A YouTube Träumerei: Ashish Kumar

Illustration: Algie Saputra

The following is the transcript of an interview with Ashish Kumar held in August 2022. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length. The notes throughout the text and the afternote are Ashish’s own.

Interview: Max Wittrock


Diatonic: Ashish, it's great to finally talk to you! We've exchanged a few emails over the last few days. Let me briefly explain how I discovered your channel. I think it was on Reddit – someone was asking about the best YouTube channels, and somewhere in the comments someone had replied: "I can't believe that no one has shared Ashish Kumar’s channel! It’s got the highest-quality recordings of the greatest piano pieces.” Could you describe really quickly what it is that you do on YouTube?

Ashish Kumar: Thanks! That’s very flattering. So what I do is very simple, and in a sense very basic. I upload recordings of works which I think are excellent – both the piece and the recording. And all I do really, to add value to that recording is: one, I synchronize the piano score with that recording; two, I write a brief description of the piece; and three, I write a brief description of why I think this recording is a good recording of the piece.

And that’s it. I don’t appear in my videos. I don't say anything. People barely know anything about me, which is a nice position to be in, actually.

Diatonic: It sounds very modest when you describe it. But we should mention that you have more than 130.000 subscribers as of today. So I think it’s fair to say it's a very successful channel.
What's your theory: Why do people subscribe to your channel and watch your videos?

Ashish Kumar: That's a good question; I'm honestly pretty puzzled by that as well (laughs). I think it's probably a combination of two things.

Number one – and I don't want to blow my trumpet too much – but I do think I spend a lot of time trying to get good recordings. And when I say good, I really mean good, as opposed to famous or well known or well-reviewed – because those are different things, right? There are lots of famous recordings which are not very good, but which people tend to know about and reference. So I do say quite explicitly on my channel that I have a bias towards recordings which are slightly newer and slightly less well-known.

The second thing is that I think some people appreciate the stuff I write in the description box. It's usually quite a personal response to the particular work and why I think the performance is good. On lots of other channels you do see descriptions as well, but those tend to be copy/pasted from Wikipedia or CD liner notes. I do try to do something which is really quite personal, and to point out things which people might miss.

That’s probably it. I can't think of anything else.

Diatonic: Just want to be really clear about one thing: I'm not at all surprised by the success of your channel. I think it's really, really valuable for beginners, intermediate players, and for professionals alike. I for example discovered a lot of recordings I hadn't known previously through your channel. And I think your comments are just on point.  But let's go back to the beginning, like the real beginning … do you remember when you first came into contact with music?

Ashish Kumar: You know, when you answer these first contact questions you're never really sure if you're making the answer up (laughs). But the first thing that comes to mind: I used to stay at my aunt's place when I was primary school, with a cousin who used to play the piano quite a lot. I think I heard him playing the Turkish March, Für Elise, popular pieces like those. All in all it was a fairly conventional way of getting into classical music. And then I begged my parents to get me started on lessons after that.

Diatonic: Did you like playing the piano from the very beginning?

Ashish Kumar: No, I didn't like it. It absolutely sucked. I got my parents to let me take lessons and then I realized the process of developing technique is actually long and painful and fairly arduous.

I didn't enjoy it until I got to about ABRSM grade five. That’s when you start being able to play things which you actually enjoy and want to play, although I wouldn't say I was an obedient student. I remember there was one lesson where I was supposed to play a particular piece which I didn't really like. So I printed out a page from I think Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.12 and brought it to the lesson and said, "Oh, I haven't brought the score for the thing you asked me to learn. But I have this one page from this Hungarian Rhapsody with me, so can we study this instead?"

Diatonic: Did you practice a lot as a child?

Ashish Kumar: Oh, no! I was very delinquent. I'm fairly impatient I find when it comes to practice; so I only ever practiced if I was learning an actual work. So I wouldn't do scales, arpeggios, anything like that, because it was just so mind-numbing. But if it was a Chopin nocturne, for example, then I would really practice it hard, because you're hearing good music as you're learning.

