TIANYOU ZHANG
Chinese pianists are no mystery any more to Western audiences: they crowd the world stage, and in several cases tower above it. Chinese violinists, though, have tended to make slower progress. They may fill conservatoires these days but are still filtering into our consciousness. And only one or two have made a breakthrough at the level of Ning Feng, whose recordings for Channel Classics have appeared with impressive regularity in recent years (the latest, of concertos by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, is just out) and have been heaped with praise.
‘I don’t know why things have been slower for violinists,’ he tells me on a Zoom call from his home in Germany. ‘There are quite a number of us from China playing in the West, trying hard to secure a place on the international scene, and I would say I’m part of an ongoing process. Whether you can truly say I’ve broken through, I don’t know: I wonder about this. But either way, I have no answer. There are obviously cultural obstacles to overcome, but no more so than for the pianists.’