Aficionados of black metal, drone metal, doom metal, “griefcore” and whatever other metal genres have sprung up in the last fifteen minutes might like to investigate Vasculum. The group/artist’s page has a few songs for download – I like it very much, but then I would.

The Vasculum manifesto is, apparently,

no audience engagement – no promotional engagement – no performance – no collaboration – no photographs – identity of no significance – location/eating habits of no significance – to be listened to at massive volume or not at all

It’s safe to assume that it’s music in the best tradition of one-man lo-fi black metal projects, I think, and puts me in mind of the likes of Xasthur and Leviathan. If anything Vasculum is (are?) a lot less refined and a lot more brutal. Listen here: http://vasculum.co.uk

Seeing Bavouzet perform Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche at the Proms last Friday was an immensely inspiring experience. His technical assurance was such that he made the flashier, more mercurial runs and fiendish final cadenza seem like a spontaneous outpouring.

I had some serious goose-bumps several times during Bavouzet’s performance, which more than made up for the lacklustre première of Arvo Part’s fourth symphony, which I’d be inclined to describe (at best) as inoffensive.

It’s only recently that I’ve seen other pianists perform works for the left hand in concert. The other was James Rhodes, in recital at the Guardian Hay Festival. There, James played the Blumenfeld Étude pour la main gauche in A flat – and, as was the case with Bavouzet, one really wouldn’t aware of it being a single-handed performance, were it not for the fact that both pianists at various points used their right arms to brace themselves against the side of the piano.

This element of posture interests me – I’m not sure (and perhaps James will be kind enough to comment on this if I prod him on Twitter) whether it’s deliberate or almost unconscious. You see, when I play pieces for the left hand alone, I tend to keep my right hand rather demurely anchored on my right knee.

Now, I’ve never noticed any extraordinary aches or pains while playing, for example, the Bach-Brahms Chaconne, but when I work on the Ravel – particularly the evil (for me)  jumps up and down the keyboard at the end of the first cadenza – I come away feeling a bit the worse for wear, particularly in my back muscles. It’s early days – I don’t have to have the piece learned until next spring – but I’d be interested if any of you who play pieces for left hand alone have any thoughts on the matter… does a gentle lean into the piano with the right arm help matters?

If I’m lucky I manage to spend about an hour practising per day. This, clearly, is not enough to maintain a healthy repertoire, or to conquer a piece like the Liszt, so I’m breaking it down into manageable sections that can all be beaten into submission separately. Once they’re all subdued I shall try and stitch them together.

I’ve currently two main points of attack. The fugato section, about which I previously had a bit of a mental block, has proved to be straightforward to play, but easy for my fingers to forget, so there has been a lot of repetition of that around these parts. The prestissimo octaves towards the end of the piece have proved less daunting than I feared although it’s taken weeks of slow practise to get them to a respectable speed. I’m still not sure that they’re really coming out at a proper prestissimo – more of a panicky allegro moderato, I suspect… but still, they’re coming along quite nicely.

However, while I’ve been focusing on these bits so narrowly, I’ve found other sections that I’ve resurrected go back to rack and ruin. I think I need to organise my practise better so that I spend at least some time reminding my fingers how the whole thing goes.

I’d be very interested to know how other amateur players with limited time manage the challenges of learning larger works.

“This won’t do,” thought I.

So: the Schumann Symphonic Etudes have been put to bed for a while, along with Carter’s 90+, while I get the Liszt going again. Interestingly, getting it up and running again – in an albeit slightly shaky fashion – took me just four days. It just goes to show how long a piece can stay ingrained in your subconscious if you spend long enough learning it to start with.

I’ve returned to Caténaires after letting it lie fallow for a while. Now, I’ve by no means mastered the other short Carter pieces that I’ve been looking at, but they’ve been ticking along quite nicely, and I’ve become comfortable with Carter’s idiom – whatever that might be.

Greater familiarity with his musical language has made it much easier to process – and memorise! – the stream of constant non-repeating semiquavers, to the point whereby I’m now reasonably confident I can get the whole piece under my fingers. Reassuringly, it’s also starting to feel like music rather than just a chain of notes.

