Diedre Irons at 80: “I just play the piano…”

Pianist Diedre Irons

Photo credit: Debbie Rawson

I’ve known pianist Diedre Irons as performer, colleague and friend since she arrived in New Zealand in the 1970’s. This article about her life and work is my 80th birthday tribute to one of New Zealand’s most brilliant and profound musicians.

When Canadian-New Zealand pianist Diedre Irons was a little girl, she was never daunted by an audience. “I just loved performing,” she told me, in a recent interview. “I was told to bow once, and I played my piece, and then bowed like they did in the movies, with great flourishes. I didn’t notice that the audience laughed.”

In March this year, Irons celebrated her 80th birthday. For almost 78 of those years, she has played the piano. A child prodigy in Winnipeg, her Canadian hometown, she played carol tunes on the family’s upright piano at two, began lessons with her grandmother aged four and played a Haydn concerto with a student orchestra when she was just seven. She feels fortunate that her family cared about music, and that there was always music in the home.

When she was about ten, the family moved to a larger house, and one Saturday, arriving home from her music lesson, Irons was amazed to find movers unpacking the grand piano she’d begged for every birthday and Christmas. “It still really grabs me to think that my parents, who struggled a bit to pay for lessons, would do that for me.”

Pianist Diedre Irons, aged 12

…backstage after her performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Victor Feldbrill

There was never any question that she would be a pianist. Irons describes her precocious development as “typical” of a prodigy. Aged just 12, she was invited to play Schumann’s piano concerto with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. She also began piano lessons with a local teacher, Russian-trained Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Grammatté, an eccentric genius who was also a composer.

The piano technique Irons learned from Eckhardt-Grammatté – “very natural, involving weight and rotation” – was hugely influential. “She was fiery, scary, very Russian, very demanding, taking me right back to the beginning,” Irons remembers.  “She gave me so much, in the way of an easy technique.”

Madame Eckhardt-Grammatté wanted to take her star pupil to Vienna, but Irons showed her determined streak, breaking with her Winnipeg teacher after six years to audition for the Juilliard School in New York and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Offered scholarships to both, she chose Curtis so she could study with the eminent Bohemian-born Austrian-American pianist Rudolf Serkin, renowned among other things for his interpretation of Beethoven.

For Irons, the freedom of life in Philadelphia was very different from her strict upbringing in Winnipeg. She laughs often and infectiously as she describes challenging times in her life. “I was from the Prairies, with no experience of life. I can’t believe now how plain dumb I was. I could play the piano and that was it! In the 60’s, the east coast of the States was a very different place.”

Eventually, Irons spent 12 years in Philadelphia, at first as a student, learning a huge amount of repertoire, playing solo, chamber and orchestral music, and soaking up the 1960’s big city vibe. In 1968, the year she graduated, she married double bass player Dale Gold, a fellow student at Curtis, and moved with him to Atlanta, Georgia, where he had won a position in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Despite the freedoms of the 1960’s, it was generally accepted that, once married, women put their role as wife first and supported their husband’s career. So, after living as a housewife in Atlanta, without even a piano for the first six months, Irons initially turned Serkin down when he rang to offer her a teaching role at Curtis.

“I’m married now,” she said to him, or words to that effect, laughing at herself now as she remembers. Gold, when she told him later that day, was horrified. He resigned his orchestral job, and they moved back to Philadelphia. He free-lanced while she took up the Curtis position, teaching students for whom piano was a “secondary” instrument and later becoming head of the secondary piano department. She also maintained a busy performing life, including as resident pianist at the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming.

Their son Jeremy was born at Grand Teton in 1972, a “very adaptable” baby, and Irons continued working without much interruption. The next major change came when Gold was appointed principal bass of the NZSO in 1976. Irons and her young son joined him the following year.

At first, in New Zealand, Irons suffered from the inevitable culture shock and missed her professional work. “I was really missing my life, my identity. I lost who I was,” she says now. Looking back, Irons thinks it was ultimately “a gift”.

Pianist Diedre Irons

She enjoys “the whole package” of her musical life in New Zealand.

Photo credit: Debbie Rawson

“I don’t want to be a soppy optimist,” she explains, “but I’ve learned who you are is more important than what you do. I might never have discovered that, if I’d had some sort of typical career in the States and been funneled into one specific area of music. I’ve had such variety here, chamber music, orchestras, accompanying choirs, and soloists – it’s been the whole package.”

