• 
  By Sharon Verghis
  


• TheAustralian


• 1:00AM July 3, 2010

It was in 2006, in poverty-ridden rural Cambodia -- a setting as far removed from his normal concert hall milieu as possible -- and the young Australian pianist was performing in a sweltering hall to an audience of silent Khmer schoolchildren on a ramshackle keyboard, valiantly playing Mozart while swatting away locusts and swarms of noisy mosquitoes.

Tedeschi, who was in the country for four weeks to give masterclasses and performances in some of its poorest regions, grins at the memory. "It was full-on. There I was . . . I'd just played the frickin' Duport Variations by Mozart on a keyboard attached to a generator because there wasn't any electricity, and they [the audience] were just, like, what's going on?"

He pulls a wry face, grinning. "And then for the next four hours the Khmer kids got up on stage and did Cambodian dances, and it was the same dance, the same movements, with the same music, for four hours, and they were getting into it, they were loving it." He grins. "I felt like an alien. I went swimming in this beautiful pond while I was there, and I was getting all these glares from the Buddhist monks, and someone told me later it was a sacred pond." He wasn't skinny-dipping, was he? "Oh no. But I had my passport in my pocket [of his swim shorts] so that was karma. I nearly couldn't get out the country."

He grins puckishly from the depths of his overstuffed floral armchair; a slim wraith of a man with a prematurely receding hairline and an air of boyish earnestness overlaid with the gravitas of someone much older.

A lot has been happening in his life in recent times. His move to Boston in 2007, where he has been studying with luminaries such as jazz pianist Ray Santisi, pianist Peter Serkin and keyboardist Dave Bryant, has gone so well he's planning to live in the US permanently. He's relishing his exploration of jazz, the adrenalin-fuelled tightrope walk of melding his pure classical training with its snaking, organic forms. There's a new ABC Classics CD coming out later this year, "which is entirely, for the first time, my vision". Then there's his commitment to a new charitable organisation, MicroLoan Foundation Australia, of which he was appointed official patron last year.

Mention the foundation and his eyes light up. Tedeschi, 29, may have built his public identity on his prodigious musical talent -- he made his debut at the Sydney Opera House at nine, played for Pavarotti at 13, and has been an award-winning international concert pianist since 18 -- but there are many other decidedly non-musical passions. He ticks them off on his fingers: books, politics, cricket, film ("I'm a ridiculous movie buff"). Then, unexpectedly, there's the long, quiet track record in philanthropic pursuits.

Classical musicians are generally not to be found swatting away locusts while playing in dirt-poor Asian backwaters, but Tedeschi, you learn, is not one to confine himself to the rarefied environs of the concert hall. He admires movers, thinkers and doers, figures such as Fred Frumberg, founder of Amrita Performing Arts, an organisation devoted to rebuilding Phnom Penh's devastated cultural fabric; American humanitarian Greg Mortenson, whom he met earlier this year in Washington, DC; and, locally, activist musicians such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra's Richard Tognetti.

He speaks thoughtfully about social justice and world politics, of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and the effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish spirit. The whole world is fodder for conversation.

On July 22 he'll perform in a fundraising concert for the MicroLoan Foundation at St James Church in Sydney's central business district, alongside Sydney jazz and classical pianist Kevin Hunt and Ukrainian violinist Maria Gorkun. Based on the microcredit principles popularised globally by Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, whose work setting up the Grameen Bank to provide small loans to poor women in Bangladesh earned him the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, the year-old foundation has notched up its 2500th loan in Malawi, with more than 99 per cent repaid.

To Tedeschi, there's something wonderfully satisfying about that, and in microcredit's self-help ethos in general. "As someone who is not an economist, it struck me as being very pragmatic and [based on] common sense."

In recent years, the pianist has been quietly donating time and energy to a host of charitable ventures in aid of everything from mental health and cancer to animal welfare. Last year he was awarded the Legacy Prize by American philanthropic organisation the Creativity Foundation for his contributions to music. He has performed for the Mater Hospital, the Karuna Foundation, the Wayside Chapel, at the UN and at fundraisers for the Dalai Lama, and he is the roving ambassador for the Australian Children's Music Foundation. He's also the patron of the Bowraville Cultural Festival, on the mid-north coast of NSW.

Not many of his fellow musicians can boast the same record. Unfairly or not, classical musicians as a breed are not noted for their activism or extracurricular social justice efforts, something Tedeschi concedes and puts down to the hermetic, abstract culture of classical music, with its focus on the past and, sometimes, on the future, "with one foot rarely in the present".

He attributes his contrasting mindset to his family's humanitarian values. His father is NSW Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi; his mother left a practice on the north shore to work as a doctor on an Aboriginal mission in Bowraville while his 27-year-old brother Ben is a caretaker for a residence for indigenous Canadians on probation in far northwest Canada. Why there? He rolls his eyes, smiling. "Who knows? That's just Ben."

He'd like to see more classical musicians engage with the world and is heartened by a more outwards-looking shift in recent times with the rise of more musicians with a socially engaged focus. Examples range from Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen's ecologically focused Baltic Sea Festival; and cellist Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Connect program in New York City public schools, to Lang Lang and Maxim Vengerov's roles as UNICEF goodwill ambassadors. Last year, Barenboim, soprano Barbara Hendricks and conductor Christian Benda joined Kofi Annan's Time for Climate Justice campaign.

In March this year, pianist Lang, conductor Christoph Eschenbach and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra performed in a fundraising concert at Carnegie Hall for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, while the League of American Orchestras is spearheading a nationwide food drive, in its second year and inspired by the film The Soloist, based on the tale of a homeless musician in Los Angeles.

All well and good, Tedeschi says, but points out soberly that activist artists are not always met with public support. Classical music and its musicians, many believe, are meant to be above the fray, divorced from quotidian realities. He nods grimly when told of the heated public debate in Israel in 2007 when more than 40 of the country's classical musicians, educators and scholars released an unprecedented written statement protesting against the occupation of Palestine, and calling for peace and a two-state solution.

The hostile reaction to the view expressed by one of the signatories, Dutchi Lichtenstein -- that "the separation between involvement in music and ideology is unacceptable to me; music is not divorced from the social context in which it operates" -- doesn't surprise him in the least, Tedeschi says quietly.

This narrow mindset needs to be challenged, he feels. Musicians do have a role to play outside their art. He cites the example of Tognetti, a vocal campaigner for the arts in Australia, and says slowly: "Musicians and artists always need to be looking forward like Richard, even if it's scary, even if they don't like what they see. I think it's wonderful that there are people who are willing to get the shit kicked out of them in order to change things." He pauses, staring at his hands.

"Richard once said to me he feels like he's weaving some kind of special thing" -- he traces an invisible web in the air, then crumples his fist -- "and someone's just chucking a plastic chair at it. Richard's anger is constructive. It has meaning and it's there for a reason. I admire him hugely."

Simon Tedeschi performs with Kevin Hunt and Maria Gorkun at St James Church, Sydney, on July 22.