Diatonic: Hearing good music is good cue for me: Do you remember what the first recording was that you actually listened to? Or to be more specific: one that you remember and that made you think "Wow, that’s something I really want to want to analyze”, or "I want to have that on repeat in my CD player"? Can you remember?

Ashish Kumar: Yeah. I think it probably was a recording of Horowitz playing the 1986 concert in Moscow. It probably was Träumerei, he might have played it as an encore. And I remember it was just such a staggeringly beautiful performance. I listened to it on loop on the way to school. And listening to it now, now that I've heard more recordings of how it's quote unquote supposed to be played, that recording is very unusual, because Horowitz almost makes it sound like it's got the wrong time signature. I was shocked when I looked at the score and saw that it was actually in 4/4, right? Because Horowitz makes it sound like 3/4. That was probably the first recording I really fell in love with. And then I started looking at pianists from around that period. And I discovered Rubinstein, I discovered Richter, but that Horowitz recording was the first one.

Diatonic: I'm getting goosebumps when you're sharing that story. Because I think that Träumerei, actually all the Kinderszenen, that music touched me deeply when I heard it for the first time. I think in my case, the first recording I heard, it was Martha Argerich playing.

Ashish Kumar: It's funny you mention this because not very long ago I was thinking of putting together a video on the Kinderszenen. And I tried to find modern recordings – you know, not famous ones – which were at least close to Horowitz and Argerich, and I really struggled.

Which, honestly, is so embarrassing. Because it’s an almost ideological point I make to myself that all great recordings will eventually be surpassed, and it's insane that after all this time, no-one has managed to do a better job than Horowitz and Argerich in the Kinderszenen. They’re such simple pieces, and it's quite stunning that even today those recordings are still unparalleled benchmarks.

Diatonic  When I first heard the Horowitz recording I wasn’t playing the piano myself yet. Listening to it I thought: "That's quite an easy piece, I should try to play it". Because (in my opinion at least) he makes it sound so easy and dreamy. And when you sit down on the piano – that's when I realized as an adult learner that it's really hard – to put it mildly.

Ashish Kumar  I think you're exactly right. When you try and play it you realize there's so much going on. For example that thing Horowitz does in the left hand (sings) as the main phrase is returning. That little voice, in the LH, when he brings it out you think: "Oh, I can do that" … and you can't. It doesn't sound anywhere near as good. Or the way, every time it reaches the highest point of the phrase (sings), he gives that top note slightly different colors or a different phrasing.

It's sad actually, that some people think of Horowitz as a flashy technician. I think he's fundamentally an intimate pianist. He's a sort of a pianist for the inside rather than a pianist for the outside, a lot of the time. That tends to get forgotten a bit.

Diatonic : How can we imagine your apartment? Are there tons of CDs and records everywhere? Do you have extensive Spotify playlists? How do you keep track of all the music?

Ashish Kumar  So I do have three or four hard disks which are just full of stuff which I have either bought or scavenged or dug up in dodgy places online. I have one shelf which is full of actual physical CDs – but I think 95% of the music I own is on my hard drives. The collecting started when my parents bought an iPod Classic for me and I thought: "Oh my God, it's got like 80 gigabytes," which used to be a lot (laughs).

So I thought: okay, I'll just download the stuff I like and I'll put it on there. And then I found that as I was listening to this music, a lot of the time I was thinking: I don't really like this, or, this doesn't sound as good as I thought it would sound, why isn’t it like this other recording? That's when I realized the choice of pianist matters a lot. So just as a byproduct of me wanting to get myself a good iPod playlist I started obsessively hunting down recordings.