In 1977 it didn’t take long for New Zealand to discover and embrace her marvellous musical talents. She'd played in America with violinist Peter Schaffer, who'd since become NZSO concertmaster, and he suggested a tour together. At their first concert in the Concert Chamber in the old Wellington Town Hall, Irons was, she says wryly, "revealéd", with a biblical emphasis.

Irons was soon in demand for chamber music tours and concertos with the professional orchestras, as well as solo recitals, lieder accompaniment, and recording projects with the country’s top soloists. Her marriage to Gold over, she formed a relationship with NZSO trumpet player Albert “Fuzzy” MacKinnon and their daughter Phoebe was born in 1980.

I was in the audience in the Wellington Town Hall in the early 1980’s for a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s monumental Turangalîla, in which Irons played the hugely challenging piano part within the NZSO. I vividly remember her dazzling performance, and the huge ovation she received when conductor Michi Inoue invited her to take a bow. She remembers it as a landmark, “not only because it was that amazing piece, but also such a lot of work, month by month, to be able to play it up to speed.” Inoue invited her to play it again in Tokyo in 1983.

Diedre Irons with her husband Fuzzy MacKinnon and daughter Phoebe, during a tour with the NZSO in 1983.

Photo: Supplied

Soon afterwards, Miha Pogacnik came into Irons’ life, “like a thunderclap,” she says. The charismatic Slovenian violinist was introduced to her in 1984, by Chamber Music NZ, for a New Zealand tour. She travelled internationally with him for seven years on “outrageously demanding” schedules; there were, she says, “no lengths I wouldn’t go to fit in with all of that.”

In 1987 I reviewed for NZ Listener a concert in their second CMNZ tour, describing their musical rapport as “immediate and astonishing.” “They seem,” I wrote, “to invite the listener to share in an experience both intense and personal.” I also described the audience reaction: “thrilled, shouting and stamping their approval.”

Irons told Ian Dando in an interview for Music in New Zealand in 1996 that Pogacnik had liberated her dark side musically. “We were quite a stormy duo,” she said. “He led me from obedience and technical refinement to a freedom bordering on wildness.” Looking back now, she believes he taught her much about music; “how to not be correct, how to imagine ‘loud’, how to imbue every phrase with meaning.”

Towards the end of their association, however, Irons felt some dissatisfaction with Pogacnik’s playing. “It was all about freedom, but there are certain things in music indicated by the composer that I feel, really strongly, need to be observed, and that he would not do, over and over.” Touring multiple countries, with concerts every night, she tried to explain the issue to him at airports, and that night he would make changes, “almost as if he was trying to placate me”. After one or two performances, however, the same issues returned.

Pogacnik was also intensely involved with his Institute for the Development of Intercultural Relationships through the Arts (IDRIART) which manifested as festivals all over the world. Eventually he and Irons played together in 25 countries. At times, Irons felt that IDRIART, with its ideology of cultural transformation through music, was more important to him than the music itself.

Their musical partnership ended when Irons cancelled a tour at short notice. “The Gulf War was underway; aircraft were being blown up! Phoebe was still quite young, and I realised I didn’t want to go,” she explains. “I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

During one of the duo’s New Zealand tours, Polish violinist Jan Tawrozewicz, who had joined the staff at Canterbury University, came backstage after their Christchurch concert. “Jan introduced himself, in his courtly way,” remembers Irons, “and said he hoped he and I would play together.” 

After Irons moved to Christchurch in 1992 for a position as lecturer in piano at Canterbury University, she and Tawrozewicz did indeed perform and record together for many years, and formed the Canterbury Trio with Russian cellist Alexander Ivashkin, who was also teaching at the university.

In 1993, her husband Fuzzy MacKinnon, who had retired from the NZSO to accompany her to Christchurch, died very suddenly. It was a huge shock for Irons. “There’s such a yawning void when somebody dies like that,” she says. It took a long time for her to recover, a time when she became even more involved in music, realizing, she says sadly, that “it wasn’t going to die.”

During a tour with the Canterbury Trio, soon after her husband’s death, she was grateful for Tawrozewicz’s kindness. “Jan was amazingly supportive; he would just be there, waiting for me, holding out his arm for me to grab,” she remembers. “I felt protected by him.”

