The year was 1987. The Soviet Union, under leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was approaching its final chapters.
As if to catch the dying embers of the USSR, recently graduated pianist James Kirby left his life in the West behind to head to Moscow to study at the age of 22. A close school friend drove him from east London to Heathrow Terminal 1 for a 9:40am flight. ‘The flight number was BA872.’ The number immediately rolls off his tongue. ‘I was feeling quite anxious on the way there.’
But a meeting at the airport before check-in may have calmed his nerves a little. He crossed paths with cellist Matthew Barley. Both of their tickets bore the same destination: Moscow, to study at the Moscow Conservatory. ‘We both seemed inappropriately dressed for the Moscow winter,’ remembers Kirby. ‘My parents had bought me a Barbour jacket, not exactly warm but resilient. I think I remember Matthew donning a bright red Gore-Tex jacket. We got on straight away.’
'We didn't have a clue what lay ahead'
They boarded the plane, ready to be hurtled across the globe into a whole new world, government, culture and society. ‘We didn’t have a clue what lay ahead of us,’ chuckles Barley. ‘It was a proper adventure. No forwarding address or telephone numbers to give to relatives. At home, nobody knew what we were up to.’
It was very hard to find much information about the student hostel, but Kirby and Barley were more than aware that access to a decent meal was going to be hard to come by as students in the Soviet Union. The British Airways flight served steak with peppercorn sauce. Kirby savoured the meal, with every chew storing away the taste for a snowy Russian day. ‘I knew it was going to be my last good meal for months.’
The pilot crackled through on the Tannoy: ‘Eighty miles away from Moscow now and we will make our descent.’ A frisson of fear and excitement ran through Kirby, an unfamiliar and unsettling mixture of emotions. He and Barley stepped out into Sheremetyevo 2 Airport, north-west of Moscow. The pungency of petrol and cigarettes flared the nostrils. But after a grudging stamp on the passport from an unsmiling border officer, they made their way to the person who would take them to the hostel.
Stuffed into an emergency shelter
Vlada, a dumpy young lady, waited in Arrivals with her clattering minibus. She drove them all the way to the hostel, ‘an hour-and-a-half of no traffic on the motorway’. But the hostel had not prepared a comfortable and smooth welcome for its Western visitors. Kirby’s designated room at a Khrushchevka – low-cost five-storied apartment buildings erected during the 1960s under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – was not ready in time. ‘I was stuffed into an emergency shelter on the ground floor where people normally don’t stay. There were three of us in one room for a whole week.’
Kirby’s connection to Moscow came from a chance moment in London. Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva, a relatively unknown name on the UK’s concert scene in the 1980s, came to perform a recital in the octagonal room of Christie’s auction house – a ‘strange venue’, recalls Kirby. And her repertoire to dazzle the audience was the complete Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, written especially with her in mind by the Soviet composer. Hamish Milne, Kirby’s professor at the Royal Academy of Music, took him to see Nikolayeva’s performance that evening.
‘She played the work with an astonishing sense of love and commitment, with a radiantly beautiful tone,’ Kirby remembers. ‘I went backstage and asked if I could study with her. I always thought how wonderful it would be to visit Moscow, and I found myself going to the concert and saying those words to her.’
After post-concert pleasantries were exchanged, Kirby’s desire for tutoring may not have been translated effectively. ‘I don’t think she thought much of the interaction. She didn’t speak English. And I couldn’t speak German, which was her second language. But I thought I really must have a go. It might just be possible.’
'They wanted to know if I could cope with the Russian winters'
And there was a programme to make this dream come true. The British Council had an exchange scheme to allow its students of different disciplines – music, literature, engineering – to study in the USSR, and for the Soviets to study in the UK.
Kirby put his name forward and got an interview with the Council. ‘Strangely enough, I got a letter saying I had to play something but they weren’t at all interested in what I had to play. They were only interested in whether I could cope with the harsh Russian winters, and if I had a partner and could cope with being away from them for a year. They told us about Soviet life, the lack of substances in the shops. We were told about communism and the challenges of living under the regime. It was a practical but strange interview, but I think they were looking for resilience and desire so that’s probably what got me through.’