Where do I get them from now? Literally all over the place! I do have a Spotify account. It's very, very useful because Spotify has got a very good catalog, even recordings which are now no longer commercially available elsewhere. Some slightly obscure Russian websites will have recordings by Soviet-era pianists, iTunes and Idagio cover some things that Spotify doesn't. But honestly the way I go about selecting recordings is – I'm basically a magpie. I steal as much as I can from wherever I can. And slowly I just happened to build up a very big collection.

Diatonic: So timewise: When you received that iPod you were probably still a teenager?

Ashish Kumar: Yeah. So this was when I was maybe 14 or 15, that’s when I started to sort of slowly collect stuff. And then when I went to university that's when I got the Spotify account. That was when my mind was blown by how much there was on there. And that's when I started to listen for hours and hours and hours.

Diatonic:  But you didn't pursue a career as a musician, right? You went to pursue a different degree in college?

Ashish Kumar: Yes. My career is slightly complicated to explain. The Singapore government offers scholarships to 18-year-olds; it basically says, We’ll send you to study overseas and pay your way through university, both undergrad and master’s, then you come back and work for us for six years. So I took that scholarship. I ended up studying law in university – if you ask me why I chose law, honestly, it's because I thought it sounded kind of fun (and it was, actually, although I never intended to become a lawyer). So I did my undergrad and LLM in Cambridge, then came back to Singapore to finish my national service. Then I became a diplomat working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and completed a posting in Brunei. I'm technically still working for the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but I'm on loan to the Ministry of Communications and Information –  I guess you can call it the Propaganda Ministry if you want to be a bit cynical.

So that's what's happened with my life. While I was in university, to be honest, I didn't touch the piano more than 20 times in 4 years. It was a waste because I should have kept up with it. But my main interest in university was competitive debating – I joined the Cambridge Union and did a lot of debating all over the place.

Diatonic: So did you ever think about actually pursuing a career as a professional musician? Or – since you are also composing – as a composer?

Ashish Kumar: No. I think that's because I have a slightly too accurate assessment of my own abilities, which is to say, next to none (laughs). No, I started composing in university because I happened to have Sibelius 6 on my computer. I was just playing around with the program and I thought, "Oh, actually, it's really easy to just write music on this. So why don't I start?" And that was it. At no point did I think of it as anything more than something I enjoyed doing.

Diatonic:  Let's focus on that really quick. Because if I were to sit down at the computer and start Sibelius (a professional notation software), I most definitely wouldn't be able to compose the pieces you were and are composing. So how did you develop knowledge in that particular area? Did you read books or how else did you get started with music theory and composition?

Ashish Kumar:  It definitely wasn't books. I think the main way I composed was via mimicry. Copying composers I found interesting. Or sometimes it was because I had just become familiar with a particular concept and just wanted to try it out. Or I had just finished looking at a Bach fugue, so I'd say "Actually, this sounds kind of fun to do, why don't I try writing a proper fugue?" Composing was a way of trying to understand what other composers were doing – as opposed to a means of self-expression, which I think is a bit unusual. But that's how it started out.

At some point I did try writing larger-scale stuff. I spent a bit of time in Brussels and while I was there I wrote this massive passacaglia. If I recall, the theme of the passacaglia modulated down by a semitone each time, so it started at the highest end of the piano and through something like 70+ variations it reached the very bottom. The thing ended up being an hour long and almost completely unplayable. That was the one time I really tried to write a large-scale piece. It hasn't seen the light of day, by the way, for which I'm very relieved. I don't think I could put it out in public without revising it a lot.

Diatonic: Knowing about your debate history now I'm not surprised that you're not afraid of actually stating opinions. But a lot of people on social media try to be everybody's darling, they don't really form an opinion and you really put yourself out there. But also: Your community is really friendly and really engaging. Is there also criticism? And if yes: How do you deal with that?

Ashish Kumar: People do say nasty or snide things sometimes on every YouTube channel. But you are right: the community as a whole is just so positive and welcoming – and, actually, very intelligent and knowledgeable in the way it listens to stuff. For me social media has been an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Diatonic: That’s good to hear!

