“I was born with one hand: I feel as normal as you feel, for me there’s no difference.” I’m talking to pianist Nicholas McCarthy about Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, and the way in which it came into the world. “I often say just how thankful I am for Paul Wittgenstein – and Otakar Hollmann too. Just imagine: to give your concert debut as a two-handed pianist, and to be called into battle, and a matter of months later your arm is crudely damaged or amputated…” Both pianists, responsible for commissioning many piano works for the left hand, began their careers before the First World War, before experiencing life-changing injuries.
“To then be repatriated, and to come back to commission works for left hand alone, and to re-do your concert debut, this time as a one-handed pianist. I can’t imagine the steely determination that that must have taken,” McCarthy says. “I don’t think I’d have that determination – if you lose a limb, you might say ‘well, that’s it.’” I’m a little surprised, because McCarthy’s own journey as a pianist is also one of singular determination.
For many musicians – including for Ravel – music is something taken up from their very earliest years. Constant practice is an accepted part of life. But for McCarthy, the thought that he would become a musician did not occur until a startling experience as a teenager.
“I’m from two unmusical parents, two salespeople, I’m an only child. None were musicians, neither my grandparents, or anyone in my extended family. I look back very fondly at that time – there was no practice, no auditions, no nerves, or having to prepare something for a concert.”
“When I was 14 everything changed drastically. I discovered the piano through a friend of mine, a very accomplished pianist, the only good pianist at my state school. She was often wheeled out to perform for prizegivings or assemblies. I’d seen her play before – but this time she was playing Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, first movement. I’d never even really heard of Beethoven, state school music education wasn’t the best, and I really didn’t know much about classical music. All I can describe is just this life-moment happened: I was transfixed, in awe at the sound, at what I was hearing, I was dumbstruck. But more than that, I was filled with this overwhelming sense that I’d found my path.
“It sounds really strange, at 14, with one arm, no musical training, no musical inclination, never even having touched a key on the piano, to know at that moment that I was put on this earth to play the piano, to communicate through music. I’ve never experienced a moment like that before or since.”
That afternoon McCarthy informed his parents he was going to be a concert pianist – “a piano player is probably what I said!” It took a while for the notion to sink in. Acquiring a small keyboard, “I started to self-teach. My right arm, which I don’t have a hand on, can play one single note, and then my left hand play normally. I would play anything with a one-note melody line, and an Alberti bass, or a chord with a melody line. That’s how I started.”
McCarthy first began to delve into the left-hand repertoire in earnest after joining Junior Guildhall in his late teens. It was then he discovered Ravel’s two piano concertos.
“I’d become obsessed with Martha Argerich, and my friend bought me tickets to see her play Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G at the Proms. Obviously, it was staggering, phenomenal. And that second movement… what I heard in that concert, with Charles Dutoit conducting, it stayed with me for life. By this time I knew there was a left-hand piano concerto, but I’d fallen in love with the G major two-handed concerto.
“The first time I heard the left-hand concerto, I remember sitting down, quite excited, with the score. I wasn’t ready to play it, and my teacher certainly wasn’t going to let me play it – but I had the score. Yet in my first experience of it, I felt disappointment. It’s so different, much more at the boundaries of Ravel’s compositional style, versus the quite neoclassical G major concerto. In the Concerto for the Left Hand we have this extremely unusual orchestral opening – growling, visceral. It really did take me a while to get to know the piece and to find the love for it that I already had for his two-handed works.”
Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand is a darker work, with gestures at the circumstances that brought it into being. Its musical offering is quite distinct from the G major concerto, and its combination of solemness, grandness, pathos, and dark absurdism is unique in Ravel’s output. “As a pianist, the concerto makes me feel so many different emotions. The opening – it can be uncomfortable, you hear that darkness, that angst – but then this majestic melody emerges out of this cacophony of sound.”
We reflect a little on one particular theme at the opening, a simple three-note descending motif, first sounded in the horns. The melody “gives real pathos, with hints at the darkness,” McCarthy says, singing the theme. “The reinforcement of the note. It’s deeply felt, which is maybe why it comes back so often.” The melody re-emerges later in the piece in a poignant solo for bassoon, before appearing again as part of the work’s remarkable closing cadenza.
