Embedded Files
Interview by Tobin C. Carlin | Tealartis | September 2026
Photo source: Private archive of Xianmei Fang
Classical music has carried its stories across centuries, yet every generation discovers its own way of giving them a voice. For some young musicians, that journey begins early, with curiosity, individuality, and a virtuosity that becomes more than a means of expression.
Xianmei Fang, an award-winning musician, is already making an impression far beyond her years. She is an organist, pianist, fortepianist and harpsichordist and has performed on international stages – steadily establishing a distinctive place in the world of classical music. We had the pleasure of conducting an interview with her.
In our conversation, Xianmei Fang reflects on the journey that has shaped her into an exceptional young virtuoso whose artistry is attracting growing international attention. She shares her artistic perspective and experiences from her recent concert engagements, while also discussing what it means to her to build a life and identity as a musician.
The conversation further explores the relationship between classical music and social media, and how she views the opportunities and challenges this changing landscape presents.
You are part of China's first generation of professional organ students, and began your rigorous musical training at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. How is the organ discipline received in China?
Xianmei: I began majoring in piano at the affiliated primary school of the Central Conservatory of Music. When I entered high school, the school introduced organ as a compulsory course for piano majors, and that became my first encounter with the instrument. I still remember the feeling of playing the organ for the first time: its extraordinary range of colors and immense sense of sonic space captivated me almost immediately and opened up an entirely new musical world.
At around the same time, the Central Conservatory of Music officially established an undergraduate organ program, so I chose to continue studying the instrument in depth. As part of one of the first generation of organ students to receive systematic professional training within China, I was also fortunate to witness the gradual development of the discipline in the country.
The Central Conservatory of music is rooted in China while maintaining a strongly international outlook. Through international masterclasses, festivals, and exchanges with music institutions abroad, we were able to encounter different performance traditions and musical ideas while still studying in China. These experiences broadened my artistic perspective and laid an important foundation for my later studies at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg.
You are an organist, pianist, fortepianist and harpsichordist. What does each instrument bring out in you, and is there one that feels particularly close to who you are?
Xianmei: If these keyboard instruments were people, each would have a very distinct personality. The piano's struck strings, the organ's wind-driven sound, the harpsichord's plucked strings, and the fortepiano's distinctive touch and way of producing sound all require the performer to continually adjust the way they listen, touch, and think.
The piano was the starting point of my musical journey and gave me my most fundamental musical language. The organ brought me into a completely different acoustic world. Its special relationship with architectural space, air, and timbre taught me to understand sound and polyphonic structure from a broader perspective. The fortepiano and harpsichord, meanwhile, bring me closer to the historical context in which the music was created. Especially when playing Classical-period repertoire such as Mozart, the touch, timbre, and dynamic characteristics of historical instruments often lead me to reconsider many details in the score and their relationship to the performance practices of the time.
So it is difficult for me to choose one instrument that feels 'closest' to me. Each reveals a different aspect of musical character, and each continually influences the way I understand the others. When I am fully immersed in playing, I often feel that the instrument sounding in that very moment is the one closest to me.
You completed your Bachelor and Master degrees in Organ and Harpsichord at the Mozarteum University Salzburg with top honors. Can you tell us about your early impressions when starting studying in Europe?
Xianmei: After coming to Europe, I realized for the first time that music history has sound, space, and even a kind of physical texture.
When I first entered churches that were several centuries old, sat at historical instruments, and experienced directly the relationship between an instrument and the architecture around it, I understood in a very immediate way how inseparable music, history, and environment can be. This was especially important for the study of organ and historical keyboard instruments.
At the Mozarteum University Salzburg, I did not feel much distance as an international student. On the contrary, I was given a great deal of trust and many opportunities for practical experience. Learning did not take place only in classrooms and practice rooms; it extended to the stage, historical instruments, primary sources, and a wide variety of collaborative projects. From solo playing and chamber music to working with orchestras, from studying historical documents to taking part in different kinds of performances, this comprehensive training greatly accelerated my transition from a student in the practice room to an internationally active professional musician.
That may be the deepest influence my studies in Europe have had on me. I gradually stopped thinking of music simply as, 'I play what is written in the score,' and began to ask instead: Why does this music exist in this particular way? From that point on, history, instrument, space, and performance were no longer separate things to me.
You are already performing very actively internationally. As an organ soloist you performed solo recitals for the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg, and performed the organ at the opening concerts of the Salzburg Festival. Can you tell us about your experience when performing at these venues?