Ashish Kumar: Yeah! Which is strange because you see lots of other people talking about mental health issues or how it's affecting their self-confidence. I've never understood that because people are just so nice, at least to me. At the beginning, when people wrote occasional negative things I used to respond and be like: "Oh, I think you're wrong for these reasons..." or "This is nonsense..." partly because I'm quite an argumentative person.

But now it just doesn't affect me anymore. I get notifications in my email whenever someone comments, so I do read everything. But I've kind of learned to just let it go when someone says something like: "Are you even a professional musician," or "How dare you criticize the great Artur Schnabel” and so on. I go: "Well, whatever. You think that, I think this. That's the way the world is."

Actually, here's a funny thing: one of the nicest things about the channel is that quite a few professional pianists – and this was totally unexpected – have actually reached out to me to say thank you…

Diatonic  Wow!

Ashish Kumar: ... for stuff I’ve put online. I don't think I should name all of them. But some of those who probably wouldn't mind being mentioned: Frederick Chiu, for instance, who produced a gorgeous recording of the Chopin Études, reached out to say, “You know, I think in your comments you noticed lots of things which I wish people had noticed." Rustem Hayroudinoff also said some nice things about my comments on his recording of the Rachmaninoff Préludes. It's a really sweet and affirming thing for me, a total amateur, doing my little thing on YouTube, to have proper pianists come along and say that they appreciate what I do as well. That's really nice.

I should also mention that the channel is a good way to meet people. My channel name is my actual legal name, so even when I was doing my diplomatic postings people would come up to me at receptions and be like: "Are you the guy on YouTube?" And they’d be shocked, because you know, why is this guy a diplomat? And why is he in Brunei? I guess they assume I'm a professional teacher or musician or something – which I obviously am not.

Diatonic: And I think a lot of great things – not just on social media – started out because someone just decided to do something … well, in a playful way, on the side. But now that the channel has grown to more than 130,000 subscribers: Do you sometimes feel pressure when you upload something? Because you have... for your niche, I think that's quite a large audience. How does that make you feel?

Ashish Kumar  I've never felt any pressure in what I upload. All the pressure, if any, comes from me. I think it helps that my channel is not monetized. It's always maintained a place in my mind as a fun hobby which I do, not something which I'm doing for other people or for money.

There are long periods where I don't upload anything. Sometimes because I'm busy with work, but very often it's because the process of making one of these videos takes a lot of time and effort. For instance, sometimes I will go through a whole bunch of recordings and I'll select two which I think are really good. Then I'll come back to them one month later and I'll be like: You know what? I really don't think these recordings are quite up to the standard I want them to be at.

And sometimes I wait five or six years before suddenly an amazing recording appears. This has happened several times where I had these pieces I really wanted to upload – but there literally were no great recordings out there.

This is the kind of stuff makes me worry about the channel sometimes – what if I never get to share a work I love because there’s no good recording of it? It's really not about what how people will react to the video.

Diatonic: And timewise, how long does it take? Or what kind of effort does it take to run a channel like that? Do you have to listen to hours and hours of music? Do you plan your week? Do you schedule things? Can you take us behind the scenes a little bit?

Ashish Kumar: I don't have any kind of fixed schedule, since this is something which I do in my free time. But the process of creating a video can be quite long-drawn, and there’s different stages to it.

The first thing is that I try to find two very different recordings of the same work. And then I try to listen to these recordings without any knowledge of the work’s history, its origin, the concept, or the score. I want to evaluate these things purely based on how they sound and nothing else, to kind of listen to them from the inside.

And once I have heard several recordings, then I actually take a look at the score and I start going through all the recordings I have in a more disciplined way. And this can take weeks for a particular work. If a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto is approximately 40 minutes long and I’ve got 25 recordings I want to go through, that's something like 21 to 22 hours of listening.

