Master keyboard artist Malini Jayasinghe-Peris cut a slim, dignified figure that distant evening, when she performed with the Symphony Orchestra of Ceylon nearly half a century ago. She was then in her mid-thirties. She was draped in a striking black saree with a broad scarlet border and her black hair gleamed like the surface of a new Steinway grand, her hands alighting on the keys and lifting off in light, graceful gestures. The memory of that concert is very clear.
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Malini Jayasinghe-Peris gives the cue to members of the Chamber Music Society of Colombo at a rehearsal of Mahler's Piano Quartet, which was performed at the Goethe-Institut concert. Photo: Indika Handuwela
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This was the acclaimed young Ceylonese musician who had made headlines here and gone on to make a name in Europe, competing among some of the world's most promising pianists of the time. Anyone in the country who talked about serious music was talking about Malini Jayasinghe-Peris, the exceptionally gifted pianist with the resonant double-barrel surname. Like cellist Rohan de Saram, she would put Ceylon on the classical music map.
At that concert she was the soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and that was the first time we heard her (she had played the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto with the orchestra a couple of years earlier, at the orchestra's debut, but in 1958 we were much too young to be taken to concerts).
The second time we heard Malini Jaya-singhe-Peris, in person, was at last weekend’s chamber and solo recital, held at the Goethe-Institut Colombo.
The pianist cuts the same graceful, dignified stage presence she did five decades earlier, but with a minor difference – this time the effect is topped with a distinguished head of silver hair. The pianist’s profile, as she takes her place at the piano, is familiar.
We had seen this same profile in a photograph on the cover of a long-playing record that had come out in the mid-Sixties. The appearance of the US-made record was the other special occasion our attention was drawn to the Sri Lankan musician, in the half-century interval between the two Malini Jayasinghe-Peris concerts.
(The pianist has spent the greater part of her life outside Sri Lanka, mostly in the US, raising a family, teaching, and giving concerts around the world. She has graced concert halls in America, Canada, Britain, Europe, Israel, Russia, China, Australia, India. In fact, to many here, Mrs. Jaya-singhe-Peris’ concert appearances in the country of her birth may seem too few and far between.)
The long-playing record was an album of works by Debussy, Ravel and de Falla. It was the first time a Ceylonese classical artist had collaborated with a leading international recording label, a cause for local celebration. Radio Ceylon announced a special broadcast of the complete album.
The performance sparkled, crackled, exploded. The fierce, stamping, hot rhythms of twentieth-century Spanish music alternated with the strange, misty-aqueous, nocturnal-supernatural worlds of the French Impress-onists. Everything dazzled. One work, Ravel’s triptych Gaspard de la Nuit, is acknowledged as the most technically demanding work written for the piano ever. The notes danced, rippled and tripped off the pianist’s fingertips. “Brilliant” was the general verdict among those sitting by their radios that night.
“Brilliant” is a word Malini Jayasinghe-Peris has heard repeatedly over the years in reference to her playing. It is a compliment that might once have flattered her. Not any more.
“When I hear someone say that a recital of mine was brilliant, I think, oh dear, I have failed,” says Mrs. Jayasinghe-Peris.
She is reflecting on her life and career as she relaxes on a verandah at the Goethe-Institut, after a rehearsal for her Saturday concert. “I don’t play to prompt comments like ‘brilliant’. I would be much happier if someone said the music had touched them, reached into their soul. The musician should be only a conduit for the composer’s intentions. I have evolved as a musician, I like to think. I might once have wanted to excite audiences with clever keyboard work. That is inevitable in young artists on the make. You play to impress.
“For me, now, music is about conveying what the composer had in his heart, head, soul. His moods, his feelings. Sometimes I feel I accomplish that at a concert, sometimes I feel I haven’t. It’s not something you have control over. It happens or it doesn’t. That’s the magic and wonder of music.”
Mrs. Jayasinghe-Peris, who usually goes simply as Malini Peris, is a professor of keyboard studies at George Washington University, Washington DC, where she has lived with her family since the Sixties. She has given up music administration and focuses on teaching. She works five days a week instructing eight hand-picked students. Her life as a musician is divided between performing as a soloist and with chamber ensembles and teaching.
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“When someone says that a
recital of mine was brilliant, I think, oh dear, I have failed. I would be
happier if they had said the music had touched them, reached into their soul.” |
Over the years, Mrs. Jaya-singhe-Peris has noted changes in the perception of classical music among young people. “This is the You-Tube generation!” she laughs. “The world is moving much faster than it did when I was a young person. Today’s students want quick results.
