Pianist Malone following new dream
82-year-old calls Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand an ‘extra challenge’
WEST HARTFORD, Conn. — What do you do after you’ve climbed Everest?
Where do you find the next impossible challenge? The next dream to chase?
For Chicago pianist Norman Malone, those questions emerged three years ago, when he accomplished something he’d never imagined possible: performing Ravel’s monumental Piano Concerto for the Left Hand with an orchestra. At age 79. For the first time in his life, having never played with an orchestra before.
Malone had spent roughly 60 years practicing the piece, mostly because he loved it so much, but also because he knew it’s the most treacherously difficult composition written for left hand alone. If you could play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, surely you could play anything for left hand.
Why the obsession with left-hand music? Because at age 10, when Malone was a prodigious pianist, his father attacked him and his two younger brothers, leaving each partially paralyzed on the right side.
Malone’s hopes of becoming a concert pianist seemingly were crushed. But he wouldn’t surrender his place at the piano.
So after a yearslong search, a teenage Malone found someone willing to teach him, and he discovered he wasn’t the first pianist to face this dilemma. Some of the world’s greatest composers — Brahms, Prokofiev, Bartok, Britten and, of course, Ravel — had written major works for pianists like him.
The Ravel became Malone’s obsession when he was a piano student at DePaul University in the 1960s. And though he ultimately supported himself and his family as a widely admired choral teacher, retiring from Lincoln Park High School in 2001, Malone never stopped practicing the Ravel and other onerously difficult works in the seclusion of his home.
A series of Tribune articles in 2015 told the world Malone’s story, which he never had shared with his colleagues or students, who until then didn’t know how he had become disabled (or that he never had stopped practicing). That’s when requests to perform began pouring in, among them an invitation from West Hartford Symphony Orchestra music director Richard Chiarappa to perform Ravel’s concerto in 2016.
“From the moment we finished the Ravel, Norman and I started talking about what’s next,” Chiarappa told me last Sunday as he and Malone prepared for that afternoon’s concert, billed as “Norman’s Triumphant Return.”
About a year ago, Malone started studying Britten’s Diversions for piano (left hand) and orchestra, a piece less mammoth in scale than the Ravel, but one rich in obstacles of its own.
Unlike the Ravel, which is played straight through without pause, the Britten is structured as a theme and variations, each one utterly distinct in tempo, rhythm and musical syntax. You could say that the Britten stands as 11 mini-concertos, each one quite complex in the ways soloist and orchestra interact.
In effect, Malone had found several new Everests to climb.
“Why am I doing this?” asked Malone rhetorically as we chatted a couple of hours before his performance of the Britten.
“To see if I can still do it! And it’s a piece that hasn’t been done much before, so it’s an extra challenge there.”
It’s worth noting that Malone faces one extra hurdle that other left-handed pianists do not: His partially paralyzed right foot doesn’t function well, so he must use his left foot to manipulate the sustaining pedal on his right, an awkward, out-of-kilter position. Further, he cannot use two pedals at once, as proficient concert pianists routinely do.
The weather was cold, rainy and raw in West Hartford on the afternoon of the big concert, but that didn’t stop a large audience from coming to hear the pianist from Chicago.
After a brief spoken introduction from conductor Chiarappa and a screening of a 2016 “CBS Evening News” story about Malone, the pianist walked to the front of the stage and encountered a loud ovation from the crowd. He reacted by shaking his head “no,” as if to say he didn’t want to hear cheers just yet. As Malone settled himself onto the piano bench, a crew from Chicago-based Kartemquin Films trained their cameras on him for a documentary-in-progress being made in association with the Tribune.
Malone nodded to Chiarappa, indicating he was ready to start, and the conductor launched the orchestra into the opening theme. Soon Malone’s enormous left hand was gliding up and down the keyboard.
He sounded tentative in tone at first but seemed to gain self-assurance with each passing measure. By the end of the first variation, he was showing some pianistic panache and finessing large keyboard leaps.
As the concerto proceeded, pianist and orchestra sometimes got a bit out of sync, not an unusual phenomenon. No less than Russian hypervirtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, after all, stunned listeners during his American debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1928, playing so fast in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as to leave conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and the orchestra behind in the dust.
A couple of other glitches in Sunday’s performance of the Britten occurred, though it was difficult to determine whether pianist or orchestra was at fault. More important, though, Malone unmistakably was gathering momentum and poise with each variation.
By the time he reached the sixth, a Nocturne, there was no missing the tonal beauty of the silvery accompanying figures Malone played across the length of the keyboard, while orchestra concertmaster Carin Wiesner Hoffman unspooled long, silken lines on her violin. Malone and friends now were creating hauntingly ethereal music, the score’s plaintive quality reminding me of the heroism Malone has shown through most of his life, including on this occasion.
Many other feats followed, but the orchestra’s lyric poetry and Malone’s deeply felt responses in the heartbreaking Adagio cut to the core of this music. So although some other orchestras play with a bigger sound, and some other pianists with more wizardly technique, the poetry of this performance conveyed the story Britten was trying to tell.
That Malone and Chiarappa’s orchestra finished the rousing finale, a buoyant Tarantella, with stop-on-a-dime precision showed how far they had come from the performance’s tenuous beginning and from their first concert together three years ago. They deserved the standing ovation they received.
When I spotted Malone at the reception following the concert, fans were queued up to offer their congratulations. “Awesome,” “beautiful” and “incredible” were a few of the compliments.
Malone broke away from his admirers for a few minutes to discuss what had just happened.
“I got more confidence as it went along,” he said. “I knew I had to work up to the Adagio — that is the pinnacle of the piece. So I tried to build up to that climax.
‘I’m glad I made it all the way through. I thought: That was good.”
So what comes next for him?
“Maybe the Prokofiev,” said Malone, referring to the Russian master’s Piano Concerto No. 4 for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra.
At this point, does anyone doubt he can do it?
Norman Malone will play a solo piano performance, and excerpts of the documentary-in-progress “Left-Handed Pianist” will be shown at 4 p.m. Nov. 10 at the Gorton Community Center, 400 E. Illinois Road, Lake Forest; $10 general; $5 students; 847-234-6060 or https://gortoncenter.org.