It's tough. It's tough, because honestly: How many times can you listen to a work before you get sick of it? How much can you remember about the first recording by the time you're listening to your seventeenth? And psychologically, after a while your brain starts playing tricks on you, right? If you listen to one work over and over again, you lose objectivity, you can end up obsessing over tiny details [Ashish’s note: I remember rejecting dozens of recordings of Chopin’s Op.22 because pianists were playing the first phrase of the polonaise too woodenly – literally about two seconds worth of music. Similarly when I couldn’t hear the woodwind pulses in the coda of the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. It was a miserable exercise in futility and I can’t tell you how relieved I was to eventually get over this kind of thinking]. So I have to spread it out over a long period of time and kind of internalize it. I usually listen recordings on the way to work because I have about two hours of travel time each day.

After finding the recordings I want, I’ve got to get the score for the video. I'm quite particular about finding high quality scans. So again, for lots of these wonderful works I want to upload, there are just no high-quality scans online or on IMSLP. So I just can't upload them.

One very good example is Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert's Schwanengesang. Frederic Chiu has an amazing recording of it; in fact the only very good recording I've ever come across. I've wanted to upload it for about seven years, and literally at the beginning of this year someone finally uploaded a good score of it on IMSLP [Ashish’s note: This is probably as good a place as any to recognise the fantastic work of piupianissimo on IMSLP, who almost single-handedly sustains the micro-community of score channels on YouTube.]
And so in the end I had to wait seven years to work on this video, all because I did not find a high quality enough score, which is a bit insane. But I just don't want to put out something which does not look good. Even if no one who sees the video cares that much, I just can't not care about it.

And then the third stage is – well, after I’ve downloaded the score, chopped it into little bits, deskewed it, cleaned it to remove any scanning artefacts – I start writing the commentary and the analysis. Usually that can be quite fast, maybe two or three hours to get all of it done. But if I cannot find a good reference work or analysis of a piece, I have to do it from scratch on my own. I remember this was the case for both Rachmaninoff's sonatas – I just couldn't find any good reference works on them and spent two days on each going through the scores with a pencil, like I was writing a thesis for a music degree, having to map out themes and everything. Those sonatas took me weeks to do from beginning to end because they're quite long works, too.

So it all takes a surprising amount of time I must say. Even though the outcome is pretty straightforward.

Diatonic: But, you know, I think the seeming simplicity is exactly why people like your channel so much! Because I think a lot of content on YouTube has flashy preview images and catchy titles, but the videos are sometimes just moderate, or bad, or superficial …

Ashish Kumar: This is sort of me trying to commit to some kind of principled consistency, right? All of my titles are in exactly the same format, all the thumbnails will be nothing but literally the first page of the score. So the only reason someone would click on the video is because they are interested in the music and nothing else. I’m not sure the alogrithm knows what to make of my stuff at all.

Diatonic: Do you have any goals for the channel: number of subscribers, new formats or categories? Or with it being a hobby, do you just see where it goes?

Ashish Kumar: Honestly, every single day I am surprised that there are this many people interested in my channel. I wouldn't mind at some point starting a different channel – which has me, as in actual physical me, appearing in a video and explaining stuff and going through particular things I like in a work. Because my current format, while it is very enriching, is also quite limited.

But for this channel I don't have any particular goals in the sense of targets. I do have a kind of – I'm not sure this is the right word – philosophical goal in running this channel. Which is that I want people to listen to music in an open-minded way which focuses on music as sound. Which seems like a very trivial thing to say – but, not to put too fine a point on it, there is quite a lot of bullshit floating around the world of classical music. One big myth is that music is about respecting the composer’s intent, or the written score, or the music’s essence or whatever. And multiple times on my channel I’ve said that I don't care about respecting music – because music is just sound, how can it be respected or disrespected? You might as well speak of disrespecting the colour green, or the concept of electromagnetic radiation. It’s nonsensical. And the same goes for a composer’s intent. If you disagree with what they’ve written, if you think it can be improved, you know, go for it! Music should be liberated from the score because music isn’t the score [Ashish’s note: So I recognize this seems like an odd thing for guy running a score channel to say, but I want the score to be just a visual aid that’s secondary to what you’re hearing. If instead of an urtext I could get a precise transcript of what the pianist was doing in their performance, that’s what I’d use instead. Then there’d also be no way of knowing what the composer wanted.]

