Quote of the day:

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
—Groucho Marx

Paul Wittgenstein was a concert pianist who lost his right arm during the Great War. But he taught himself new techniques for using the pedal and moving his hand and managed to continue his career as a left-handed concert pianist. He commissioned pieces from all the leading composers of his day such as Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, and Maurice Ravel, and built up a repertoire of left-handed piano pieces with orchestra that he played for the rest of his life.

Many of these works have been taken up by two-handed pianists, of course, but now there has come on the scene a young pianist who was born with only one hand, Nicholas McCarthy.

According to an article in the Times of London:

When Nicholas McCarthy called a music school as a 15-year-old to inquire about piano lessons, they were perplexed to learn he only had one hand. “How can you possibly play scales one-handed?” the head teacher asked.

“No problem,” he replied undeterred. “I want to play music, not scales.” The phone line went dead.

What happened next is testament to what McCarthy, 36, calls his “Kevlar exterior”. Yesterday he made his debut at the BBC Proms when he was joined by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

“It’s such a career milestone,” he said, speaking from the dressing room before the performance. “It’s a dream come true for me. It’s a huge moment for me and my family.

In fact McCarthy is the first one-handed pianist to play that concerto at a Proms concert since Wittgenstein last played it in 1951, though many two-handed pianists have played it in the intervening years.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Nick McCarthy is that he didn’t start to learn to play the piano until he was fourteen years old. That was when he heard a friend at school play Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata and he decided that was what he wanted to do.

The concerto is a beautiful piece, and as it’s by Ravel there are plenty of lush harmonies. It’s in three movements but they are played continuously, and I find that the middle section march always reminds me somewhat of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. See what you think. Close your eyes and wouldn’t believe all those piano notes are being played by just one hand, and the left one at that.