The music is there, we only have to open our eyes: pianist Alexandra Dariescu on 100 Nutcrackers, advocating for women composers & a new direction at the Leeds International Piano Competition

Alexandra Dariescu (Photo: Nick Rutter)

Back in 2018, I met up with pianist Alexandra Dariescu [see my interview] to chat about The Nutcracker and I, her innovative stage performance blending live piano music and dance with digital animation, which she had debuted in 2017. Recently, I met up with Alexandra again to celebrate the fact that she reaches the 100th performance of The Nutcracker and I on 26 November 2024 at the Barbican‘s Milton Court and to talk about her continuing advocacy for music by women composers, along with developing a new string to her bow at this year’s Leeds International Piano Competition.

Alexandra developed the Nutcracker project partly thanks to her participation in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama‘s Creative Entrepreneurs programme, and when we met up recently, it was in a gap during her coaching at the Guildhall School, where she was working with students who are 24 to 27. She feels that this is the right time for them to explore. She can help them open up their horizons to include contemporary music, music by women and artists of colour. She finds that the younger generation is more open to exploring, and she finds it rather different to her time at college. She feels, in a strange way, that the pandemic made people more curious.

She continues to have a thirst and curiosity as an artist, wanting to learn and develop constantly, and as time passes her interests change. Also, she finds people are now a lot more open-minded. She feels artists should reinvent themselves. She finds herself constantly learning from the orchestras that she plays with. Except for the UK, tours usually involve playing the same programme with an orchestra three times, and each one is different. She and the orchestral musicians get to know each other. Recently in Australia, she was playing Mozart and after three performances she and the orchestra reached a real chamber music feel.

Alexandra Dariescu: The Nutcracker and I

Reaching the 100th Nutcracker is a huge milestone. When the idea for the project first came to her, she had no idea whether it would be successful, whether it would come alive. It was the biggest risk she had ever taken, and they carried it off. She travelled with it across the world, finding its message resonant, the idea of a young girl having a dream, and of course the music itself. It reaches audiences all over, not just those loving classical music, and it is quite something to have three or four generations of the same family at the performance. How often does that happen?

After the premiere, they changed some of the animations to improve things. But at each performance, the magic never leaves. It begins with her sitting in the dark, and the animation starts and the little girl depicted is her. As a child, she had the dream of playing the piano but did not come from a musical family. She has now travelled the world with the work and its message to grasp your dream.

Those who know Alexandra will not be surprised to learn that she is currently cooking up something else, she is not standing still. She is beginning a new stage in her life, she loves creating and taking risks. As an artist, you need to showcase the stage you are at at this moment, something exciting and scary.

Petroc Trelawney and Alexandra Dariescu presenting highlights from Leeds International Piano Competition (Photo: Frances Marshall)

She has been working with the Leeds International Piano Competition on an education project, Count Me In looking at the link between music and maths. Created with conductor and presenter Timothy Redmond, the programme involved performing the Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the children providing the orchestral music via songs which Redmond had created. She loved it, the way it was so interactive, informative, educational and fun. The performance has been filmed for wider dissemination, and this helps bring music into schools. For Alexandra this is the same vision as Nutcracker, music is not elite. And in June 2025, she is joining Timothy Redmond and the London Symphony Orchestra for Count Me In at the Barbican.

Arising out of this came the invitation to join Petroc Trelawney to present the semi-finals and finals of the Leeds competition for the BBC. It wasn’t easy, but a wonderful challenge, and she describes it as amazing with a real buzz, Petroc Trelawney was very generous, and she hopes to be doing other such projects.

Also at the Leeds competition this year they introduced the Alexandra Dariescu Award recognising outstanding performances of works by female composers. The first time such a thing has been done at the Leeds competition. So many of the competitors chose to include music by female composers, and this acts as an incentive to their adventurous spirit in choosing repertoire. The winner of the inaugural The Alexandra Dariescu Award at the Leeds International Piano Competition was Junyan Chen.

Alexandra Dariescu and Junyan Chen winner of the inaugural Alexandra Dariescu Award

Alexandra believes in a collaborative approach: joining forces with the Leeds competition, introducing children to the amazing repertoire there is, showcasing the repertoire at the competition, and teaching at conservatoire. The award was a big coup and helped to encourage people to take new repertoire seriously. She sees this as a whole process, you cannot bring about change overnight. We need to work together to make change.

The music is there, we only have to open our eyes, it deserves to be heard, and she enjoys the research. She quotes a list of possible concertos that deserve to be included in programmes, works by Leokadiya Kashperova, Nadia Boulanger, Dora Pejačević, Amy Beach, Germaine Tailleferre, Florence Price, and Doreen Carwithen. Alexandra will be playing Carwithen’s concerto, for piano and strings, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in 2025.

She emphasizes that she is not taking away from the amazing music that we grew up with, but adding to this, showing the other side of history. But it is not always easy to programme these works, orchestras need to sell tickets! You have to convince conductors and promoters, sometimes they go for it, which is amazing, and sometimes not. One of her solutions is to include two shorter concertos in one evening, male and female pairings, one well-known and one lesser-known. So Ravel and Tailleferre, as she studied with him. Cesar Franck’s Symphonic Variations and Nadia Boulanger, as Franck used to visit the Boulanger family and was Lili Boulanger’s first teacher. Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations and Florence Price’s concerto, both were written in 1934, a little-known fact. Florence Price played her concerto once, and then it disappeared. Amy Beach wrote her concerto for herself, she did the first performance, and the reviews were good but then the work was neglected. Alexandra feels that it is high time to revive it.

With such pairings, she can collaborate with marketing, doing videos, telling stories, finding links and connections, using social media, and encouraging audiences to come to hear something new. It takes time for an unfamiliar work to be loved, you need to repeat it, people need to get to know the works, if there are radio performances and good recordings then this helps.

Between now and Christmas she has 28 Nutcrackers planned. She has just come from Macau and will be performing in London, Paris (where the five performances are sold out), Dijon, Dortmund, Potsdam, Ljubljana and Athens. As Alexandra sees it, inspiring so many more young people.

Alexandra Dariescu after Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and Fabien Gabel

She will be at St Martin in the Fields on 21 March 2025, performing Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in a programme that also includes music by Anna Clyne, Nadia Boulanger and Mozart.

On 11 April 2025 , she will be with the the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo at the Barbican when she will be performing Doreen Carwithen’s Piano Concerto.

In August 2024, her recording of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto with conductor Tianyi Lu and the Philharmonia came out on Signum Classics. The disc paired Clara Schumann’s concerto with that by Edvard Grieg, who came to Leipzig to study and got to know Clara Schumann. Another lovely pairing. And the disc came out in time to celebrate the third anniversary of Alexandra’s project to achieve gender parity in music.

When I ask what she would like to record, in an ideal world, she mentions the Piano Concerto by Leokadiya Kashperova (1872-1940), who was Stravinsky’s piano teacher. Her concerto was written in 1900, the same year as Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto 2. Alexandra recorded it for BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week programme, but few people apart from Alexandra play the work.

The Nutcracker and I

26 Nov – Milton Court Concert Hall, London – further details
29 Nov – 1 December, La Seine Musicale, Paris
6 & 7 Dec – Opera Dijon, Dijon
15 & 16 Dec – Cankarjev Cultural and Congress Centre, Ljubljana
20 & 21 Dec – Konzerthaus Dortmund, Dortmund
23 Dec – Potsdam Nikolaisaal, Potsdam
29 Dec – The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Newcastle
25 Jan – Megaron Concert Hall, Athens