The British Council offered Kirby a scholarship – but there came a snag. Despite travelling to Moscow, he still had to audition to receive a place of study. His future at the Conservatory was not set in stone. ‘I thought I had got in, but I found I hadn’t. I was quite alarmed. But when you’re told these things in a different language, you’re kind of cushioned against the blow,’ he says. ‘Worst case scenario, I could have failed the interview and got sent home again.’ And, in the end, after passing the audition, he received a note designating him a teacher for the year: it was Tatiana Nikolayeva. And within ten days, he would face his first lesson.
Kirby had an idea of what Russian musical training would entail, given the lineage of pianists from Moscow – Rachmaninov, Gilels, Richter, Ashkenazy, Lupu and many more. He had hoped that being at a famous institution would have a powerful impact on his playing. However, it didn’t quite work out that way at first.
'Terrifying' lessons
The lessons with Nikolayeva, studying for one year from 1987-88, were quite short, and the style was somewhat general. ‘She didn’t untangle me, and I wanted to be untangled,’ Kirby says. ‘I had the sense, also, that I was learning too much repertoire far too quickly. I felt that I needed to go into detail and this wasn’t working out, and I realised that the best way to discuss it in private would be to go to her class very first thing in the morning, hoping that I would be the first student to arrive. To my horror, I opened the door and the room was already packed with students.
‘I said to her, “Do you mind if we speak in the corridor?” And then I told her that I had learned so much from her, but that I’d like to have a different experience because I would only be [at the Moscow Conservatory] for two years.’ Was she angry and defensive about it? ‘No. She was very nice. But politically it may have been unwise as I was entering the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1990 and she was the chairperson. But morally I thought it was the right thing to put my musical development first over the politics involved in a competition.’
Through his connections with Hamish Milne and with Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky – the winner of that 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition – Kirby switched his studies to Eliso Virsaladze. ‘Her lessons were absolutely terrifying,’ he recalls. ‘They were always early in the morning at her home, around 8am, and it was a long and awkward journey, especially in the depths of the Russian winter. She had a very small class and it was a great honour to be accepted as a student. My colleagues even wanted to come with me to my lessons to hear her teach. I always ended up bringing someone.’
Virsaladze was the total opposite of Nikolayeva in teaching style. ‘She was very detailed. And every other word from her was nyet. I remember one time I was playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto on one of her two grand pianos. She perched on the sofa. I was getting ready for the first chords of the piece, and even before striking the first note, she halted me with another nyet. It’s interesting… because Nikolayeva’s teaching style was more general, all her students played differently. But on the other hand, Virsaladze was very formidable, exacting and detailed, so we all tended to sound like her!’
West vs East: collaboration vs dictation
Moscow has prompted Kirby to consider deeply what an effective and powerful teacher-student relationship should be like, and he looks back with fondness to the working relationship with Hamish Milne at the Royal Academy from 1984-87. ‘Hamish tried to be your colleague and work with you rather than enforce the conventional student-teacher relationship. Sometimes he was like an overgrown student himself. He was much more collaborative yet equally demanding, but in a less formidable way. He always explained his reasoning. Russian teachers never really justified their instructions.’
Now 60, Kirby imparts his pedagogical wisdom at several institutions: the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff; Royal Holloway, University of London; and Eton College; plus, to a handful of private students. There are around 28 students under his wing. ‘One of the hardest things is to find the right piece for the right person at the right time,’ he says. ‘You also have to be a philosopher, a human being, to deal with everyone differently. Show them the door, gently push them through and help them to take wing.’
'I can't really believe what I did'
Does he regret going to Moscow? ‘Not in the very slightest. I really lived life to the fullest and made so many friends. I travelled a lot around the Soviet Union and even organised my own concerts there.’ During his postgraduate studies, his schedule started to fill up with performances. ‘I played solo concerts all over the place – the Ural Mountains, the Baltics, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Ufa, Ukraine, Belarus, Magnitogorsk. I suppose another person could simply have practised. Looking back on those days, I can’t really believe what I did.’
