James Rhodes
James Rhodes credits music with saving his life and is on a life-long mission to nurture new audiences. But, as John Evans discovers, the radical pianist takes a dim view of the traditional concert format
James Rhodes, concert pianist and campaigner, wants a cigarette – except we’re indoors, in the bar above the West End theatre where he gave a sell-out concert in 2013. So, since he’s teetotal, he asks for a drink of water instead. In any case, it’s only 11am, the exact time we agree to meet. Such punctuality is rare among artists like Rhodes who are juggling a packed schedule, but then Rhodes is no ordinary artist.
To his thousands of admirers around the world – he has over 160,000 Twitter followers – this slim and softly-spoken 43 year-old is an inspiration and a guide; a musician who, through sheer dogged determination combined with an all-consuming love of Bach, Chopin and Beethoven, has emerged from a living hell to become their first-choice ‘classical’ pianist; indeed, for many, the only pianist they have ever heard of.
If you’ve never heard of him, you’re possibly the sort of person who likes their classical music served respectfully in a concert or recital hall to an audience listening attentively and critically. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that – the music demands it.
OR DOES IT? Not according to Rhodes. He’s on a mission to shake up classical music. Not in way music mogul Simon Cowell would recognise, but with authenticity; in a way that connects the music with as many people as possible – and especially those new to the genre.
Plenty have tried, of course. Classical crossover, that sugary ‘classics as pop’ approach typified by the likes of Il Divo and Russell Watson, springs to mind.
Even the acclaimed pianist Lang Lang has succumbed to its dubious charms. James Rhodes has a good deal to say about them, and despairs of the vogue for serving up bite-size chunks of classical music for the entertainment of people doing the ironing or walking the dog. ‘There’s a middle ground – you don’t have to be terrified that [classical] music is so academic and that you should instead listen to the bit off the Hovis ad for three minutes, or the latest star pianist play the soundtrack from a TV show. Just stop talking down to people and treating them like they’re stupid.’
And there, in a nutshell, is James Rhodes’s musical philosophy, a philosophy reflected in his new album. Typically, it’s not just any new album, but is released on good old-fashioned vinyl.
Before you run away with ideas of an old Deutsche Grammophon-style cover featuring a soulful image of our hero, though, be warned that the title of Rhodes’s new LP deserves a parental advisory note: F**k Digital. ‘The title is tongue-in-cheek but it’s also a kickback towards everything that’s happening and the pace it’s happening at,’ says Rhodes. ‘As a society, we seem to have forgotten how to shut up and listen. Of course there’s space for digital; I love hi-res audio. But there’s something very nice about old-school vinyl; the hiss and crackle, the covers and designs. You don’t get that with Spotify or Apple Music.’
Where does Rhodes’s appetite for challenging classical music’s status quo – traditional presentation versus watereddown crossover and the march of digital – originate? To answer that, you have to go back to his childhood when, from the age of five to ten, he was repeatedly sexually abused by a male PE teacher.
There’s no point dancing around it. Rhodes certainly doesn’t in his memoir, Instrumental. Over the course of 254 pages he recounts the terrible mental and physical after-effects of that abuse – effects he’s still dealing with. It’s tough reading and is soon to be made into a Hollywood film.
At 13, Rhodes eventually escaped his abuser and left his school for Harrow where he took piano lessons from Colin Stone, now teaching at the Royal Academy of Music. ‘He was terrific but I had so many bad habits,’ says Rhodes. ‘There was no technique. I just wanted to play, badly.’
‘Just stop talking down to people and treating them like they’re stupid’
Even so, at 18, the Guildhall School of Music beckoned but he was persuaded by his parents to go to Edinburgh University.
‘I studied music but ended up in my first psychiatric ward a year later. Then I stopped playing the piano completely. A short while later, I went to University College London where I did psychology – the blind leading the blind, you might say.’ He emerged three years later with a 2:1.
Rhodes prefaces each of the 20 chapters of Instrumental with a recommended piano work and recommended recording. The point is, they show how music helped to pull Rhodes back from the very edge, an act music has been performing for him since he first heard Busoni’s piano transcription of Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor at the age of seven. ‘Music saved me because it was irrefutable proof that the world wasn’t all bad,’ he says.
And now he wants to save others.
This latest twist in his remarkable story began in 2004 when, at the age of 28, some five years after leaving UCL and by now a successful City-based financial advertising salesman, he took stock of his life. His son, Jack, was the catalyst. ‘[When not working] all I did was listen to music, think about music and go to concerts,’ he says. ‘That love of music hadn’t left me since I first discovered Bach. So I remember wondering what I would say to Jack when he grew up and asked me, “Dad, all you do is talk about music, so why are you doing a job that isn’t in music?”‘ “well, son,”’ I imagined myself replying, “Mummy likes cashmere and we’ve got a mortgage to pay.” But then I thought: f**k that, I’ll become an artist’s agent.’
The one artist he wanted to represent was his idol, the pianist Grigory Sokolov. He proposed a business partnership with the pianist’s existing agent, Franco Panozzo, who was based in Verona, Italy. When the pair met at his office, Panozzo invited Rhodes to play his piano. Rhodes recalls the moment in Instrumental: ‘I turned around afterwards to see his reaction. He was totally silent, and after a minute simply said, “James – I have been doing this for 25 years and I have never heard someone play the piano like that who was not a professional pianist.”’ Panozzo was clear: Rhodes would not be an agent – he would become a concert pianist. He found Rhodes a renowned piano teacher, also based in Verona, called Edoardo Strabbioli. ‘I didn’t go the conventional route. I did an Amy Winehouse in reverse. I’d done all the drugs and drinking, and finally got a hardcore teacher in Edo.’