Xianmei: Both performances left a very deep impression on me, but each carried a different meaning.
The Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg is one of the internationally renowned concert halls. Its Propter Homines Organ is a modern instrument with an electronic combination memory system and an exceptionally rich range of colors and performance possibilities. When I design a solo recital there, I deliberately choose works from different periods and styles, hoping that within a single concert the audience can experience the instrument's varied and expansive sound world.
During the opening of the Salzburg Festival, I performed in the Franziskanerkirche in Salzburg. Unlike the modern organ in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation, the organ there uses a mechanical action and offers a completely different playing experience. On that occasion I chose Mozart's two works in F minor, K. 608 and K. 594. To perform Mozart's music in his birthplace, in such a historic church, and as part of the opening events of the Salzburg Festival had a very special meaning for me and remains a precious experience in my musical journey.
The organ, in particular, is deeply connected to the space around it. How does performing in different churches and concert halls influence the way you hear and interpret the music?
Xianmei: Unlike many other instrumentalists, organists cannot take their own instrument with them from one place to another. Every time I arrive at a new church or concert hall, I have to get to know the organ there from the beginning and adapt again to the sound of the entire space.
For example, some churches have a very long reverberation, so a sound remains in the space for a long time after it is played. In such a place, tempo and phrasing need to be adjusted. In a concert hall, the sound is often clearer and more direct, so the approach is different. Every organ also has its own character. Even when I perform the same work, I would never play it in exactly the same way in every place.
For me, this is also one of the most fascinating aspects of the organ: interpretation is not about carrying a ready-made answer around the world, but about continually asking new questions in response to the instrument and space in front of you.
As harpsichordist you perform at world-class early music venues, including the Resonanzen Festival at the Wiener Konzerthaus and the Ljubljana Festival. What do these different musical environments bring to your experience as a musician?
Xianmei: The Vienna Konzerthaus and the Ljubljana Festival were very important milestones in my professional journey. The Vienna Konzerthaus in particular had been one of the great concert halls I admired from a very young age. To finally see my own name on a concert poster there, and then to step onto a stage I had once looked up to from afar, was a very special feeling.
At the time, I was still a student. But it was precisely on stages like these that I began to understand that once you enter a professional environment, neither your identity nor anything you may have achieved in the past can perform a single moment on stage for you. In the end, everyone faces the same thing: the music.
So these experiences did not give me a sense that I had 'arrived' somewhere. Instead, they made me understand for the first time what it really means to be a professional musician. The larger the stage, the simpler the things that ultimately matter: your sound, your judgment, and your ability to create music together with others.
As a pianist, you performed in a piano concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, USA, and also appeared as a guest pianist performing at a TED event in Singapore. Do different audiences around the world listen differently? Have you noticed a particular difference between performing in different countries?
Xianmei: Culture certainly changes the way we understand music, but increasingly I feel that it cannot change our deepest human emotions.
The audience at Carnegie Hall was largely there specifically for the music. The situation at the TED event in Singapore was completely different: the audience came from many different fields, and many were not traditional classical-music listeners. But once I began to play, I realized that this difference was not as important as I had imagined.
We may speak different languages and have completely different life experiences, but joy, loneliness, love, loss, and hope do not need translation.
That is one of the things that fascinates me most about music. It does not erase the differences between people, but it can pass through those differences and reach something that we share.
So I increasingly believe that a musician's growth is ultimately not only an accumulation of technique. How deeply you understand people also determines, to some extent, how deeply your music can reach.
There is always that moment just before a concert begins – the room falls silent, you sit at the instrument, and everything suddenly becomes very still. What happens inside you at that moment?
Xianmei: I think music actually begins before the first note is played.
Before that moment, hundreds of people may still be living in hundreds of completely different worlds. Someone is thinking about work, someone about family, and I also bring my own thoughts with me to the instrument. But when the whole space truly becomes quiet, everyone's attention suddenly turns toward the same sound that has not yet appeared. Then the first note happens.
From that moment on, people who were strangers to one another enter the same stretch of time. For me, this is what makes live music irreplaceable: together we experience something that is coming into being and disappearing at the very same time.
The sound cannot remain, but for a moment we shared that time.
When you interpret a work, how much of yourself do you want the audience to hear – and how much should remain faithful to the composer?
Xianmei: I have always believed that the performer is first and foremost in service of the music. Before forming a personal interpretation, I want to understand as much as possible about the score, style, historical background, and the sound world in which the composer lived. Only on that foundation does 'personal expression' become truly meaningful to me.