This isn’t at all a radical idea. Some of the best pianists out there don't follow what's written in the score. Ivo Pogorelich, for instance, or Martha Argerich. I have this slightly sacrilegious wish that for any piano work for which at least two good different recordings exist, we could somehow destroy all written records of the score and who wrote it. Because if we did that, pianists will actually have to make their own decisions. They can’t outsource their own musical thinking to what the composer has written, or waste endless hours digging up manuscripts or buying urtexts. I'm not saying we should ignore it the scores we do have, necessarily – very often composers do have good ideas. But let me put it this way: we think some composers are great precisely because we’ve found that following their instructions tends to give good results. It’s not the inverse, that we must follow their instructions because they are great composers.

You know, there are still people on my channel who say things like: "Well because this is Bach it should be played on a harpsichord, on the clavichord, it should not be played on the piano." It’s also really galling when you watch some masterclass online, and quite often the person giving the masterclass will say something like: "Well, you're interpreting this work the wrong way, because when Beethoven wrote this he had just written the Heiligenstadt Testament and he was very sad. You need to convey his grief!"

I mean, Beethoven has been dead 200 years! Why the obsession with conveying the feelings of dead people? Why don't you let this young enterprising pianist with their own ideas convey their own ideas? And then you can tell these pianists whether their ideas work or not, without reference to Beethoven.

And I try as far as possible to steer people away from that mode of thinking, and to assess music without reference to history, or what the composer wanted, or mystical mumbo-jumbo like the spirit or essence or whatever of the work. It's like existentialism, now that I think about it – you know, existence precedes essence. I don't think music has an inbuilt essence. I think it’s just sound and we should appreciate the sound for what it is, on its own terms, which means being open-minded.

Diatonic: I think I'm still processing what you just said that. I very rarely heard someone express that opinion, that you should basically discard the historical context. So are there any recordings that come to mind where you would say that the interpreter really found a way of putting a completely new spin to a classical piece?

Ashish Kumar: So this is the thing: I think there's this sneaky, unspoken secret in the classical music world – which is that almost everyone ignores, at some point, what the composer wants, but no one says it out loud. There is this weird agreement that we’ll all pretend we are respecting the composer’s intent, just in a different ways. “Oh, I found this new historical document, which gave me permission to interpret it this way,” right?

But to answer your question, there are really quite a few examples. A famous and obvious one is Glenn Gould. Listen to his recordings of the Mozart Sonatas: insane tempi, left hand incredibly loud, very hard, granite-like playing. But Gould is one of the few pianists who are open about what they are doing. He says that in the age of modern recordings, the only thing left for artists to do nowadays is to recompose pieces – because all of the important basic statements have already been made, right? And I think that's a really powerful point.

When people tell me that the point of music-making is to try to realize the composers’ intention, I always have this little thought experiment I give them. Imagine Chopin comes back from the dead somehow, you summon him through a time travel machine. And we ask him to perform his Op.23 Ballade, the first. So Chopin sits down, he performs his first Ballade, and we get it recorded in perfect surround sound.

After he’s done, Chopin stands up and says: "What I just played is the first ballade. It is the ultimate representation of what I intended the Ballade to sound like, and anyone who does anything different is just not playing my first Ballade.”