Think about it: Rhodes hadn’t touched a piano in 10 years and now here he was, facing five years of intensive study, travelling to Verona for five days every month to be coached by a man who, in Instrumental, Rhodes describes as ‘the most violent, aggressive, arrogant, dictatorial bastard I’d ever met. It killed me,’ he says.
‘It was brutal. It was horrific. It was what I needed, but I don’t think I could do it again.’
I ask him how he remained committed to his new career when received opinion is that you should have already attained a seriously high standard of playing when you reach music college at 18, never mind 10 years later. ‘There are a lot of “shoulds” in classical music,’ he replies. ‘You should know what a cadenza means, you
should play all the Mozart concertos, you should never talk to the audience…
‘I started to be able to play Chopin sonatas, Rachmaninov preludes and all the pieces I’d dreamed of playing and I was playing them properly. That’s what sustained me.’
Even the agonisingly slow process of acquiring a good technique couldn’t dent his commitment. ‘It’s a logistics problem, that’s all. If you have someone who can show you how to get a technique and you have the time to do it, you can. Anyone reading this who thinks, “I’ve always wanted to play the piano but it’s too late”, it’s a lie! I guarantee that anyone with two hands will be able to play a Bach prelude in six weeks. In fact, I wrote a book that tells them how to do just that [How to Play the Piano – Little ways to Live a Big Life]. Get a £30 keyboard. Practise 40 minutes a day – in six weeks you’re playing Bach. It’s not rocket science.’
Edo taught Rhodes the value of good fingering, to approach a piece of music bar by bar, and to employ techniques such as playing blindfold to help lock in the notes.
Midway through his studies, Rhodes gave a recital that, if nothing else, proved he was on the right track. In 2009, he acquired, quite by chance, a manager – Denis Blais, who financed his first CD: a compilation album of some of his favourite ‘saviour’ pieces called, tellingly, Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos. Most importantly, Blais encouraged Rhodes to develop his idea of playing and talking in concert.
The CD was eventually released in
2010 and on the back of it, the BBC asked Rhodes to present a documentary about Chopin for the composer’s bicentenary. He was getting noticed. His second memoir, Fire On All Sides, is a journal of a five-month tour in 2016; as before, each chapter is prefaced by notes on the pieces he played, in a style I promise you won’t find in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Over the years, he has developed and honed his performing style. It’s the same ‘Bach and talk’ approach he first envisioned and it’s resonating with people, young ones, especially.
‘Their average age is early 20s,’ he says. ‘Youngsters are so much more openminded. The minute you say, “Listen to this, you don’t need to know anything about the music and you can clap when you want,” a concert becomes welcoming and friendly.’
It’s a dig at the classical establishment; at the codes and conventions he believes freeze out ordinary people keen to explore the music. I want to know his views on artists like Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-mason who have benefited from the system he rails against. ‘It’s about the audience, not about talent,’ he says. ‘There will always be an audience for them and I will be in that audience. But that’s a fraction of the population. I’m more interested in the remaining 99.5 per cent who want to know more about classical music but wouldn’t know where to start.’
It’s his focus on this emerging audience that is key to Rhodes’s appeal and what distinguishes him from most traditional artists bound so tightly to repertoire, technique and interpretation. His description of some performers is uncomfortably close to the truth. ‘The pianist comes on, scowls at the audience, sits down and plays, and then [leaves]. The only thing that matters is the performer and the music, while the audience is almost irrelevant. But I’ve always thought the audience is the third part of the equation, otherwise you might as well listen to Spotify. So you talk about Bach’s Chaconne or whatever you’re playing but not [in terms of], “There are 80 variations, it goes from D minor then moves into B major…”. Instead, you tell the story of the composer and his life, as well as his music.’
For Rhodes, it really is as simple as that. He says people are wrong to buy into the idea of the artist being somehow more fragile and more special than them. Instead, in his world, the artist shows up, does their job and actually talks to the audience. They don’t, he says, ‘pretend that Chopin is living through their soul.’ Rhodes is refreshingly candid about his own playing, which, he says, is still work in progress. However, to dwell on this is to miss the point. ‘I’m like a gateway drug. My audience isn’t sitting down to listen to Denis Matsuev play Rach 2, partly because they don’t know who he is and if they Google the piece there are 350 recordings with the performers looking like they’re constipated.’
Instead, his aim is to encourage them to stay; to explore what classical music could offer them. ‘Look, it doesn’t have anything more to say to someone than, for example, Adele. All I’m saying is that these composers who I love, if you haven’t experienced their music, there is a way to listen to it that just might give you another sense of that feeling you get when you listen to Adele, a way that might sustain it and take you a little bit deeper. So give it a chance, rather than assume it’s for other people and not for me.’
‘Creating, whether painting or writing music, is a sign of mental wellness’
Today, with his career in full flow, Rhodes still has piano lessons and plays to other pianists for their feedback. He lives in Madrid with his girlfriend, an Argentine model and actress, and a Steinway piano. He doesn’t practise as much as he’d like, being heavily involved in work to get a new law approved that will, he says, ‘make Spain the number one country in the world for the protection of children.’ Meanwhile, he has a TV show and a radio show, and he’s writing another children’s book about music.
As my time with Rhodes draws to an end, he leans across and says, ‘We’re all quite mad. I haven’t met anyone who isn’t. But creating, whether painting, writing or making music, is a sign of mental wellness; a way out of depression or anxiety. If you wake up at 4am wanting to kill yourself, writing 1,000 words, painting a picture or listening to some music is going to do more for you than lying in bed and thinking.’
He’s living proof.
F**k Digital is out now on Signum Records