Already a subscriber? Log in
Stephen Plaistow was our tutor this week, seeking out the best recording of the Piano Sonata in A minor, No. 8, and setting up a session that was perfectly balanced between exposition and explanation. First he gave us the Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires, and the fiendishly fast streams of quick notes at the beginning of the first movement. ‘Flowing like oil’ is how Mozart asked for them to be played, Plaistow explained, before moving on to the same passage played this time by Andras Schiff.
‘Did you prefer his view?’ asked Plaistow. ‘I don’t.’ And you could really hear why. After the Pires, Schiff sounded too rushed, too volatile, too uneven — not at all flowing like oil.
Mozart wrote the sonata in Paris, where he was having a rotten time. He was no longer the boy wonder of continental Europe, his music attacked by rival composers, and his mother fell sick and died while he was there. This, suggested Plaistow, was an experience, ‘requiring, as it does for all of us on losing a parent, some quick growing up and a new stance to the world’. This was not an aspect I had expected to think about when I tuned in.
Plaistow also rather surprisingly, and perhaps not intentionally, gave us a laugh-out-loud moment. First, he set up the joke by explaining that every pianist tackling this sonata has to appreciate how Mozart ‘emancipated’ the left hand, giving it more than just a perfunctory accompanying role. Then he gave us a performance by Hélène Grimaud that exaggerated the left hand so much it was as if we were listening to Dudley Moore on Beyond the Fringe. This was not entirely fair to Grimaud, perhaps, and Plaistow hastily made amends by letting us know that he had stuck with her performance and was glad he had done so. His objective was not to criticise but rather to illuminate, to make clear.
‘My mum was only 13 years and a few months older than me,’ announced Nile Rodgers on Monday morning on Radio 4. It was one of those moments when the words just jumped out of the radio, forcing me to stop and listen. Rodgers went on to say, so matter-of-factly, ‘My parents were heroin addicts.’ At the time, the early Sixties, in Greenwich Village, he didn’t think it was peculiar. ‘All the adults were like that.’ But he also said, ‘I felt very unwanted, and sometimes unloved.’ Rodgers later worked for the Black Panther movement for a while before getting a slot at the Apollo Theatre with his band. ‘I started doing music to have some kind of voice,’ he says.
In Walking on Planet C (produced by Paul McClean) Rodgers took us with him as he walked round the Manhattan he knows shop-by-shop, street-corner-by-street-corner. ‘Most people who live in Manhattan,’ he tells us, ‘don’t have a car and don’t know how to drive.’ He started a regular project of walking every day, long walks from Harlem down to the Village, after being diagnosed with ‘extremely aggressive’ prostate cancer. It keeps him in good shape, and ‘I see people and I see things I haven’t seen for a long while’.
You may think you’ve never heard of Rodgers but you’ll probably know something that he’s written or produced — ‘We are Family’, ‘Material Girl’, ‘Let’s Dance’. Cancer made him want to find out whether he had ‘done something bigger than myself’. He began writing a blog about his walking adventures, calling it ‘Walking on Planet C’ (because ‘once cancer attacks it’s always outside looming’) and straightway acquired more than 100,000 followers. Hearing him talk about Manhattan, his life, his reaction to the diagnosis, I can see why. He walks past Studio 54 and recalls when he and his band, Chic, were refused entry. They went straight back to his apartment, which was just around the corner, and started ‘jamming on the groove’. By the end of the night they had created ‘Freak Out’ — ‘the biggest single song I’ve ever written’, says Rodgers, quietly triumphant.
Trending
Also in Arts Reviews
Also by Kate Chisholm
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in