12-year-old pianist plays with city orchestra in 10th year celebrations

MUMBAI: At nine, when most children still watch cartoons or listen to kiddy pop, Sanzharali Kopbaev was playing Bach. This evening, the Kazakh prodigy, now a serious young man of 12, will play Grieg’s ever-popular Piano Concerto with the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) at the NCPA.
With its cascades of octaves and mood variations, the masterpiece is no child’s play, but as is evident during rehearsals, Sanzharali’s notes effortlessly tumble down and scurry up the keyboard, and fall into seamless transitions from tranquillity to turbulence.And the boy pianist does all this without the score, playing the 30-minute-long work straight from memory.
“He is a superstar in our country, a little superstar,” says his teacher Botagoz Aigalkayeva, who has accompanied him from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and cultural centre, where Sanzharali studies at a school for gifted children—a Soviet tradition that continues till this day. But his rigorous training doesn’t mean that he is missing out on childhood. “I play football, I swim. I also play chess and like computer games very much,” he says in Kazakh interspersed with Russian, which his teacher renders into pure Russian, which an SOI cellist renders into English. He also has friends outside the special school. “They respect me,” says Sanzharali.
The evening will also feature Elgar’s well-loved Enigma Variations and Shostakovich’s Festive Overture. The concert is fourth in a series of five concerts marking SOI’s 10th anniversary season, during which such staples of the repertoire as Paganini’s First Violin Concerto, Brahms’s First Symphony, Holst’s Planets and Mahler’s First Symphony have been performed. The final concert, a gala that will include The Blue Danube waltz, will be on Friday.
SOI was founded serendipitously. In late 2003, NCPA chairman Khushroo Suntook heard Kazakh violin virtuoso Marat Bisengaliev in London and invited him and his orchestra to perform in Mumbai. In a couple of years, the visitors formed what came to be touted as India’s first professional symphony orchestra, drawing a small share of string players from local talent, with Bisengaliev as their music director. Down the years, SOI has attracted acclaimed soloists and conductors, including pianist Maria Joao Pires and conductor Charles Dutoit, and has done wonders to boost local interest in Western classical music. Especially among students of Western music—and not just in Mumbai—acceptance into the orchestra is considered by many as the first step towards a serious musical career.
SOI has also toured within the country and abroad, to acclaim. Its rite of passage is believed to have occurred in Switzerland in January under the baton of the orchestra’s associate music director Zane Dalal.
“I was very surprised at the press reports from Zurich and Geneva. They compared us with some really good orchestras. We played to a full house everywhere... There were these very reserved Swiss ladies, who after a concert would become very friendly,” says Suntook. “SOI was formed against great odds. People said then such a thing won’t survive in India… it will fail in six months. Well, it’s 10 years now and we are still around.”