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Thursday 4 December 2008

Absolute focus

Chopin Experience (BBC Radio 3)

Bott’s guest was the pianist Peter Katin, who played a Chopin Barcarolle on the Pleyel at Hatchlands, but also gave us a Nocturne from a Broadwood, reckoned to be the English equivalent. It was fascinating to hear how different the two pianos sounded, but also to recognise the inwardness, the veiled quality of the music. Not at all Romantic. As Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist, said on Michael Berkeley’s special ‘Chopin’ edition of Private Passions on Sunday, ‘It pulls out of one thoughts and feelings that one did not know one had.’ An echo of what Daniel Barenboim wrote in the Guardian last week when he revealed that his teacher in Paris, Nadia Boulanger, had insisted that when he was playing he should ‘think with his heart and feel with his intellect’. This seems to me to describe exactly the sensation of listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes. It’s as if Chopin is actually talking to himself, uttering the deepest thoughts about life but through the medium of a language that is not fixed but can be interpreted by the individual listener.

Also on Private Passions was William Hague, who we discovered took up learning to play the piano on the day that he resigned as leader of the Conservative party. ‘It changed my brain,’ he said, ‘my whole mind.’ He chose one of Chopin Preludes (Opus. 28, No. 20 in C minor) because he had learnt to play it, which struck me as a wonderfully imaginative response to what he confessed was a big setback. ‘When you’ve had a big discontinuity in your career — that wasn’t planned for — suddenly to develop your mind in new ways is very satisfying,’ he revealed.

Cherie Blair, of course, turned not to music but to writing up her memoirs when she fell from her place as Britain’s ‘First Lady’ (as she likes to think of herself). This week you will have been able to hear her reading from her own book, Speaking for Myself. But if you’re quick you’ll be able to Listen Again to her interview with Jenni Murray for Woman’s Hour. What shook me was not the ‘titillating revelations’ about sex in Balmoral but the dismissive way she recalled her friendship with Carole Caplin — ‘She provided a very good service for me.’ She also left me gasping with disbelief when she ended by describing her life as ‘the story of a girl who started off living in Waterloo in Liverpool and ended up with a ringside seat on history’. Who needs Alastair Campbell?

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