Irons remained at Canterbury University until 2003 and then moved to Wellington to teach piano at the NZ School of Music until 2012. Did those two decades of teaching contribute to her own playing, or just take valuable time away?

“I think teaching contributes to your own practising, which is 90% of playing,” she replies. “I’ve sorted out how to do it. And you get to know all the pieces your students are playing, so that’s good, and students have insights from time to time that are really interesting.”

I suggest to Irons that her playing has always been notable for the beautiful sound she draws from the piano. “I’ve heard that all my life, since I was ten,” she says. “I’m very much more aware of my sound from illustrating for students; it’s amazing how different one piano can sound when different people play it. Why is my sound ‘beautiful’? – I think it has to do with relaxation, with playing everything loose.”

Since her retirement from teaching, Irons has maintained a busy performance schedule, including concertos with orchestras and a lot of chamber music. She’s been part of the growing New Zealand circuit of chamber music festivals, the Adam Festival in Nelson, the At the World’s Edge Festival in Queenstown Lakes, the Martinborough Festival, and concerts for regional chamber music societies. Irons said once that she enjoys chamber music more than any other kind of music-making, and I asked her if this is still true – and why?

Irons in rehearsal with Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin) and Andrew Joyce (cello)

“Chamber music is fun!”

Photo credit: Debbie Rawson

Her answer comes with characteristic laughter. “Chamber music is fun! When I played recently with Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Andrew Joyce, there was so much laughter, my stomach hurt all day after the rehearsal. And yet we all did our work and when we were on stage, it all came together.”

Her highlight of the past few years, she says, was playing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto with the NZSO in 2020, in Wellington, in a small window in Covid restrictions that permitted public gatherings without distancing. I reviewed the concert for RNZ Concert:

Soloist was Diedre Irons, one of this country’s most cherished and accomplished pianists. Irons is not a flashy pianist, but her piano sound is always glorious, glittering when needed and liquid in its beauty in more lyrical and serene moments. In the opening, Beethoven invites the pianist straight on to the musical stage and Irons took hold of the work immediately with great musicality. She covered the emotional and technical scope of Beethoven’s big conception with ease - dramatic piano chords answered brass fanfares, rapid scalic or arpeggiated passages from the keyboard dissolved into limpid melodies. The audience held its breath at the beauty of her playing in the first movement’s short cadenza.”

As a young child, Irons never suffered from “nerves”, but she says she’s had to deal with them through most of her performing life. The anticipation from performers and audience at that NZSO concert, after the first lockdown in 2020, was palpable, and the concert was also livestreamed. “If I’d known in advance that 148,000 people would watch the livestream,” laughs Irons, “I’d have been a goner. But I need to get nervous; my job is to change it into excitement, into being in the music.”

Beethoven is special for Irons, as he is for so many musicians. She played and recorded all five Beethoven concertos with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and she and Pogacnik used to perform the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas over three evenings. “Every time I’ve gone on one of those 13-concert CMNZ tours, and played a Beethoven work, that was the one I never got tired of. His works are all so different, these bursts of creativity from this composer. When you’re playing Beethoven, you discover new things all the time; how things relate to each other, the unique chord voicings.”

This year, Irons will perform Beethoven’s 3rd and 4th concerti with three New Zealand orchestras, in Auckland, Wellington and Kapiti (details below). She’s also joining forces with her friend and colleague, pianist Jian Liu, for the Orpheus Choir’s concert ‘O Fortuna!’ in Wellington in September, playing two-piano versions of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

The ebullient Irons is determined to continue playing and to accept invitations to perform. “I still love it! There’s very little else I’d rather be doing. And when I’m preparing something for performance, I’m the best version of myself; the happiest, healthiest, most energetic version.”

As well as preparing the Beethoven concerti, she’s learning Chopin’s Études Opus 25. “I’m just loving them, and I’m memorising them, so when I’m not playing them, they’re in my head. It’s the habit of a lifetime,” she says, laughing. “I just play the piano, that’s what I do!”

St Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra ‘Ludwig and Diedre’ Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto Auckland, 18 May 2025 (more details here) 

Kapiti Concert Orchestra Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto Te Raukura ki Kapiti 16 August, 2025

Orpheus Choir ‘O Fortuna!’ Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with pianists Diedre irons and Jian Liu Wellington, 27 September, 2025 (more details here)

Wellington City Orchestra Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto Wellington, 7 December, 2025 (more details here)