AN INTERVIEW WITH RENNA KELLAWAY After eight years as Head of Keyboard Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, pianist, teacher and international competition juror Renna Kellaway stepped down last summer to pursue her work elsewhere. MusicTeachers.co.uk caught up with her recently to find out more about her life and work as one of Britain's most respected pianists and teachers.

"All my training was based in the European tradition", began pianist Renna Kellaway at the time of our interview, "and, as a schoolgirl, I was lucky to have heard such great artists as Claudio Arrau, Alexis Weissenberg, Moiseiwitch, Emma Goldstein and others." That might not be considered all that unusual, unless of course you take into account the fact that her formative years were spent in the relative isolation of the South African city of Durban, a far cry from the concert halls and recital rooms of Europe's main cultural institutions. With the war having only recently finished "the second not the first!" she added emphatically, she counted herself as being fortunate enough to have been tutored in an environment in which her headmistress placed a strong emphasis on the musical arts. "When artists were playing locally, she would take her 'girls' (as she always referred to us) to the city hall to hear these wonderful musicians, or would make the first period of every Friday morning either a lecture or a recital for the whole school." With such influences it is hardly surprising that Renna's passion for the piano and its music became channelled into a career that has spanned continents as a performer, teacher and competition juror.

	Renna Kellaway, aged fifteen

Renna began piano lessons at such an early age that she never imagined being anything other than a pianist. "I also did ballet and studied the cello, but something had to go and, by the time I was thirteen, I had already made my debut appearance with the South African Broadcasting Orchestra playing a Mozart concerto K271. So it seems as if the decision was already made." Success ensued; at fifteen, when on a tour of South Africa, she was heard by a Dutch pianist who persuaded her to continue her studies in Amsterdam with Johannes Röntgen, the son of a famous Netherlands composer. "The whole family were musicians and his father had been close friends with both Grieg and Brahms…all these figures who had been very remote to me as a teenager suddenly became very real."

She was seventeen when she moved to Holland and she admits that the change of environment was a huge culture shock: "The orchestras in South Africa were quite good, but obviously they missed the great body of traditions of sound and performance. The first time I was taken to the Concertgebouw Hall to hear the Concertgebouw famous orchestra, I was overwhelmed." There she also played regularly to Clara Haskil, who she describes as "a decided influence…she, and the quality of her sound were an absolute inspiration." Renna remained in Amsterdam for eighteen months, but the intensifying of the Cold War gave Röntgen great cause for concern, since, having survived the Nazi occupation and the constant purges, he saw the menacing threat of a Soviet invasion as real. "It worried him terribly, to the extent that he sent me to continue my studies with Franz Osborn, a onetime protégé of Schnabel, in London. There, I had to go up to St John's Wood for fortnightly lessons: he never watched the clock and sometimes lessons would go on for three or more hours, or whatever it took since I was required to learn by memory three or four pieces every time." The demands were intense, especially for a nineteen-year-old, but Renna is happy to acknowledge that the approach he took provided her with a broad structure on which she could build and evolve her own ideas as a musician. "I think that's what teaching is all about and I was certainly provided with an incredible springboard."