Do you think all the pianists in the world collectively should agree to stop playing the Ballade, now that we have an objective view of what the composer really wanted? I think that's just mad. We should just tell Chopin we don’t care what he thinks. But lots of pianists seem to subscribe to that notion, at least in what they say. Of course they try to fudge it by saying: "Oh, yes, but even if you follow the score, the score gives you flexibility!" But that's sort of a practical cop-out. Right? I think even if we did know exactly what the composer wanted, that should not determine what we do.

But back to the question: Glenn Gould is one obvious example. Ivo Pogorelich is another, he’s always doing things which are absolutely not in the score. In his recording of the Chopin Préludes, for instance, which I think is one of the great landmarks in Chopin recording – he does so many strange and wonderful things there. Suddenly an entire passage will be in staccato when there's no such indication in the score. Or he'll play a prelude so incredibly slowly, it almost dissolves into individual notes, it’s like pointillism. His whole approach is to push very, very hard at the margins of what is expressible.

But here's the funny thing: even pianists who are the most committed to this ideology of following the composer's intent very often are not doing it. A great example is András Schiff. He always says: You need to look at the score, you need to understand the performance tradition, you should take the composer seriously. But all of his recordings are super weird, right? He takes the indications in score and he exaggerates them to an extent that I'm sure the composer never intended. If Beethoven listened to Schiff’s recording of the Sonatas he’d probably be quite shocked. He’ll say: "Okay, I didn't want you to accent those notes that much, I didn’t want the slurs to be quite so pronounced.” But clearly András Schiff deep down just enjoys these fun, interesting textures he's generating. I think it's a pity he needs to refer to Beethoven's intent to get away with it. I wish he had the freedom to say I play it this way because I love it when it's played this way.

But yeah, honestly, probably 70-80% of all the great pianists do different things from what the composer writes in the score. And if you think about it, my channel forces me to realize that, because when you are literally synchronizing every bar of a piece with what you're hearing, you tend to notice the deviations.

Diatonic: But I think that's the beautiful thing about your channel. It makes me listen to music really, really intentionally with my eyes closed, trying to note the differences. And I think in terms of how I pursue music, you've definitely reached your goal!

I would assume a lot of people ask you for recommendations of recordings. So let's say you're invited to a birthday party from someone who's not into classical music at all so far, and you have to pick one or two recordings to really get them excited about classical music. What would be your favorites?  Do you have any idea of what you would pick?

Ashish Kumar: That's an amazing question. Ok, I'll just list two recordings which I love for very different reasons, stuff to get someone unfamiliar with classical music started. So the first one: Glenn Gould's 1981 version of the Goldberg Variations, which is very, very slow. But I recommend this because it is just so consoling and calm and so tranquil. You're looking at this huge ocean of emotion, but nothing on the surface moves.

And I really love that recording because when I was studying for my A levels – which are super stressful in Singapore, I should add – I would take breaks to play the Aria from the Goldbergs on my piano, at Gould's really slow pace. Just because it helped me to survive the day. I think Gould’s is one of these recordings which is just good for you, you know, it’ll make you a happier person overall.

The other one – I don't think this is a very well-known recording – is a Chandos CD of Howard Shelley playing three piano concertos. It's the Grieg and the Schumann Piano Concertos (which are quite a standard pairing), but then there is also Saint-Saen’s Second. Now, Howard Shelley is not that well known, but I think he is the greatest performer of piano concertos ever in the history of recorded music. He has recorded so many concertos: all of the Rachmaninoff and Beethoven concertos, a whole bunch of Mozart piano concertos, and a good number of fairly obscure Romantic/Classical concertos as well.

And literally every single recording of a concerto of his I've listened has immediately become my favorite or second-favorite recording of that concerto. Even in repertoire like the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos which has been recorded hundreds of times by all the great pianists of the past. He's a stunning, absolutely unbelievable pianist. Fast tempi, very low tolerance for overused gestures, but a lot of playfulness and clarity and consistently propulsive phrasing. And another thing about his recordings: the orchestra always does amazing stuff. Like, you are so aware of the orchestra and all the beautiful things it’s doing, the woodwinds and the brass always have a great time, and the climaxes are so joyful and earth-shattering. This Grieg/Schumann/Saint-Saens disc is the kind of recording – it just makes you so wildly happy, that’s really what it is.