I do not think the 'self' needs to be deliberately added to the music. We can never truly become the composer, nor can we completely return to the period in which the work was created; we can only understand it through the life experience we have today. If that understanding is genuine, the performer is already present in the sound. So I am not looking for a particular ratio between 'fidelity' and 'self.'
The work acts on me first, and I respond to it through sound. Perhaps that is what personal interpretation means to me.
In 2026 you performed with the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra at the Grand Hall of the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest for the "Night of the Organs". How was this experience for you?
Xianmei: This concert was very important to me. It was a great honor to appear as organ soloist in the Grand Hall of the Liszt Academy and to collaborate with the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra.
That evening I performed two organ concertos. The organ has an extraordinarily rich palette of timbres, and when it is combined with a symphony orchestra, those possibilities become even more apparent: it can blend into the overall orchestral sound and, in the next instant, emerge as a very distinct solo voice. This constantly changing role is one of the things I find most fascinating about the organ concerto.
The concert was sold out a month in advance, and more than a thousand people attended. For an instrument as relatively niche as the organ, it was very moving to see such an enthusiastic level of interest.
You collaborated with a number of orchestras around the world, including the China Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Centre for the Performing Arts Orchestra in Beijing, and the orchestras and ensembles of Mozarteum University Salzburg. What have these encounters taught you about the universality of classical music?
Xianmei: I originally studied piano and for a long time was accustomed to thinking about music from a soloist's perspective. Later, studying harpsichord and organ brought me truly inside the orchestra and changed the way I listen.
As a soloist, it is easy to focus on your own sound. In an orchestra, however, you must hear everyone else at the same time and understand your place within the whole. Everyone has an independent voice, yet everyone must listen and respond to one another in order to create a single whole. For me, that is also one of the most fascinating things about an orchestra.
Thinking about your recent concert engagements, was there a particular performance, encounter or unexpected moment that has stayed with you – something you will carry into the next chapter of your musical life?
Xianmei: The experience that has stayed with me most deeply was performing Julius Reubke's Organ Sonata in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation. Reubke died at only twenty-four, and this was the final major work of his life. During the nearly thirty-minute performance, as the intensely charged harmonies and highly demanding pedal writing intertwine and roar through the immense sonority of the organ, time seems almost to lose its meaning. Interpreting this work is, in itself, an experience of almost burning through one's life force.
I am twenty-three now. To encounter, at this age, a score written by another young genius who poured his life into it creates an extraordinary sense of resonance across time. The vitality that bursts from this music has had a profound impact on me, and I know that memory will remain deeply engraved in my future artistic journey.
Your education is still an important part of your journey. You are currently pursuing your Meisterklasse in Organ at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. What are you learning about yourself at this stage of your journey?
Xianmei: I feel deeply honored to have the opportunity to pursue the Meisterklasse in organ at the University of Music and Theatre Munich. As the highest degree within this particular system of artistic training, it marks a new stage in my artistic journey – one that requires deeper exploration. My previous studies have given me a solid foundation, but at this new starting point, my perspective and musical perception must also rise to a new level. I hope to engage with a broader range of musical fields and, through that wider perspective, gain a deeper understanding of the profound masterpieces in which so much human intelligence has been distilled.
Do you remember the moment when music became more than something you studied – the moment you realized that this might actually become your life?
Xianmei: For me, there probably was not one decisive moment, but rather a realization that gradually became clearer: music is something that can never truly be 'completed.'
I have always felt a sense of reverence toward fields that allow for infinite understanding and interpretation, and music is exactly such a field. It has no single answer, and there is no final destination that one can truly reach. Strangely, that infinity does not make me uneasy; instead, it gives me a deep sense of peace. As long as curiosity remains, there will always be something new to learn and discover.
Perhaps it was when I understood this that I knew music would not simply be one phase of study in my life. It is more like a conversation that can continue for a lifetime.
What’s your go-to meal on a concert day?
Xianmei: Banana, chocolate, and coffee.
When you’re not practising or performing, what is your favourite way to switch off?
Xianmei: Reading and walking.
If music wasn’t your career – what would you be doing?
Xianmei: Geography.
Do you have a little ritual or routine you always return to before a concert?
Xianmei: I stretch and move my arms and legs to get the circulation going throughout my body.
What is something you love doing that has absolutely nothing to do with music?
