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Declan Byrnie, child prodigy and world-class concert pianist, has enjoyed a glittering career from a young age, touring the world’s best concert halls and producing acclaimed recordings. Ten years into his career his wife dies in a terrible accident and he stops performing; alone with his grief, he falls into obscurity, his concert career abandoned.

As the novel opens, we meet Declan at the end of one of his practice sessions and this immediate signals a major theme of the book – the obsessive nature of being a professional musician. In the dark backstreets of New York City, away from the glamour of Carnegie Hall and the like, Declan seeks out pianos on which to practice (despite having a decent grand piano at his apartment). He’s not fussy about the instruments, only that his practising keeps him away from his apartment until returning is “the only possible course of action”. He plays in nightclubs and cramped, smoky bars. He accompanies a singer called Sandrine, and uses his piano playing as a way to pick up women (although it embarrasses him to admit this). He’s filling a great big hole in his life with music and unsatisfying casual relationships. His dead wife haunts him and he talks to her, consciously and unconsciously. We learn a little more of his relationship with her through letters which are interspersed in the narrative.

With his decision to return to performing comes a host of attendant situations and characters, from his suave agent, Peter Barlow, to wealthy friends and patrons, journalists, an independent piano blogger (!), audience members and strange, sticky fans, and a rich Russian patron of the arts, in whose beautiful concert hall Declan plays later in the novel. Entertainingly and acutely depicted, many of these characters are recognisable from the international world of classical music and are a reminder that beyond the learning and refining of the notes is the necessary “business” of the industry.

The book takes Declan and reader on a road trip of sorts, both physical and emotional. There are the concerts, the settings successively more significant until we reach a beautiful concert hall in Boston where he plays to an audience of 700 people. Along the way, there is a crazy music festival, the polar opposite of the refined surroundings where Declan is used to playing. There are people too, including Elise, a young woman whom he meets at a swish modern concert venue, who accompanies him some of the way on his journey to Boston, and who acts as a contrasting foil for Declan’s introspection. We journey through music with him, exploring the minutiae of Bach, Chopin, Mozart, and especially Beethoven – the Hammerklavier Sonata in particular – where myriad details of the score and the musician’s personal relationship with it are revealed. Declan’s relationship with the Hammerklavier is a strange one – you sense that he doesn’t like this music very much yet is drawn to its complexities and its greatness. Purists may baulk at his irreverence, but it brings a greater humanity to both music and performer.

There is also a wealth of detail about the practice of practising, including the wisdom of Declan’s piano teacher Tal, and performing – the emotional and physical aspects of the pianist’s craft, and the sheer grunt work of being a musician, which are often overlooked in the midst of beautiful, arresting performances.

The book ends in Italy in a small town in which Declan and his late wife dreamed of one day settling, and it is here that the circumstances of his wife’s death, and its preamble, are fully revealed. It’s shocking, unexpected and sad, and one feels that Declan’s behaviour throughout the book as he deals with his grief is justified.

The prose is immediate and engaging, often entertaining, with many episodes which remind us that musicians do not exist in a gilded cage but are ordinary people who happen to do extraordinary things. The protagonist could have a different career and the narrative would still be effective – this is, primarily, a story about love and the exigencies of human relationships, and how betrayal and grief shape and change us. But the fact that Declan is a musician and, more specifically, a pianist – the loneliest of musical professions – and an obsessive one at that, lends a greater depth to the narrative; his obsessive nature causes him to analyse and over-analyse his emotional responses, much as he analyses the Hammerklavier, but also provides an outlet for his grief. Practicing is a protection against his emotions and the music offers a special kind of solace.

Few writers can truly capture the physical and emotional experience of playing and engaging with music, especially complex repertoire like the Hammerklavier sonata. Not since An Equal Music by Vikram Seth have I encountered such sensitive, intelligent and vivid writing about music as Damian Lanigan achieves here. Added to that, a well-paced, entertaining storyline makes this book a thoroughly good read.