Diatonic: Wow, thank you! And last question: If you were to go to a remote island, and you could only pick one recording for yourself that you would have to listen to over and over again – I know it's a tough question – but which one would you choose?

Ashish Kumar: Oh, God. Yeah, this is the dreaded question, right? (Laughs) And I’m going to have to think about this. Because it's a real proper dilemma, isn't it?

Diatonic: It is. When I think about this for myself the problem is: Do you choose something simple that calms you? Or do you want something insanely complex where you can discover stuff for years to come?

Ashish Kumar: This is the exact problem I’m having. I'm asking myself, what could I listen to thousands of times and not get tired of?

Diatonic: I think I would choose the Kinderszenen. I don't know about the performer but…

Ashish Kumar: No, I mean Kinderszenen is great because I think it has this exact quality, right? Lots of the more tranquil pieces in there are so beautiful, expressively very unmediated, very pure. But it also has quite a bit of excitement – like the Knight of the Rocking Horse (Ritter vom Steckenpferd) and everything.

What would I choose? I don't know. I'm so tempted to give an answer that’s really a cheat. Like Michael Korstick's giant box set of the Beethoven Sonatas. But that doesn't really count, right? Because it's 32 pieces and they last something like twelve hours.  

This is such a disappointing and conventional answer, in a way, but maybe I would choose Zimmerman's recording of the four Chopin Ballades. It’s a real musical universe. I think it has everything. There is so much tenderness in them, so much violence, so much lyricism, andso much weird, abstract, incomprehensible stuff as well. I think no matter what I feel, there’ll be something in there for me to enjoy. So maybe that.

Diatonic: Sounds like a very reasonable answer.

Ashish Kumar: And as I’m saying this, I’m having lots of other recordings coming to my mind. But now that I’ve chosen it, I have to stick with it I guess. So I’m going to say that one!

Diatonic: And we all hope you won’t go to a remote island – because we all want you to run your YouTube channel for years to come! So thank you so much for sharing great music online for sharing your thoughts. And thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. It was great talking to you.

Ashish Kumar: Well, thanks so much. I’m very glad that you enjoy the channel. And I’ll try to keep it going to the best of my ability – while still having it stay a hobby!

Afternote
Some time after we spoke, Ashish emailed me regarding my last question: I reproduce his comment here in full.

“Having thought about it a bit more, actually, I’m not going to stick with it. (Sorry!) Because as much as I like Zimerman's recording of the Ballades, I just don't listen to it very often. It’s not a necessity in my musical life. So instead I'll go with Kocsis' recordings of the four Rachmaninoff Concertos, which have kept me company on all my train rides for the last three months. Kocsis' playing is unspeakably good – it has Rachmaninoff's own steely-fingeredness without any of Rachmaninoff's emotional distance. (I have a hypothesis that Rachmaninoff’s crippling self-doubt comes across in his playing, sometimes – there’s an apologetic, rushed quality to it, like he’s convinced he’s tricked people into liking his music and doesn’t really deserve to be there.)

For some reason, even today there's this perception that Rachmaninoff's work is very pretty but not much more, which is not just wrong but ludicrously, laughably, wrong. He’s an obsessively rigorous composer; in the 3rd Piano Concerto, more than half the material in that massive first movement comes from the first two bars of the work – and I mean literally the first two bars, that little orchestral pulse before the piano even enters. And for those critics who say Rachmaninoff is just schmaltz – and there are still a good number of them – I feel like they've have had it drilled into their minds that real, vulnerable, earnestness of feeling has no place in classical music. In which case, fuck them.