Xianmei: Travel and photography.
Is there a piece of music that feels almost like a portrait of you at this point in your life?
Xianmei: It is difficult to say that any one work is a portrait of me. But recently I have been listening often to Mozart's Fantasia in F minor, K. 608, and it gives me a great deal of strength.
With regard to Social Media, do you think the next generation of classical musicians will have to be not only performers, but also storytellers, creators and communicators – and is that something you welcome?
Xianmei: I welcome this change, but I do not think it should become an obligation for every musician.
Every era has its own forms of communication. In the past, people discovered musicians through radio and recordings; today, social media has taken on a large part of that role. For artists who want their music to reach a wider audience, it undoubtedly provides a very direct bridge.
What I find particularly interesting is that social media allows audiences to see more than just the performance on stage. A musician's thoughts, life experiences, and the process through which music takes shape can all become part of artistic expression. We are not only sharing a performance; we are also telling the story of why music matters to us.
Of course, someone can also choose not to do this at all. The means of communication may change, but the way a musician chooses to connect with the world should always remain a personal choice.
Your organ performance videos have accumulated over 5 million views across Chinese social media platforms. Has that changed the way you experience being a musician?
Xianmei: In China, the organ is still a relatively new and niche instrument, so the public remains strongly curious about it. I feel very fortunate to be able to study and devote myself to this instrument in our time, and to introduce its artistic beauty to more people. I have never regarded the attention online simply as a label of 'traffic' or popularity, but rather as a form of encouragement and responsibility. It motivates me to create and share more high-quality videos, presenting the organ from many different perspectives and showing the public its extraordinary artistic possibilities, so that this ancient instrument can find new vitality in new cultural soil.
How do you balance building a public presence with protecting the private space you need to develop your artistic voice?
Xianmei: I do not really see these as two things that require a deliberately maintained balance. A public image can be shaped externally, but for an artist, what ultimately interests people most is what your music can bring to them. Time tests everything that is inauthentic. Genuine artistic substance is what ultimately shapes an artist's identity, and what we call a public image is, in the end, the judgment people form on the basis of that real artistic substance.
Music is a very honest mirror. What a person has truly understood and experienced will eventually leave traces in the sound.
You are creating a life and an identity as a musician. Who do you hope to become through music – and what do you hope people will hear when they hear you play?
Xianmei: If you ask what kind of person I hope to become through music, it is difficult to define in just a few words. But I know deeply that music is one of the highest means through which we can reflect on and perceive human nature. Music has given me countless moments of emotional impact, spiritual elevation, and irreplaceable resonance. To be able to spend a lifetime understanding and interpreting it is already an extraordinary privilege.
When people listen to me play, however, I do not want it to become a one-way act of 'self-display.' For me, performance is a process in which the audience and I enter a work together. If, through my playing, the music ultimately touches their own memories and emotions – perhaps even allowing them to hear something within themselves again – then that is what I most hope to leave behind.
When you look at the teachers and mentors who have and still shape you, what is one piece of advice that has stayed with you – perhaps even something you didn't fully understand at the time?
Xianmei: I graduated from my Master studies in Salzburg at the age of 23 and began to face a world beyond the university, with many unknowns. In today's complex international climate and amid the turbulence of our time, it was perhaps inevitable that I, as a young person, would sometimes feel uncertain. At that moment, my organ professor, Prof. Hannfried Lucke, guided me with a saying: 'Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would end, I would still plant an apple tree today.'
That sentence gave me tremendous strength. In Chinese, we have the idea of 'xiuxing' – a form of inner cultivation and lifelong practice. To me, it is not only a kind of discipline and inner refinement that an artist should possess, but also a quiet strength that a young life must hold on to while being shaped by its time. No matter how the outside world changes, and no matter what uncertainties tomorrow may bring, what we can do is focus on the present and plant the tree in front of us today. This process of continually taking root inwardly and practicing day after day in the midst of uncertainty has become one of the deepest sources of strength that carries me forward.
What is coming next for you? Are there concerts, collaborations, recordings or musical projects on the horizon that you are most looking forward to?
Xianmei: Next comes my Hungarian tour in April 2027. I will give solo organ recitals in four cities: Debrecen, Szeged, Budapest, and Pécs. To complete a tour across different historic churches and organs will be a very interesting journey for me.
In May 2027, I will also return to the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg for another solo organ recital. That hall holds many important performance memories for me, so I am very much looking forward to returning to that stage with new music and new experiences.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse