Since 2018, I have been occasionally performing around the country with a show that mixes my stand-up comedy and impressions (and, more recently, my own poetry) with around 14 short pieces of classical piano music.
I hesitate to call myself ‘a professional musician’ but people have paid to hear me play so, by definition, I suppose I am.
The question I have most often been asked after shows—apart from, “What advice would you give to anyone else taking up the piano at 49 ?” and “Was Edvard Greig really only 4ft 11ins tall ?”—is “Do you take your own piano with you everywhere you go?”
It’s a perfectly valid question. Especially from those used to seeing bands touring the countries with roadies unpacking vast numbers of cases on wheels containing the band’s various instruments and speakers. But it’s a question which will make any pianist smile at the lack of understanding of a pianist’s (and a piano’s) life.
With very few exceptions in the entire history of classical piano concert-giving, the pianist turns up and plays whatever piano is at the venue.
The top pianists at the top venues may request a certain local Steinway or Yamaha by number (each piano has a number and no two pianos are quite the same) but that’s as close as you get to any choice or familiarity. And that’s only at the top venues. And for the top artists.
Playing what is in front of you is normally the option and is a huge challenge which is always full of surprises—some good, some amusing, some downright infuriating but you know that there is, generally, no other option.
My first ever public performance (aged 51) was in a wonderful cafe in Cardiff called ‘I, Sunflower’ (now sadly gone) run by a wonderful couple of young Polish men who served coffee and cake and sold plants and flowers and had a white baby grand piano, pop in the centre of the wood-lined, peaty-smelling room, which anyone brave enough could play at any time.
I had tinkered on it a couple of times when visiting my wife who was working in Sweeney Todd for WNO at the Millenium Centre.
The piano was pretty good. It had a nice tone, an even action and was in tune. I persuaded them to let me debut my first ever show there.
On the nerve-wracking-like-never-before day of my show, two notes actually broke in rehearsal. It’s unheard of. Immensely practical, they tried to mend them with bits of paper clips and safety pins before eventually bringing in an electric keyboard which was placed on the piano and I played the show on that.
Pianos differ in tone. Some are more bassy. Some are brighter at the top. Some have keys that are harder to press down—‘a heavy action’. Others can be uneven—the felt of the hammers worn to different thicknesses and giving a louder or softer sound than their neighbours under the same pressure. (Rehearsal on them is vital so that you know when you might not get the sound you want at any given time.)
Others have wonderfully quiet pedal blocks. Others can be horribly loud so that you feel reluctant to use the sustain pedal which means the overall wash of sound can be totally different.
The best pianos are like, I imagine (I don’t drive), suddenly being given the keys to the best car in the world (whatever that is—as I say, I don’t drive). You’re doing something you do every day but suddenly it feels totally different, how it is meant to be; the experience is sensual and you never want it to stop.
Playing a piano in public that doesn’t do what you want it to do is like having a superpower suddenly taken away from you.
But you just have to get on with it.
This is a problem faced by very few other musicians. Brass and wind and string players take their own instrument with them—often having the same instrument for life like a snooker player has their own cue. They know every thing about it: how it feels, how to get the best out of it. It’s a reliable friend. Pianists cannot ever know in advance what they’re going to get.
The idea of the Ludlow Piano Festival came to me in 2022, after I’d performed my show on both the resident pianos in town: the Yamaha at the Assembly Rooms and the Steinway at St Laurence’s. Both, in my view and that of all the proper professionals (who actually went to music college and who have played their instruments form the age of 4 without stopping for 40 years in between like I did), are real beauties.
If, I thought, we could bring in a third piano we would have, I imagined, a pleasing triangle of venues and that’s what we now have with our third hired piano at Palmers Hall on Mill Street.
The third piano has to be brought in to Ludlow in good time to allow it to settle and all the pianos are tuned at least once every day during the festival to keep them in the best condition for our star performers.
We cannot have them playing an electric keyboard placed on top of a piano with broken notes!
But sometimes, I’m sure, all of us pianists wished we’d just learnt the violin.