A key figure promotes the city

Later this year, Alonso Herrero will collaborate with Shanghai native and violinist Wu Zhengyu, recording Polish composer Karol Szymanowski's complete works for the violin and piano. The duo will also play several concerts in Europe including performances in Madrid and Granada in Spain, and Salzburg in Austria.

On March 30, he will collaborate with the Suzhou Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Chinese conductor Liao Guomin, performing Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No 2, a difficult piece that is both emotionally demanding and technically challenging.

The pianist explains that Prokofiev composed the piece after Max Schmidthof, a pianist friend of his, took his own life. The original score was destroyed in a fire and reproduced two years later, when the Russian composer, an accomplished pianist himself, premiered it as the soloist in 1924.

Alonso Herrero believes that the technique is the easiest part of the performance, because all it takes is muscle movement. "The really difficult part is the cultural background and message behind the music," he says. "Only when you really understand the piece can you play it well, and transmit the rich cultural and emotional meaning to the audience.

"When playing a piece of music, you try to express the composer's ideas, as well as your own interpretation — that's what makes a performance unique," the Spanish pianist continues. "There may be something different every time you play a piece, because you have different thoughts on your mind, so playing the music is a perpetual process of searching for the truth in the piece."

There can never be a 100 percent perfect rendering of a composition, he says. "As you age, your life experience becomes a treasured asset that can help you interpret music better and find more depth."

He also believes that living in a different culture offers an important opportunity to enrich a person's experience. For the encore piece at his concerts, he always tries to learn some local music, often transposing traditional Chinese melodies to the piano.

Another way to embrace the culture and lifestyle of China is cooking. Alonso Herrero has enjoyed Chinese food since childhood, when his Chinese schoolmate would throw birthday parties at the local Chinese restaurant. Moving to China he learned to cook authentic Chinese food. He cooks yellow croaker with rice cake, and makes dumplings from scratch. He even created a vegetarian version of the Sichuan cuisine Mapo Tofu, swapping out the minced meat for chopped mushrooms.

As well as all this, Alonso Herrero is an avid runner and yoga practitioner, with his best marathon time registered at under four hours. Something athletes and pianists have in common, he says, is endurance. It takes long hours of practice every day to be a capable performer, just as it takes hours of training to be a marathon runner.

There is also the breathing element, which is equally important in both running and playing the piano. "You need to find the intricate points in your performance to catch a breath, and relax your muscles just a little, just as finding the right rhythm of breathing while running. In that way, you can communicate with the audience and better convey to them the meaning of the music."