Recommended

The Ghost Variations by Damian Lanigan is published in the UK by Weatherglass Books on 15th September

Postcript: the title of the novel, The Ghost Variations, is taken from Schumann’s last piano work, composed in 1854 before he was committed to a mental hospital. While he was writing these variations, he flung himself into the freezing Rhine. The work is intimate, poignant and highly personal.

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After his sparkling C P E Bach disc, released on the Hyperion label in January 2022, Marc-André Hamelin, that fearless master of the piano who seems to be able to playing anything (and I mean anything!) moves seamlessly from the precision and clarity of early classical keyboard music to an album of piano rags, written over the last 50 or so years, by American composer William Bolcom (b. 1938).

In the generous liners notes, the composer himself introduces the repertoire, explaining how his discovery of the music of Scott Joplin, which had fallen into obscurity after the composer’s death,  led him to explore the genre himself in the late 1960s, at a time when Joplin’s opera Treemonisha resurfaced and his music, and ragtime in general, was being revived, and a new generation of American composers were writing new “tradition-style” rags. This music has an enduring appeal to audiences, and for Bolcom and others, reviving ragtime was a way of “picking up a dropped thread of our emerging American tradition”; paying homage to and continuing the genre.

The elements of traditional, Joplin ragtime are evident in Bolcom’s rags – the distinctive musical DNA of syncopation and swing, which Hamelin perfectly captures – but Bolcom allows himself to stray into more unusual territories, for example in Rag-Tango which alternates between the gritty sensuality of Argentine tango, piquant “crunchy” harmonies, and traditional rag elements.

In fact, such is Bolcom’s skill with the genre, and Hamelin’s pitch perfect execution, that it’s easy to forget one is listening to ragtime at all. The third of the ‘Ghost’ rags, Dream Shadows, has a lazy, hazy late-night jazz club vibe, to which Hamelin brings his remarkably sensitive sense of timing and atmospheric rubato. Meanwhile, other rags are more traditional in their toe-tapping rhythms and hip-swinging syncopation. Some are exuberant, almost Lisztian in their scope – and here that sparkling clarity and nonchalant technical assuredness that is so characteristic of Hamelin’s playing in more traditional or mainstream repertoire is once again on fine display – while others are easy-going, evoking humid evenings in the American South (with brisket cooking low ‘n’ slow on the coals, perhaps?). The rag fantasia Serpent’s Kiss opens with rumbling, pulsing notes redolent of Schubert’s Erlkönig before slipping into something more akin to silent film music, interspersed with contrasting interludes suggesting shifting narratives and characters (there’s even a Fred Astaire style tap-dancing routine!).  Some of the rags are very personal (Lost Lady and Graceful Ghost, for example), others celebrate friendships, musical collaborators, and other composers, such as Louis Chauvin and Ernesto Nazareth (Joplin’s great Brazilian contemporary); some are wistful, others are punchy, in-yer-face, rags, but all are distinctive, appealing in their references back to Joplin’s model, but with multiple moods and harmonies, and brilliantly presented by Hamelin, who seems to really relish this repertoire (and if you didn’t know it, listening to him you’d never guess he’s a classical pianist – there’s a natural jazz insouciance to Hamelin’s playing throughout the disc). There’s wit and humour aplenty, tempered, when needed, by tenderness and poignancy, whimsy, much charm and ingenious invention.

If you don’t know the music of William Bolcom, this disc should absolutely be your starting point.  It’s a wonderful, revelatory, and, above all, really enjoyable listen from start to finish.

William Bolcom: The Complete Rags is available on the Hyperion label. With detailed liner notes by the composer.

This review first appeared on ArtMuseLondon.com

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Scrolling through Twitter, as I do far too often each day, this concert poster caught my eye:

It’s striking, isn’t it? Not just the bright colours and simple design, but the choice of image which instantly says “summer” – appropriately, for a summer concert.

It’s also not a typical classical music image. There are no people in penguin suits, or conductors with wild hair, or women in evening gowns – indeed, none of those tired, cliched images all too often still associated with classical music. It’s immediately eye-catching, it contains the information you need, and the choice of the ice lollies instead of a more “classic” (as it were!) image might just attract people who might not normally choose to go to a classical music concert.

