Playing Yourself: Zeju Fan on Fidelity, Individuality and What Classical Performance Gets Wrong

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Zeju Fan listens back to his own recordings and does not always like what he hears.

“A bit artificial,” he says. “Disconnected.”

He is not talking about wrong notes.

We are sitting in a practice room at the Royal Academy of Music, where Fan is completing his final year on full scholarship. On 26 June, he will give his London debut recital at Smith Square Hall with a programme built around Beethoven, Berg, Ligeti and Liszt. Yet the subject occupying him this afternoon is not the venue, the audience, or even the recital itself.

It is interpretation.

Fan arrived in Britain at sixteen after earlier studies in Beijing, first attending the Purcell School before progressing to the Royal Academy of Music. The move changed more than his surroundings. It altered the central question of his musical life.

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In Beijing, the problem had largely been technical: how to play. In Britain, it became something harder to define. What separates a conservatoire student from a pianist people genuinely want to listen to once the technical gap begins to close?

He has been looking for answers in other people’s recordings. More specifically, in pianists who seem to possess qualities he does not.

Cho Seong-jin comes up almost immediately.

It is an interesting choice. Fan’s natural territory lies in Beethoven, Liszt and Rachmaninoff — repertoire that rewards projection, scale and physical confidence. Cho represents something different: restraint, colour and poise. Musical qualities Fan openly admits do not come naturally to him.

“He’s the opposite of myself. That’s why I listen to him.”

Whether this degree of self-analysis produces better performances, or simply another form of perfectionism, is harder to tell. Most young musicians spend their twenties refining strengths. Fan seems unusually interested in identifying their limits.

The other recording that keeps returning to him is André Watts performing Liszt’s Sonata in B minor live in Japan in 1988. Fan has been studying the work for more than a year in preparation for his Smith Square Hall recital. Hearing Watts, he says, fundamentally altered the way he thought about the piece.

What struck him was not the scale of the performance, though the scale is considerable. It was the reasoning behind it.

“Everything is reasonable,” he says. “And reasonable is very hard to achieve.”

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He means something precise by the word. Not logical. Not correct. Something closer to inevitable: the sense that each phrase already contains the possibility of what follows, that nothing arrives unexpectedly because everything has been prepared for without the preparation becoming visible.

In a work as volatile as the Liszt Sonata, that is a demanding standard. The piece can easily become a sequence of effects rather than a sustained argument. Fan is interested in something more difficult: a performance in which freedom and structure remain inseparable.

I ask him what specifically Watts does that produces that feeling.

“He never plays a note for its own sake,” Fan says. “Every gesture comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. Even the silences.”

He pauses.

“Most pianists fill the silences. Watts uses them.”

The conversation eventually returns to a broader question.

Fan believes many classical musicians approach interpretation from the wrong direction.

“They’re asking how to sound like Liszt. Not how to sound like themselves.”

It is an attractive argument, though not an entirely new one. Every generation of performers believes it must rediscover individuality for itself. Classical music is full of musicians who speak persuasively about personal voice while sounding remarkably similar in practice.

The difficulty is not articulating an artistic philosophy. The difficulty is demonstrating it in performance.

Fan argues that distinction matters. Whether audiences ultimately hear it is a different question.

“The score matters,” he says. “Style matters. History matters. But fidelity can become concealment.”

His recital programme at Smith Square Hall reads almost like an attempt to test that proposition in public.

Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata opens the evening. Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1 follows. Two Ligeti Études come next. The recital closes with Liszt’s Sonata in B minor.

Seen together, the four works reveal a consistent fascination with forms under pressure. Whether Fan consciously intended it or not, the programme feels less like a survey of repertoire than an exploration of what happens when musical structures begin to strain against their own boundaries.

Image via zejufan.com

The sequence, however, was deliberate.

“I didn’t want a programme that showed range,” Fan says. “I wanted a programme that asked one question from four different directions.”

The question, as he frames it, is what happens when a musical language reaches the edge of what it can say.

Berg and Ligeti are the unusual choices. They are not works many young pianists select when introducing themselves to a London audience.

“The Ligeti is the biggest question mark,” Fan says. “But the audience can decide.”

Smith Square Hall is not a venue typically associated with conservatoire debuts. Its programming history tends towards established artists and serious chamber music.

“I’m not at that stage yet,” he says when asked whether he considers his playing genuinely distinctive. “But I know what I’m working toward.”

Earlier this year, Fan attracted attention through the Pianissima International Competition. Yet he speaks about that success with noticeably less enthusiasm than he does about interpretation.

Classical music often treats interpretation as the search for correct answers. Fan seems more interested in the questions.

His recital at Smith Square Hall may not answer them. It is difficult to imagine any single performance doing so. The more interesting possibility is that the questions themselves prove worth hearing.

On 26 June, London audiences will have the chance to decide.

Zeju Fan performs at Smith Square Hall, London, on 26 June 2026.