They have a shorter attention span. They don’t want to put in the hours, the time, the thought needed for serious music. They are on the move all the time, rushing from one class to another. Music lessons are squeezed into the curriculum like any other subject. There is not enough introspection. That is my running battle with my students. I think of the line from the W. H. Davies poem, ‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’ ”
There is a tempting aspect to performing before an audience that has to do more with displays of flamboyance than genuine musicianship. It is a weakness young performers easily succumb to. She discourages the tendency in her pupils. “I tell them that showing off is not being true to the music. Discover the music, don’t display yourself. It is difficult not to want to show off if you have a stunning technique. Bravura playing that is only brilliant is not what we want.”
But bravura, after all, is part of the package, a key element in propelling a star musician to the top. Malini Jayasinghe-Peris must have shown a healthy blend of both musicianship and bravura when she gave her European debut recital at the Wigmore Hall in 1953, and again two years later when she took part, with 77 other pianists from 25 countries, in the 1955 International Chopin Piano Competition, competing alongside such future greats as Vladimir Ashkenazy and Fou Ts’ong. The Chopin event in Warsaw is held once in five years and is possibly the most exacting of piano competitions. Mrs. Jaya-singhe-Peris earned an honourable mention that year. It was a high point for the music community in this country. One of our musicians was making her mark on the international stage.
In a lifetime devoted to music, Malini Jayasinghe-Peris has moved with some of the biggest names in classical music of the last 60 years. She left Ceylon to study on scholarships, attending the Royal College of Music, and later studying under the Hungarian pianist Louis Kentner, who was her teacher and mentor for 20 years. Kentner was the brother-in-law of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
“Kentner was more like a father figure,” says Mrs. Jayasinghe-Peris. “He would take me along when he and Menuhin and the cellist Gaspar Cassado (who was one of Rohan de Saram’s teachers) went on vacation to Gstaad, Switzerland. When Menuhin was away, I would take out my violin and play on it (violin was my second study at the Royal College of Music), and when Kentner was away Menuhin would ask me to play Beethoven sonatas with him.
Menuhin and Kentner would later record all ten Beethoven violin and piano sonatas. Menuhin also asked me to teach his daughter Zamira the piano, although she wasn’t that good on the instrument.” (Zamira, a daughter from Menuhin’s first marriage, would later marry the pianist Fou Ts’ong, who came third in the 1955 Chopin Internation-al, the competition in which Malini Peris also took part.)
Mrs. Jayasinghe-Peris has worked closely with well-known contemporary composers. She travelled to New York to study Ned Rorem’s third piano sonata with the composer himself, and later gave the work’s North American premiere. She has worked with Armenian-American composer Alan Hovha-ness and Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim (“Ben-Haim sat on the stage when I performed his sonata in Tel-Aviv”). “I played Kodaly to Kodaly,” she says, referring to the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, who died in 1967.
“If I am working on something written by a living composer, I try to meet the composer and find out exactly how he wants his music played. It is very hard to get an exact sense of the way contemporary music should be played just from looking at the score. In that sense, contemporary music is not like older classical music.”
Malini Jayasinghe-Peris does not look her age (83), and she works the keyboard with the agility and strength of a young virtuoso starting a concert career. In short, she is more than up to the rigours of concert playing, as she demonstrated at last week’s recital, in which she teamed up with members of the Chamber Music Society of Colombo to play Mahler’s Piano Quartet and solo works by Liszt, Debussy and Ravel. The solo works were chosen for their associations with water in its manifold moods. The Ravel was the astonishing “Ondine” (water sprite) episode from Gaspard de la Nuit.
“All my life I have been intrigued by water. Water is so versatile. It can be still, flowing, mysterious, romantic, threatening, frightening. One of my favourite books as a child was Longfellow’s Hiawatha. I was enchanted by the character Min-nehaha, whose name means Laughing Water. My fascination with water as a subject in art and music must have begun with Minnehaha.”
Under her strong fingers, the “water music” murmured, rippled, splashed, cascaded, thundered. And, yes, laughed. Audience members gave the pianist a standing ovation. Mrs. Jayasinghe-Peris dedicated the evening to the memory of her cousin, the late Sita Joseph de Saram, “musician, teacher, artist and sculptor.”
Looking back, the pianist is reminded of people in the Colombo music world whom she knew and worked with before she left Ceylon to start a new life elsewhere. Many of these people are no more, such as her first piano teacher, Irene van der Wall, who died in Australia a couple of years ago, and her first violin teacher, Eileen Prins, who passed away last year. “When I came to your mother for violin lessons, she had recently returned from England. This was before you were born.”
It’s been a long evening for Malini Jayasinghe-Peris, and it’s time to go. Her cousin’s son, Lakshman Joseph de Saram, is waiting in the corridor to take her home. We step out into the fragrant Goethe-Institut garden. There has been a shower and the lawn sparkles with drops of water.
It’s been a long, wonderful evening for us – hearing the pianist play, talk about her life in music, joke (her laugh does suggests “laughing water”), and touch chords from the past. Memorable notes, many wistful, hang in the night air, like whiffs of jasmine. |
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