It seems to have been very worthwhile to take a step back and do some preparatory study with slightly easier pieces. And I’ve got to know more of Carter’s works in the process.

Another interesting and pleasing side-effect of playing music as intellectually stimulating as Carter is that after an hour spent battling the irrational rhythms of something like 90+, a lot of more “normal” music doesn’t seem quite so difficult any more.

Where next? I’m looking forward to trying to play Berio (the Sequenza) or one of the Stockhausen Klavierstuecke. But I’ll get these Carter pieces sorted out first.

Apart from a very brief doodle on an upright piano, playing Cage’s In a Landscape to an audience that wasn’t at all prepared for it (although they did seem to enjoy it), that was my first “serious” performance on piano for at least five years, probably longer. And despite the fact that there wasn’t an audience, it was, I think, the first performance I had worked for since my university days.

Whilst being very enjoyable it made me reflect on a few things.

Going back to the piano after an absence of some years was one of the things that really helped my recovery from the depths of mental illness in 2007. At that point I was extremely rusty, yet for the first time in a very long time I was making music for the right reason – purely for the sake of enjoying the music itself.

So why had I neglected the piano so badly for all that time? I think my journeys down other musical blind alleyways – particularly my dalliance with folk music – came about due to a lack of confidence that manifested itself as a need to make a musical name for myself. Part of what brought me down was the realisation that I’d done exactly that – albeit in a pretty small way – and it didn’t mean anything to me. Hollow fame indeed.

So, returning to the piano really became a way of rebalancing my relationship with music itself. And it’s worked. I’m simply ecstatic to be playing music that I love. And I’m playing exactly what I want to, with no consideration for a potential audience. To quote the title of the much-misunderstood Milton Babbitt essay: “who cares if you listen?” I don’t. And not in an antagonistic, punk-rock way. I’d love to be able to persuade an audience that Feldman’s Palais de Mari is the best thing since sliced bread, but if I can’t, I won’t lose any sleep over it. I’ll play it anyway.

I’d just started tackling the first two Chopin Études from op.10 when I had surgery for a serious infection caused by a cat bite to my right index finger last February. The errant feline’s teeth punctured the flexor sheath, leaving my finger paralysed and allowing the infection to spread the length of the digit down into the hand. The surgery was successful, and I got to keep the finger, and the hand. Apparently the loss of a finger or the hand itself is not at all unheard-of in such circumstances.

After the surgery, it was by no means certain that I would get full function back. I had some very black moments in hospital – I was there for nearly a week – which I tried to dispel by researching left-hand-only repertoire. In fact, I haven’t actually regained full function, due to some tendon thickening that makes the finger feel slightly “woody”. There is noticeable nerve damage, too. Importantly, that damage doesn’t affect the fingertip, and the loss of function only really impairs my ability to curl the finger under into a fist. No great loss there.

It turned out that recovery was massively assisted by the piano – Claire the hand therapist told me to get back on the piano as soon as possible. The initial creakiness of the affected finger was heartbreaking. It was so stiff that something as physically undemanding as Pärt’s Für Alina was an enormous struggle. I don’t mind admitting that I cried with relief at the fact that I could play anything at all.

But I made damn sure it got moving, and went back to the Chopin op. 10 no. 1 Étude with a vengeance. Very slowly, and painfully, at first, of course. In the five weeks I was signed off work for recovery, very little seemed to matter apart from being able to play the piano again. I’m still tremendously grateful to the good people of the burns unit in Selly Oak hospital for the fact that I can.

You’ll excuse me, then, if I feel rather proud of last Wednesday’s excursion with the orchestra. I’ve got to the point where – possibly for the first time in my life – I’m actually rather happy with my playing; goodness knows there’s lots to work on – but work I shall. I’ve got the prospect of more concertos and a solo recital to look forward to.

Onwards!

Needless to say, I found Caténaires extraordinarily trying from the off. Yes, slow practise is the way to get round a piece like that – but the other problem was getting it to stick, even at a slow speed. It’s a little like playing Feldman at the speed of light, as there are patterns in there, but even when they repeat, they’re modified. In essence, what you have is a sequence of thousands of notes with very few triggers for memory. It really isn’t possible – for me, at least – to read a piece like that at the speed it needs to be played.

