Pianist's true calling rests off-stage

Pianist Wang Xiaohan. Photo provided to China Daily

Before he went to Hanover in 1998, his father often took him to learn Chinese painting and calligraphy at the antique shop Rongbaozhai in Beijing. Those paintings became notes and scores in his mind.

"Once while viewing Huang Yongyu's Lotus in the Wind painting, I heard Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 playing inside my head. The two were just so close."

Wang later interpreted his understanding of the connection between the painting and the music in his Piano Paintings compositions. One of the pieces was chosen as the repertoire in the Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn in 2007. In the same year, he won China's National Composition Competition for his piano composition Lost Diary. He topped the same contest the following year with his violin score Villages.

He got a doctoral degree from Hochschule fuer Musik in 2010, and started to tour around the world, performing with many famous orchestras. Within two years, however, he gave up that jet-setting lifestyle to find his true calling－as a teacher in the middle school, where he once studied.

"I'm pretty sure being a full-time pianist is not the life I want," he says. "Tight schedules, living between airports, hotels and concert halls, repeating the music ... that's not what I want."

He says that he had once worked as an assistant teacher at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and that experience seemed meaningful to him. At the middle school in Beijing, he now has 10 students and teaches 15 hours every week.

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