From time to time, I’ve given some famous pianists a bit of a kicking in the arts pages of this magazine. You may be a Bach specialist, but that’s no excuse for sleepwalking through all six keyboard partitas in a marathon recital. Your -Beethoven Diabelli Variations may be renowned, but don’t expect a rave review if you trap me in an intimate concert venue while you pound the keys like a pneumatic drill.
You’d think, though, that a journalist who snipes at world-class soloists would have the sense to keep his own amateur playing to himself. And if he’s idiot enough to post a recording on social media, he should learn to take what he dishes out. Alas, I never learn.
The older I get, the more addicted I become to playing an instrument that I have no hope of mastering. I didn’t have a single piano lesson between 1981 and 2025. My technique atrophied during long years of boozing and has only recently picked up; even so, it’s put to shame by millions of Chinese eight-year-olds.
I have the ears of a connoisseur but the fingers of an arthritic pub pianist. So I can hear exactly how bad I am. Thanks to a couple of lessons from Nicholas Walker, who has achieved the stunning feat of recording the complete solo Balakirev, I’m not quite as bad as I was. But the more I improve, the more desperate I become, endlessly repeating treacherous passages in the hope that they will magically repair themselves. The solution is to take a break and then isolate every finger movement in slow motion. But I’m not built like that.
During my career as a drunk, I knew I should pause between sips and walk away when I’d had enough. Fat chance. In the end my only option was to give up alcohol completely. Now I’m wondering if total abstinence is the answer to my piano problem. Over the past few days, I’ve seriously thought about smashing the wretched thing with a pickaxe.
There’s a particular piece that reduces me to an obsessive frenzy. It’s an arrangement by Wilhelm Kempff of Bach’s Chorale Prelude BWV 734, ‘Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein’. The right hand plays a perpetuum mobile while the left hand is divided between a continuo bass and, yikes, the hymn tune played with the thumb. There’s nowhere to hide if anything goes wrong.
Which it invariably does. BWV 734 is my white whale. I can’t move on until I’ve captured it in a single take on an iPhone balanced on the end of the keyboard. Last week, after hours of false starts, I thought I finally had it nailed. No one would mistake it for a professional performance, but surely it was good enough for Facebook.
Big mistake. Underneath the polite comments of my mates was the word ‘Outch!’ (sic) left there by one Dr Robert F. Siegmund, a stranger who had gone to the trouble of attaching an emoji of a man clutching his head in agony. Mortified, I thanked him for pointing out what a crap pianist I was. ‘My pleasure,’ he replied nastily.
Who was this Dr Siegmund? His Facebook profile showed a portly and scowling Austrian businessman squeezed into full evening dress ‘at his residence in Switzerland’. Behind him was a portrait of an ancestor who, the caption said, had been ‘intended for nobilisation’ by Emperor Franz Joseph I. ‘Intended’, note: nowhere in Herr Doktor’s laborious notes on his family tree was there any mention of noble blood. That must be frustrating, but why take it out on me?
Anyway, I deleted the video, resolving never to touch the piano again, only to receive a text from young Ariel Lanyi, whose latest disc of Franck and Reger miraculously combines poetry and virtuosity. Nice pedalling and articulation, he said. But what about Dr Siegmund’s ‘Outch’? ‘Screw him,’ said Ariel. ‘Put it back up.’ I didn’t. Instead, I lay on my bed listening to the hideous unevenness of my fingerwork.
The problem is that nerves set in, even in the privacy of your own flat, as soon as you press record. I’ve discovered that you can calm them a bit if you wear headphones to muffle the sound of your own playing. Every day this week I’ve worn them for three hours of slow practice. (I’m guessing the people upstairs didn’t have the benefit of noise–cancelling headphones, but since they hate me anyway I don’t feel too guilty.) And today I made another recording of BWV 734; let’s just say that it’s marginally less soul-destroying to listen to than the previous one.
For the time being I can forget about my white whale and move on to something else. A Scarlatti sonata is leering at me from my piano. Like everything else I’ve ever wanted to play, it lies just outside my technical capabilities. But I’ll plough ahead and may even upload it to Facebook, if only to see if it provokes another cry of ‘Outch!’ from a certain Swiss residence.
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