The Central Conservatory of Music, referred to as alto, is located in Yanjing, the capital of China, and was founded in 1949. It is a higher education institution that cultivates high-level professional music talents, directly under the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, and is the only "211 Project" key construction university among the art colleges and universities in the country.

For music students across the country, the Central Conservatory of Music is the sanctuary in their minds. Although there are many key conservatories in the country, including Huaxia Conservatory of Music, Huhai Conservatory of Music, Haijin Conservatory of Music, Beiyang Conservatory of Music, etc., they are also very famous in China. But if you say "best", it must be alto. In particular, the piano department of alto is the undisputed first in the country.

The Piano Department of the Central Conservatory of Music was founded in 1950, and in the course of more than 60 years of development, one legendary figure after another has emerged here, from Zhu Shimin and Yi Kaiji at the beginning of the establishment of the department, to Zhou Guangren, Li Qifang, Yang Ming...... The names of these people may not be well known in the pop music circle, but in the hearts of professional piano students, they are tantamount to a great god!

And the world-famous performers who have gone out from here also abound, including Gu Shengying, Li Mingqiang, Liu Shikun, Yin Chengzong, etc., and Lang Lang, Li Yundi, Chen Sa...... Many of these people are still active on the world piano stage and have considerable influence around the world.

The piano is a musical instrument introduced to China from the West, and its history in China is not long. However, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, piano fever gradually heated up in China. On the one hand, the piano, as the king of musical instruments, has a huge audience and public awareness, and on the other hand, with the continuous improvement of people's living standards, owning a piano has become more and more simple. For the purpose of cultivating children's artistic cells, more and more children are learning piano. As of now, a conservative estimate. There are 8 million piano students in Huaxia, which is a huge base. With so many people studying piano, it is natural that some particularly outstanding performers have emerged.

The piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music is an official institution with the highest level of piano teaching in China. But at the same time, I want to get into here. Becoming one of them is also difficult for the majority of piano students!

As the most authoritative teaching institution of piano in China, the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music has always been teaching for the purpose of cultivating piano performance professionals, rather than taking the road of combining amateur and professional like other schools, recruiting hundreds of people every year.

The piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music has 25 teachers, including 11 teachers in the chief teaching and research department. Each of these people is a famous god in the Chinese piano world, but here they are just ordinary teachers.

And how many students are in the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music? This year's latest stats jù. There are 81 undergraduates and 30 master's students.

If you look at the comparison of these two numbers, you can see what kind of education is practiced here. It was established to train pianists. The teacher-to-student ratio is close to 1:5, which means that there is no pressure to practice one-on-one individual instruction. In piano teaching, one-on-one lessons are the most common format. Because everyone's playing style and flaws are different, the only way to get the best teaching effect is to teach one-on-one and hand-to-hand with teachers and students. However, this method of teaching is very demanding for teachers, especially in the teaching of training pianists. is even more difficult, because the god-level piano teacher is not a cabbage. These people are counted in the whole of China. Only a place with a super deep heritage like the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music can do it!

These teachers, when they go out to other conservatories, are all piano department heads and professors, and they go to the stage. Become a virtuoso! Under their hands-on teaching, coupled with the students who were able to enter here, they themselves went through a lot of difficulties and dangers, and they were already at the level of quasi-performers before they entered. The combination of such advantages makes the piano students who go out here. It's hard not to be outstanding!

It is precisely for this reason that students who graduate from the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music always have a natural sense of superiority. They have never disdained to compare with the piano students of the domestic conservatories, and they are all Chai Academy (Tchaikovsky Conservatory), Carnegie, the Golden Hall, the Liszt Cup and other international top academies and competitions.

Chu Yang's college entrance examination was taken two years ago, when his grades in cultural classes were very good, and he was also ranked in the top ten in the province. In addition, his application was an art college, and his first choice was West China Conservatory of Music, so he should have naturally become a freshman in the piano department of the Conservatory of Music.

Even because of his outstanding performance in the professional examination, he has already obtained the entrance pass of the West China Conservatory of Music.

But Chu Yang entered the system at that time, and he worked for two years. From the Ministry of Culture to Zhongxian, Chu Yang carried out his musical practice in another way.

