Niu Niu: No Holds Barred

Niu Niu is set to take the stage on May 12 with Théo Fouchenneret as part of The French May Arts Festival. We sit down with the pianist to discuss his musical inspirations through the pandemic, his new album Lifetime, his love for performing and more recently, composing.

Niu Niu is the stage name of Zhang Shengliang, who was born into a musical family in Xiamen in 1997. His father was a pianist and he grew up listening to his parents’ music: “They were always playing recordings,” he says. And so taken was he by the piano that, aged just three, he started playing the instrument. By six he’d given his first recital and by nine he released his first international album. “So even though I’m just turning 26 this year, I can tell people I have 20 years of experience,” Niu Niu quips matter-of-factly. He isn’t boastful, even though he’s been told he’s a child prodigy all his life. Indeed, he’s known no other calling. 

“When I was seven,” he recalls, “I asked my parents, besides playing the piano, what else can I do? I’ve been playing the piano for so long that it feels like it’s my life’s mission. How I feel about it now is that I’m not just playing the piano, but I’m using the piano to make music, using my hands and my 10 fingers to bring joy and hope to everyone who listens to my music. That’s what being a musician means to me now.”

Niu Niu became the youngest student to enroll into the affiliated primary school of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, which he entered at the age of eight. He’s played for royalty, including King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales in 2007, and presidents, at the BRICS summit evening gala in 2017. He played at the 10th and again at the 25th anniversaries of the Handover in Hong Kong, when each time his virtuosity and skill were on full display. “I just loved to perform,” he tells me. “I still remember my first recital at six and I was so relaxed. There were over 1,000 people in the audience but I just wanted to share my music and share what I can do. That was the beginning. As I get older, I get more nervous because now I feel like I have more responsibility to bring even better music. But the passion remains the same.”

Although classically trained, Niu Niu isn’t satisfied to remain just a concert pianist. First off, he doesn’t just listen to classical music. “I actually listen to a lot of pop music and jazz, even some EDM during college,” he says. He’s dubbed music before for the animated version of Piano no Mori (Forest of Piano) and recently tried his hand at composing. His first, “Impromptu No 1, Hope”, was a classical composition but he’s also arranged it into a Cantonese pop song for singer Gin Lee. 

“I’ve always loved to compose but it was only in the last two years of the pandemic that I got more time to spend at home and go deep into composition. I took a few courses in composing while I was at Juilliard,” he says. “But I started composing ‘Hope’ in 2020 as a way to encourage everyone to always keep the hope and to keep the belief that tomorrow will be better.” 

Niu Niu admits the pandemic was tough – he found himself spending a lot of time in Hong Kong when his tours were cancelled. “Still, I wanted to share a message of hope to everyone, and the composition was the best way for me to get the message across.”

His second work, “Impromptu No 2, Miss”, was composed for a friend who died during the pandemic. “My dear friend was a respected elder of mine and when I heard the news, I was really sad. I composed ‘Miss’ in the beginning of 2021. I had a lot of time to think during the past two years and I thought we should always try to find growth out of whatever difficult times we might face in life.”

Unable to perform in public during the pandemic, Niu Niu threw himself into recording. Shortly after releasing Faith and Hope in 2021, he began work on Lifetime, which includes “Miss”. “Lifetime is also very much inspired by the pandemic,” he says. “For the album, I chose 17 short pieces by 17 different composers from around the world to express 17 different feelings and passages that we’ve all experienced in our lives – joy, anger, hatred, sorrow, and other emotions.” From Liszt’s “William Tell Overture” to Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini”, to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Energy Flow” and even Niu Niu’s own arrangement of “Amazing Grace”, the pianist-composer seeks to capture all the emotions of a lifetime into a 66-minute recording. No easy feat, but no task too challenging for a child prodigy either.

This month, he’s performing a series of duets alongside pianist Théo Fouchenneret at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, presented by the French May Arts Festival and sponsored by the First Initiative Foundation. “Théo’s a very serious musician and so full of emotion,” says Niu Niu of his peer. 

The duo are playing Tailleferre’s “Toccata”, Bizet’s “Carmen Fantasy”, Rachmaninov’s Suite No 2 and a rarely performed two-piano version of the “Yellow River Concerto”. “I think everybody will have a lot of fun,” says Niu Niu. “We’re working together but we’ll also have a bit of a piano battle. There’s going to be a lot of fire and a lot of harmony that evening.”

And, in the latter half of the year, Niu Niu will at long last set off on tour, with dates set in for mainland China and Japan. Composing is in his blood now, however, and he’s not planning to stop. He’s writing something that’s quite traditionally Chinese, he tells me. And he’s not just working on classical music but dabbling in pop music too. 

We’ve known Niu Niu the pianist for the last two decades. And Niu Niu the composer? We’re keeping our eyes, and
ears, wide open.