forthcoming visit to the Perth Festival of the Arts with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra next week is entirely intentional. 

周善祥最近一次来苏格兰还是他在卡莱尔（译者注：英国英格兰西北部城市）上错火车那次。“我想去怀特黑文，但是我坐了反方向的火车”，这位美国出生的20岁钢琴家回忆道。而他在下周的珀斯艺术节上与柏林交响乐团进行的联袂演出，将会是一场国际盛会。

朱晓玫谈与钢琴家Kit Armstrong相处的神奇经历

It’s part of a major tour with the former Eastern bloc Berlin band and Munich-based guest conductor Alexander Liebreich, which will include 16 dates in the UK and a performance by Armstrong of Schumann’s Piano Concerto.

周善祥这次对苏格兰的造访，是他与前东柏林乐队及来自慕尼黑的客座指挥亚历山大·李布莱希主巡演中的一部分。这次巡演将包括在英国的16天演出，以及一场周善祥的舒曼钢琴协奏曲音乐会。

Perth is their only appearance north of the Border, thus the sole opportunity for Scottish audiences to see what all the fuss is about regarding Armstrong, who first came to mass public notice as a ten-year-old prodigy appearing on America’s Late Show with David Letterman. 

珀斯是他们在英格兰以北举行的唯一一次演出。所以对苏格兰观众来说，这也是去感受周善祥到底有多大的轰动效应的唯一的机会。毕竟，周善祥第一次引起大众关注，是在他十岁的时候以神童的形象登上大卫·莱特曼的脱口秀（译者注：美国著名深夜秀）。

Kit Armstrong使用李斯特的贝希斯坦钢琴演奏巴赫

If the Letterman appearance (you can view it on YouTube) has all the trappings of circus-style TV, it nonetheless marked the public launchpad for Armstrong who, by 12, had already captured the attention of the New York Times. Its critic recognised him as “a phenomenon”, though issued a warning that, by calling him “the new Mozart”, his publicity people might be guilty of ill-advised hype, even if his performances revealed a maturity beyond his years.

如果说莱特曼脱口秀（你可以在油管上看到这个节目）具有一切马戏团式电视节目的特征，但它确实标志着周善祥进入了公共视野。毕竟，。。但同时，：尽管周善祥表演的成熟度已经远远超过了他这个年龄应有的水平，但公关团队把他称为“一个新莫扎特”可能是过度炒作。

The thing is, Armstrong was already intellectually ahead of the game. He was by then studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, and attending science and maths courses at the University of Pennsylvania.

问题是，周善祥在智力上也远远走在前头。在那时候，他已经在费城柯蒂斯音乐学院学习（编者按：读了一年就走了），并在宾夕法尼亚大学（译者注：著名的八所常春藤盟校之一）上数理课程。

He had started learning the piano aged five, but had written his own compositions well before that, one of which – an immaculately-structured, if cutely traditional, piece of piano writing – he had performed for Letterman and his millions of viewers. 

他从五岁开始学习钢琴，但他自己创作乐曲却远远比这更早。他的其中一首作品——一首结构完美，具有可爱的传统风格的钢琴作品——已经为雷特曼（Letterman）及成千上万的观众演奏过了。

By his next birthday, when most 13-year-old boys would have been struggling with the emotional transition to secondary school, Armstrong was in London, studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music, piano with Benjamin Kaplan and taking advanced maths classes at Imperial College, while accepting major performance engagements in the US and Europe.

在他的生日前，当大多数的13岁男孩们正痛苦地经历着上中学前的情感变化时，周善祥正在伦敦。他在皇家音乐学院学习作曲，并师从本杰明·卡普兰学习钢琴；并且他还在帝国理工学院学习高等数学课程。与此同时，他接受着来自美国和欧洲的各大演出的邀请。

He had already been spotted by Alfred Brendel, whom Armstrong met after a performance the youngster gave in Philadelphia. Brendel agreed to mentor him, an extraordinary endorsement of Armstrong’s integrity as a musician, given that Brendel only teaches the chosen few, and even then, only those who share his intense universal intellectualism. 

周善祥在费城的一次演出后遇见了布伦德尔（Alfred Brendel），但在此之前，周善祥已经被布伦德尔注意到了。而布伦德尔同意教导周善祥，则是对周善祥作为音乐家所应具有的正直品性的认同。因为布伦德尔不仅只教导那些“天选之子”，而且只教导那些同样具有强烈的理性主义的人。

“We came together purely through music,” Armstrong recalls. “My playing of a Chopin Nocturne caught his interest. But over the past eight years that has become something way beyond music. We share so many interests in art, aesthetics and in humour. We tend to overuse the word ‘inspiration’, but I can’t come up with a better way to describe the influence he has had on showing me how lucky I am to be in this profession.”

“我们的结识开始于音乐”，周善祥回忆说，“我对肖邦夜曲的演绎吸引了他的注意。但是经过过去的八年，我们之间已经远远不止音乐了。我们对艺术、美学和幽默都有着非常多共同的兴趣。虽然人们似乎倾向于滥用‘灵感’这个词，但我找不出一个更好的方式去表达他对我的影响。他总是在告诉我，身处于这个行业是多么的幸运。”

According to his mother – an English-born investment banker and economist who brought him up alone – Armstrong was reading the Wall Street Journal by the age of three, and was withdrawn from mainstream education because it was too easy for him and not sufficiently stimulating. But despite his intense upbringing, there are aspects of Armstrong’s unconventional life that are conventional. 

他的母亲是一位英国出生的投资银行家及经济学家，并且独自抚养周善祥长大。据她所说，周善祥在3岁之前就开始阅读华尔街日报了。周善祥还退出了主流教育，因为那对他来说太过简单并且不够刺激。但是除了紧张的家庭教育，周善祥不平常的生活中也有许多平常的一面。

When I call him in Berlin, the strange background noises turn out to be the result of his ability to conduct a phone interview and make chicken soup at the same time. “I’m just making sure no culinary disaster happens under my watch,” he says. “I’m a very ambitious cook.”

当我在柏林给他打电话的时候，电话里奇怪的背景噪音居然是因为周善祥在一边接受电话采访一边煮鸡汤！“我只是想确保在我眼皮底下不要发生任何烹调事故”，他说，“我是一个很有野心的厨师”。

Yet when I ask Armstrong, now 20, where home is, he is hard put to answer. “I’m in Berlin just now, and that happens to be where my piano lives, but I am travelling around, living mainly in hotels. If I had a home, I think it would be in London.” 

但是当我问20岁的周善祥他的家在哪里时，他有点困难地回答道，“我现在在柏林，也就碰巧是我的钢琴居住的地方。但是我到处奔波，主要住在酒店里。如果我有一个家，我想应该是在伦敦吧。”

Nonetheless, he resists being pigeonholed. Ask him about his ambitions and plans as a pianist, and the answer is surprisingly vague. “I don’t give such matters much thought,” he says. “I see myself more as an absorbed creator than a self-promoter. I take what comes.” 

但是，他拒绝被标签化。当我问关于他作为钢琴家的志向和计划时，他的答案惊人地模糊。“我不太考虑这些事情”，他说，“我把我自己更多地当成是一个专注的创作者而不是一个自我营销的人。我喜欢顺其自然。”

What comes is an extraordinary 60 to 70 concerts a year, added to which Armstrong is simultaneously active as a composer, not to mention his continuing preoccupation with mathematical studies.

但“顺其自然”的结果是，他每年举行60到70场音乐会，此外他还是一个同样积极的作曲家，更别说他还全神贯注地继续着他的数学学习。

“I’ve always been interested in many things,” he says. “I’ve never tried to specialise. But the concerts keep me excited. I need them to renew my great love of music.”

“我一直都对很多事物感兴趣”，他说，“我从来没想过要专注于某一领域。但是音乐会能让我保持活跃。我需要音乐会来不断补充我对音乐的热爱。”

 The Schumann concerto, which he plays in Perth, has a special place in his repertoire. “There really was no model for it, but it inspired so many concertos that followed, even – in the case of Grieg’s concerto, which shares the same structure – to the point of plagiarism.”

他在珀斯演奏的舒曼的协奏曲，在他所有的节目中有一个特殊的地位。“这首曲子是前无古人的，但它影响了太多后来的协奏曲。格里格的协奏曲使用了同样的结构，甚至有点抄袭的味道。”

If originality counts, then surely it’s Armstrong’s resistance to the celebrity circus that could so easily have resulted from his boyhood Letterman appearance. And now that he’s deliberately heading for Scotland, we can check him out for ourselves. 

如果追根溯源如此重要，那么可以肯定：周善祥对于“名流马戏团”的抵制可以追溯到他童年时期在雷特曼脱口秀上的表演。现在，借着他正前往苏格兰演出的机会，我们不妨眼见为实一睹为快。

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