Because of his excellent performance in the Folk Music Competition, The Voice of China, Renmin University, etc., he entered the vision of the Central Conservatory of Music and several other conservatories, and the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music even sent him an invitation, but Chu Yang did not come.

This is probably the only time that the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music has been rejected. You know, they have never taken the initiative to invite a student, and every year the students who want to come to them to learn piano are about to burst their heads, and they are too late to recruit students, where will they take the initiative to invite?

So after being rejected, several old directors of the piano department were also a little angry, on the one hand, they were angry that this student did not cherish their talents and went to politics, and on the other hand, they were also angry that their piano department was despised. For these professors who are proud of themselves in the field of piano, Chu Yang's expression is a kind of disrespect for them.

Two years later, this matter is almost forgotten. However, an unexpected news turned over this old incident from two years ago.

Wu Yingdi is the director of the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music, and at the age of 51 this year, he can be regarded as a real old man in the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music. Although after becoming the director, his main focus shifted to business, but the professional things did not fall behind, and now sitting back in front of the piano, what Rachmaninov, what Liszt that he stretched out his hand to play, there is no problem at all.

What the? Beethoven, you say? Mozart? Don't tell me that you only know these two famous pianists, in fact they are not pianists, but composers. It's just that their piano works are more famous. But at the professional level, their works are not top-notch in terms of performance difficulty.

If you have only heard of Beethoven's "Destiny", "Moonlight", and Mozart's "Turkish March", and know that these represent the "professional" in piano performance, it can only mean that you do not know enough about professional piano performance.

These pieces, on the professional level, are at best medium, and of course, this refers to the Moonlight Sonata. And "Destiny" is a symphony, there is no piano in it, as for Mozart's "Turkish March", of course, you may be very familiar with it, and even use it to make mobile phone ringtones, but if you think this is a very difficult piano piece, then you completely misunderstood. This is just a very entry-level little song, in the division of the piano amateur exam, note that I said "amateur", it is just an eighth-level repertoire.

Or you have to say, level eight is already very high. You can think so, too, but that's just relative to piano students. Note that I use the word "student" here, even if you pass grade 9 or 10, it doesn't mean that you have "learned" your piano, in fact, this is just the beginning. If you don't compromise and complete level 10 in full accordance with the requirements of the exam, and meet this requirement, at most you will be a freshly graduated elementary school student in the piano.

What's further up, if you're asking? Sue sù you, and then there is the "performance level".

What is the "performance level", you can understand it as cultivating professional piano performance, which is a kind of division of pianists.

At this level, you will no longer be faced with the familiar 599, Bach's two creative works, small sonatas and some Chinese and foreign piano pieces, you will be exposed to the works of Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Haydn and a series of master composers and performers. And what you play is no longer the kind of small sonatas and preludes that are only two or three pages long, but a set of large sonatas, suites and even piano concertos. These tunes often have dozens of pages, a piece is a book, and the playing time is often ten minutes or even dozens of minutes, and there are tens of thousands of notes in each piece......

At this point, you can say that you are no longer a "student", but a pianist at the level of a "would-be performer".

Of course, at this time, you can't be called a real pianist, because you still have to participate in a series of top professional competitions. It's not held at your doorstep, what kind of cup sponsored by a certain art school, what provincial and municipal piano competitions, or even what CCTV piano violin and piano competitions held by the central government, what you want to participate in is the "Tchaikovsky Cup International Piano Competition", "Liszt Cup", "Chopin Cup"...... These top international competitions, and the top prizes on them, prove that you have the qualifications to be classified as a "pianist".

From this, you can see how difficult the process of becoming a true pianist is. There are 8 million piano children in Huaxia, and how many people finally fight out of this layer of selection and elimination?

Director Wu has cultivated many proud protégés over the years, and he has a high authority for piano performance teaching. And the annual entrance examination of the piano department of the Central Conservatory of Music, he also personally checks it. This is an iron-faced and selfless person, who wants to enter the piano department through the back door of his relationship, but there is no door.

However, today's Director Wu received a notice that he couldn't accept at all. (To be continued......)