“My favourite part of the concerto is probably the second piano solo: the melody and accompaniment,” at 6:00 in the video above. “That’s Ravel writing for the left hand at his finest I think. It’s a very special moment of the concerto, because no matter how many people I’m playing to, it’s very intimate.”
The effect of the First World War on music can be difficult to quantify explicitly. Ravel’s own experiences would change his outlook significantly, and his post-war works are more spare or dark in colour. In La Valse the ghostly world of the fin de siècle gradually spins out of control, until driven to an eventual violent explosion. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Ravel and Colette turn everything in every-day life on its head – furniture and fireplaces spring to life, animals talk, and the restless child searches for connection, the love of an absent mother. Ravel’s own mother died in 1917, leaving a profound emotional impact.
The Concerto for the Left Hand’s opening gives hints of a French overture, echoing Ravel’s Baroque inspirations for Le Tombeau de Couperin, each of whose movements was written in memoriam to friends killed in the war. And Wittgenstein’s own wartime experiences left a profound impact on the pianist, one which it would take years to recover from.
“For me, there’s that aspect I think about a lot – that of loss,” McCarthy says, speaking particularly of Wittgenstein. “Through their loss, they provided me, a century later, with this whole repertoire which I’m eternally grateful for.”
Yet for Wittgenstein, the modernism and experimental aspects of the new works he commissioned frequently left him unsettled. He was never satisfied with Ravel’s concerto, and spent his life playing a version with significant modifications from the original manuscript. “Wittgenstein craved normality,” McCarthy says. “He wanted to have what he had, which was to sit down and play a Beethoven piano concerto or sonata. All of a sudden that’s taken away from him, and the pieces that he’s commissioning are strange and new. He hated Prokofiev’s Fourth Concerto, which he commissioned – it was never premiered in Prokofiev’s lifetime. It’s another piece that is at the edge of Prokofiev’s compositional style, in comparison to his first three concertos.”
McCarthy has a great deal of sympathy with Wittgenstein, whose left-hand arrangements he has been playing since his career began. And like Wittgenstein, McCarthy is commissioning new piano concertos for the left hand, including a recent piece History Needs... by composer Ben Lunn. When the piece first arrived, McCarthy was unsettled. “At first I said, ‘Ben, I’m the wrong pianist for this. Someone else should do it. Or write a two-handed one.’ I did a Wittgenstein basically!”
Ravel and Wittgenstein’s relationship soured over the pianist’s objections to his concerto. When Wittgenstein told Ravel, “Performers must not be slaves”, Ravel responded, “Performers are slaves.” McCarthy’s relationship with Lunn was fortunately not so acrimonious.
“Ben came to work with me on the concerto at my studio. He said, ‘Listen, I’ll come down and spend some time with you.’ Him being so lovely, putting his ego aside – because I was having a minor existential crisis over this piece – really enabled me to grow to love the work, to love the technicality and the difficulty.”
As one of the only one-armed pianists working in classical music today, McCarthy has a more intimate relationship with the repertoire than most – around 32 concertos for the left hand exist, as well as solo works and arrangements. But the fact that competition with two-handed over this limited repertoire is frequent can be troublesome. He reflects on Wittgenstein’s placing exclusivity on Ravel’s concerto, despite never being satisfied with it.
“People often ask me how I feel about two-handed pianists playing left-hand works – it’s difficult. Ravel wrote two concertos: if you have a left hand, why wouldn’t you play the concerto for the left hand? But then sometimes it annoys me, sometimes I think, why didn’t you ask me? They’ve got two hands and access to a million concertos, whereas I haven’t. And at other times it gives me such artistic pleasure to hear what other pianists do – but I can definitely understand why Wittgenstein placed exclusivity on the concerto.”
And while McCarthy is personally intimate with the existing repertoire, he is also at the forefront of creating and commissioning new pieces for the left hand. He tells me composers are frequently excited about composing for the medium, which is still in many ways under-explored, often pushing their compositional styles to the limit, as Ravel did. It will be exciting to see what new explorations emerge.