After several months of trudging through the first few pages, I bailed out. This wasn’t simple cowardice or frustration, I hasten to add, although I’d done my fair share of shaking my fist in a rage, furious with this pesky 100-year-old man whose brain was still evidently more musically agile than mine will ever be.

I decided, in a moment of rare clarity, that what was going wrong must be more than just a localised issue with Caténaires. I simply didn’t have a feel for whatever it was Carter was getting at. I resolved to do two things: listen to a representative sample of his work, and try to play an easier piece.

Ploughing through the string quartets, assorted piano works, and the Nonesuch box set, what I discovered was something that must already be blindingly obvious to anyone who is a devotee of the great man: there’s something unquantifiably and wonderfully right about Carter’s music. It might be fiendish, but it fizzes with energy and fun.

Inspired, I got hold of scores of the Two Diversions, 90+, and Retrouvailles, and selected the last of those as my first target, reasoning that it was short and looked as though its demands upon fingers and brain wouldn’t be too severe.

Thus began the start of a beautiful relationship…

I attended the recent performances of the Berlioz Requiem given by Gergiev, the CBSO and the Mariinsky Theatre orchestra at Symphony Hall. The Berlioz makes use of several brass groups – four, in fact – stationed around the auditorium. The effect of loud raspy instruments bouncing around the hall was really rather magnificent, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t heard any antiphonal early brass music for a very long time indeed. In fact, it had been so long that it took me a while to call the name of Giovanni Gabrieli to mind.

Now, hold the art of early Baroque antiphony in the back of your mind for a moment. We shall come back to it with a horrible inevitability shortly.

The other thing that impressed me about the Berlioz was the sheer number of bassoons on the stage. The passage of time may have blurred my memory but I think I counted eight, including two contrabassoons. I’ve long been a fan of the mighty bassoon; it’s one of the instruments, along with the viola, that I’d love to be able to play if I had enough lifetimes. As a tuba-player myself, the contrabassoon is obviously particularly attractive. It’s very low, and, like the tuba, can be heard over just about anything else. And, much like the tuba, it looks pretty daft.

You can probably see where I’m going with this by now. Something happened in my brain that screamed at me “ANTIPHONAL CONTRABASSOONS!”

I’m well aware that one can take tablets to avoid such things happening, but for now, in quiet moments, my mind keeps straying back to this idea. I don’t think 20 contrabassoons would be over-indulgent. Obviously a large performance space would be desirable, with a wet acoustic to allow a satisfyingly muddy wash of harmonics.

But what would they play? An arrangement of Gabrieli might work well – relatively speaking. Or a contrabass rendition of Tallis’s Spem In Alium. Or there’s always the option of a comic song like I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General from HMS Pinafore. But that, I fear, would be pandering to stereotypes. The bassoon, again, very much like the tuba, suffers from the fact that people think it sounds silly as a solo instrument. Believe me, having heard a fearsome performance of Berio’s bassoon Sequenza live in the summer, I wouldn’t want to promote any view of the bassoon or contra as comedy instruments.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what they’d play. And I shan’t be bothering to write anything: the chances of my gathering 20 contrabassoonists together are anything from very, very slim to absolutely nil. I shall just file the rather delicious idea away along with the marching Heckelphone ensemble and concerto for Contrabassophone and orchestra as being something that I would love to hear. But only the once.

The paragraphs that most caught my attention are near the end, and tell you everything you need to know about the ridiculous heights of paranoia post 9/11:

At least some of his opprobrium appears to be personal. Shortly after 9/11, his piano was confiscated by customs officials at New York’s JFK airport, who thought the glue smelled funny. They subsequently destroyed the instrument.

For several years he chose to travel with just the mechanical insides of his own piano and install them – he is a master piano repairer, as well as player – inside a Steinway shell he borrowed from the company in New York. In 2006 he tried to travel with his own piano again, only to have it held up in customs for five days and disrupt his performance schedule.

Incidentally, his performance of the Webern op. 27 Variations is pretty stellar – he perhaps doesn’t imbue the scherzo with as much fun as Mitsuko Uchida does, but it’s still a great rendition. If “rendition” isn’t too loaded a word to use in this context…