Working in the publicity and promotional realm of classical music, I am struck more often than not by how poor a lot of concert promotional material is – including by the big/important venues and promoters. It is a fact almost universally acknowledged these days that we live in a visual age; for advertising and marketing material – whether physical posters or flyers – or digital assets for online promotion, the choice and quality of images is pretty crucial. Yet time and time again I see poor quality, or simply bad, images, and, worse, in appropriate and/or illegible typefaces.

Today one doesn’t necessarily need to hire a graphic designer to create decent promotional materials. Easy-to-use design programmes like Canva offer templates and a wealth of images and other elements to help you create quality flyers, posters and social media posts, which are set to the correct dimensions for specific platforms, e.g. Twitter or Instagram (this ensures no chopped off heads or misaligned text etc).

In addition to high-quality images, choice of typeface is also important. Florid scripts may look pretty or artistic, but think about how they translate to a flyer or poster. Are they easy to read? Largely, no. Another pleasing aspect of the ice lolly poster above is the clean typeface (something like Helvetica or Arial, I think). Note how a different weight (bold) of the same typeface is used to highlight the composers’ names. The final aspect which receives a big thumbs up from me for this poster is its simplicity: it contains the crucial information (though it could perhaps do with a website link and note of ticket prices).

That oft-quoted three-word phrase from architect and designer Mies van der Rohe (“less is more”) is as applicable to furniture design as it is to concert promotional materials. Too often I see posters and other materials which contain far too many words. Give your potential audience enough What Where and When information and trust them to do the rest by visiting the relevant website or calling the box office. There’s no need to tell them everything about that forthcoming concert…..

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D major is unquestionably one of the “bright” keys – perhaps the brightest, and, allegedly, for Mozart the “happiest” key (he wrote three piano concertos in D major and four piano sonatas, including the sonata for two pianos KV 448). It’s heroic and triumphant, the key of joyous fanfares, majesty and optimism.

Mozart – Sonata for Two Pianos KV 448

This finely-crafted sonata epitomises the pure classical structure and is an uplifting and virtuosic work to play and to hear. The joyous first movement opens like an operatic overture, replete with timpani and trumpets while the middle Andante has a single aria-like melody shared between the two instruments. The finale is an ebullient rondo which feels like a piano concerto without orchestra.

Chopin – Prelude in D, Op 38 & Mazurka in D Major, Op 33, No. 2

Chopin composed most of his Opus 28 preludes prior to the winter of 1838-39, when he joined his lover, George Sand, on the island of Majorca. The Prelude in D Major, the fifth of the set of 24, packs a lot into a miniature which lasts a mere half a minute. It’s scored in continuous semiquavers which glitter with all the positivity which the key of D major suggests.

The Mazurka in D major opens with a happy main theme, embellished with ornaments. The off-beat rhythms, characteristic of the Polish folk dance on which Chopin based his Mazurkas, is clear in the accompaniment.

Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major ‘Pastoral’

The nickname ‘Pastoral’ was given to this piano sonata by a London publisher, suggesting perhaps nature and the countryside or the calm simplicity of this sonata in contrast to the one which precedes it (the ‘Moonlight’ with its unsettling opening movement and restless finale). The first movement of the Sonata in D major opens with a low D pedal point in the bass, which suggests a bagpipe drone and is associated with country scenes. This pedal point is heard again in the Andante which opens with a foreboding minor-key theme before a cheerful, skipping dance in the middle to lighten the mood. A brief, playful Scherzo follows, while the finale is firmly rooted in D major, whose lilting opening recalls the pedal point of the first movement. According to Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, this was one of the composer’s favourite sonatas and one which he never tired of playing.

Rachmaninoff – Prelude in D, Op 23 No. 4

This Prelude rather contradicts the main characteristics of the key of D major. It begins with a calm, flowing melody and accompaniment, a song without words, almost Schumann-esque in character, but grows increasingly more dramatic in its middle section, with several minor-key modulations and ecstatic episodes.