‘Have you got Schumann’s Music and Musicians?’ Hardly had the Zoom link been established and she was off. ‘After I recorded the disc, I was actually in the UK. I was in London and I wanted to buy the physical copy but I only found volume two. Then only months later I found volume one on eBay for 10 bucks!’ ‘Yes,’ I tell her, ‘I have both volumes translated by the wonderfully named Fanny Raymond Ritter.’

Tiffany Poon is a verbal whirlwind of enthusiasms, ideas and insights. Google her name and the first page produces no fewer than 57 separate click points, a number that doesn’t include the many separate videos of her as ‘subsections’ of those points. Poon is one of a new breed of musicians making a name for themselves via the internet, not merely a pianist but – perhaps just as importantly – a vlogger. A YouTube phenomenon who first made her mark during the pandemic, she has accrued nearly half a million followers on social media. Her posts are not just of her piano-playing, in the manner of Valentina Lisitsa, the first pianist to establish a career via YouTube. These are lifestyle posts in which she shares her opinions on life and thoughts on music, many filmed while lying underneath her Steinway in her New York apartment (in fact, there are many more posts of her talking rather than playing the piano). The lens is her friend, a mute companion in whom she can confide. She manages her online presence with professional skill, using smart, quirky editing. Few pianists I know are so comfortable and such fluent speakers when talking to camera – this from someone born in Hong Kong and who spoke little English until she was nine years old. She has since made up for lost time, though: as I discover, she finds it difficult to answer a straightforward question with a straightforward answer.

My first question (admittedly a dull one) relates to the reason for the interview. Why Schumann? What is it about his music that appeals rather than, say, Bach or Chopin? ‘Didn’t you get the disc?’ she asks. ‘No, not yet,’ I reply. ‘Oh. I explain it all in the booklet.’ And then she’s off, talking precipitously, darting this way and that, sometimes on the main ski slope, sometimes going off piste, then swerving back again with a qualifying statement or a self-correction. ‘There are so many reasons! I think I have always had two different personalities and emotions. Lots of trivial moments but also the fact that I’m from Hong Kong and then uprooted to New York when I was not yet eight. Hong Kong was such a part of my identity so I don’t really say that I’m from America even though I’ve been living in New York for longer than I lived in Hong Kong. Then I always found myself gravitating towards different things from my generation at times. So I would hang out with my art teachers in school so I felt like an adult and a child. This kind of duality always existed in me. Then Hong Kong is a bilingual city – Cantonese and English. At first I spoke English with a British accent. Now I speak it with an American accent.’

Tiffany Poon’s mother was a flight attendant. After Tiffany auditioned for Juilliard at the age of seven, she gave up her job to take her daughter to New York. Her father (‘he does something with computers – I’m not sure what’) stayed in Hong Kong. ‘So there was always this dual feeling in me.’ I had learnt online that Tiffany’s musical talent was inspired by a tiny toy piano she was given as a small child. ‘I was obsessed with it and I was apparently really good at faking it. I would play from ear what I heard at home on hi-fi systems, and also my dad brought me to CD stores a lot just to explore music. Not to train me or anything. They had no thoughts of me being a pianist or anything but because I played in this store and had so much fun testing out different pianos and just pretending like I knew how to play … they eventually thought that I should take lessons. After two or three months of lessons my parents thought I should have a piano at home to practise rather than just relying on whenever I visited the teacher, which was apparently three times a week for half an hour. So that’s how it started.’

That was when she was four and a half years old. She is uncomfortable about being labelled a child prodigy ‘because that wasn’t how I felt. There’s a lot of connotations, like if you’re a child prodigy you are not a human, you know. Nothing is hard for you if you’re a prodigy. A lot of things were easy for me because I was oblivious. It wasn’t because I felt like I was a prodigy myself or anything. I was just absorbing music. I don’t think I was ever a genius in terms of sight-reading or technique or anything like that. I just think my brain moved faster than my fingers. Any time I hear music it plays in my head afterwards without me consciously memorising it. It happens with anything. It could be something very trivial like walking out of a 99-cent shop and then the radio music playing in my head down the street.’

Impressively, having received a full scholarship from the Columbia University/Juilliard exchange programme – studying with Emanuel Ax and the late Joseph Kalichstein – she was named a John Jay Scholar by Columbia and in May 2018 graduated with a degree in philosophy. How did she manage to juggle both disciplines?

‘I always had a very strict schedule just coming from middle school and high school and doing the Juilliard pre-college on Saturdays. When I went to Columbia it was like “wow, I now have a full weekend and sometimes Fridays off as well”.’ The split personality thing again? ‘Yes, this sense of duality just existed naturally, like expressing the extreme differences of thinking about very abstract things to very technical things at the piano, or writing an essay versus playing music.’

Poon’s recording debut, ‘Natural Beauty’ (Kawai Edition KE‑CD001), was released a decade ago, recorded by Kawai Pianos in Krefeld, Germany, in November 2013: Bach (Italian Concerto), a Haydn sonata, three works by Chopin, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 and Debussy (‘Clair de lune’). She can also be heard on Sony’s ‘The Dvořák Album’, from the 2021 Moritzburg Festival in the Dumky Trio with Chad Hoopes (violin) and festival director Jan Vogler (cello).

The new album’s booklet credits Tiffany as one of its two executive producers. I ask her how the Pentatone recording came about. ‘I don’t know,’ she begins. ‘Just a series of events that led to that. I was very lucky. I had a friend who knew Pentatone and they liked the recording.’ Between the jigs and the reels, it transpires that Tiffany made the recording herself and then submitted it to Pentatone. Did she, then, finance the recording herself, a not uncommon route these days? ‘I mean, I rely on a lot of support from my audience, so I think it’s a joint effort. I wouldn’t say that it’s all by me alone.’ After further prodding, she concedes that it was her own money that she invested in the project. ‘You can say that if you want, but that money came from my audience because they were very supportive throughout the past couple of years.’

The Schumann album, featuring Kinder­szenen, Arabeske and Davidsbündlertänze, has been enthusiastically reviewed, though its title ‘Diaries’ eludes me, I confess, and much of the booklet is taken up with photos of herself and jejune philosophical musings (‘Who are we? What do we stand for? Who do we want to become? … Why are we doing this? Why is the world like this? Why am I like this?’).

So, I ask, what’s next for her? ‘I don’t know. I mean, not that I don’t know, just that I think I need for the sake of psychological sanity to take one day at a time. I think I will always be involved in bringing more people into classical music, the social elements of things and hopefully making more interesting concepts and videos around it.’ OK. What are you working on at the moment? What have been practising today?’ ‘Oh, I haven’t practised today. I just touched the piano for five seconds before our interview because I needed to feel like a pianist before we spoke.’ What are you practising when you do practise? ‘Well, I have a concert in San Francisco in one month and I’m playing the Chopin Preludes, so that’s what I’m working on, plus Children’s Corner and I’m reviving Kinderszenen.’ As for how many concerts Poon is playing each year, she somewhat self-deprecatory: ‘I never know. I’m still building that up so fingers crossed for more.’

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today