In harmony: Navigating love and music

There have been many times when people come up to us after a concert and ask us the question we are now very familiar with: ‘What is it like to play and rehearse together when you are married?’ If we had to answer it in one word, we would say, ‘Amazing’!

Being a musician can be isolating at times, locked in the lonely pursuit of an ideal and an excellence that will never be fully realised and achieved. Don’t get us wrong – we both feel so lucky to spend our lives making music, learning incredible repertoire from Bach and Beethoven to Britten and Boulez. It is a privilege to travel to wonderful places and share our art with music lovers all around the world, but to get to this stage has taken a huge amount of work and sacrifice.

Classical musicians are often compared to sportsmen. One of the very best, basketball player LeBron James said, when asked recently what he thinks it takes to achieve true greatness, that one must put their craft above everything else in their life, including their family – and this is coming from someone in a healthy marriage with three children who are all flourishing in their lives!

In our case, sharing both our artistic careers and our family lives with one another actually feels like an incredible stroke of luck. It is wonderful to have someone you love and have a relationship with, who also understands the dedication it takes to succeed in your profession.

With intense performance and rehearsal schedules and our own individual careers to think about, how do we make it work? There are no miracles. In the end, it comes down to respect and admiration for one another, both personal and professional. With these as the central pillars of our relationship, we feel everything else can fall into place.

We’ve always held professionalism in our work very highly, so much so, that sometimes audiences and other musicians who might not know us don’t even realise that we are in a relationship. We don’t really talk about our home lives or behave too domestically in our work environment. We try to be mindful of our colleagues and the people who we are spending time with during our tours and concerts, and we feel it isn’t right to bring our home lives into a work environment. These guidelines are perhaps followed less strictly in our piano trio; the Sitkovetsky Trio, but our brilliant cellist, Isang Enders, has played with us for over seven years so we of course have a much deeper personal relationship with him than with other colleagues who we might work with less frequently.

In terms of our music making, it seems we have struck a good balance between us, of trusting and supporting each other on stage to give ourselves the best chance of a great performance, while being incredibly demanding in rehearsals and preparation. This is where the issue of respect is so vital, because hearing from someone so close to you that you are not sounding good can be difficult and very unpleasant. However, if you know that this feedback is given with the best intentions and in support of getting the best possible result on stage, you are more able to accept it and feel grateful for the opportunity to talk so openly with one another.

Qian and Sitkovetsky try not to let their personal lives encroach on their musical careers, although these rules are loosened with their close friend and colleague, with whom they have formed the Sitkovetsky Trio in 2007 © Jiyang Chen

It is also important to note that our careers are interesting because, while we do spend a considerable time on stage together with our trio in duo recital, or even in mixed chamber music with other musicians, we also have varied individual careers which mean that we don’t spend every minute together when we perform. We both have significant other projects outside of our work together and we sometimes joke that a little distance does our relationship some good!

The biggest question that has arisen over the past 10 years is, of course, our children. How do we meet the responsibility of being good parents, giving them the love and care that they need, while at the same time satisfying our own individual ambitions that we have had since we were small children? This is not always simple, and it is heartbreaking for us to miss a big event in our children’s lives, or not be able to be there to help them prepare for something important. We’ve had countless discussions about this with so many other musicians, and there is no perfect answer. However, if we can act as role models for our children, to show them that it is good to have goals and ambitions and give their best in whatever they are doing, that will serve them in good stead as they get older and take up interests of their own.

Pianist Wu Qian is co-founder and artistic director of Surrey Hills International Music Festival. Qian will perform alongside violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky at this year's festival, 7-18 May. Tickets can be found here.