Local school pupil Lou Hägi sets his sights on becoming a concert pianist

Anyone seeing Lou Hägi play the piano will immediately notice how it seems he becomes immersed in another world. The 14-year-old from Muri in the neighbouring canton of Argovia makes playing Beethoven’s Sonata Number 8 in C Minor look easy, but he admits to having had to practise for a long time to be able to master it. Indeed, he spends between three and four hours a day practising, and up to six hours at weekends, endlessly repeating sections to get them right. “It is hard work,” he admits, “but playing and performing to an audience gives me great pleasure.”
 
Hägi currently attends the art and sport section of a secondary school in Cham but every week he travels by train to Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany to spend a day attending lessons at the Musikhochschule there, including piano practice under the supervision of professor Christoph Sischka.
 
While Hägi’s father played the piano a little, it would not be true to say the boy came from a musical family. There was a piano in the home, and, even at the age of five, Hägi would start to play on it, repeatedly asking his parents if he could have lessons. These were duly arranged, prior to him becoming a pupil under Madalina Slav in Zurich. He initially attended the District School in Muri, but as he began his weekly visits to Freiburg during this time, he had to miss a day each week. He subsequently changed to the afore-mentioned in school in Cham last summer, as timetabling was more flexible there. In summer 2017 he plans to move to the art and sport of the grammar school at Rämibühl in Zurich.
 
At present, the 14-year-old has no one favourite composer, and loves the works of Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov as well as Beethoven in addition to more contemporary works. However, he is clear that he wants to be a concert pianist. One great advantage is that he does not get nervous before performing in public. “The more people attend, the more I enjoy it,” he said.
 
The talented teenager has already taken part in a number of music competitions, for example in Laupersdorf in the canton of Solothurn, which he did when only ten, and last November he won a first prize at the Youth Music Festival of Argovia, not to mention prizes he has won in national competitions, too. His first performance as a soloist was two years ago when he played with the Freiamt Youth Orchestra conducted by Cécile Gross. In April he is due to perform at a concert of music by Mozart performed by the Bülach Orchestra of the canton of Zurich.
 
The grand piano young Hägi currently practises on has been loaned to him by a  90-year-old acquaintance and housed in the living room of his family’s terrace home, which means that, whenever he practises, not only do his parents and two sisters have to hear, so do the neighbours. This meant his mother Sandra had to use all her diplomatic skills to persuade them about the need for her son’s practice and the inevitable repetition, though now everyone affected has got used to it. “When we need to make the odd phone call, we use the loo,” explained his mother. “Of course, we are very proud of Lou and all he has achieved,” as she added how understanding her daughters had been of their brother’s playing, too.