WRITING VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF PAGANINI

The first sketches for my Variations on a Theme of Paganini date back to the mid 1990s. At that point I don’t think I had the get up and go, or the experience, to be able to see a project like that through to its necessary conclusion. But over the years, I accumulated ideas, I tried again, and finally in about 2011 the logjam broke and I was able to finish the piece.

Of course, pianists are all familiar with the various ways the great masters have dealt with the theme of the Paganini Caprice No 24. If you have even the slightest bit of a transformative bent, it’s tempting to riff on a theme like that, because the structure is so simple and memorable. There’s so much that you can do with it.

I wasn’t consciously trying to be different. Things just came to me, including quotes from other composers and various controversial ideas. The moment I discovered that the theme fitted in counterpoint with ‘La Campanella’… well, when you find out something like that, how can you not use it? It’s so tempting and it ended up being rather amusing.

There’s one variation which is quite unlike the others: it sounds a little bit like flipping between radio stations, just playing with the button, always coming back to the same channel. I tried to mimic that in the music. I remember thinking that I’d gone too far, that nobody’s going to take me seriously, but it turns out to be one of the variations that people like the most.

Then I realised that the first 16 bars of one of the variations in the last movement of Beethoven’s Op 109, if transposed, could suddenly become half of a Paganini variation without changing a single note. Again, how can you not avail yourself of something like that? I was laughing myself silly, so I decided to run with it.