Music: With the Left Hand

The piano literature for one hand can pretty well be numbered on the fingers of two. Scriabin, Brahms. Ravel and Strauss all took a shot at it, along with such moderns as Benjamin Britten and Leos Janacek.* The rest of the left-hand repertory is pretty much what the trade calls “knitting music.” But a platoon of composers in Holland last week was hard at work on some new and surprisingly engaging left-hand pieces to be played by a recent recruit to the field: 45-year-old Dutch Pianist Cor de Groot.

Until last summer. Pianist de Groot was a two-handed recitalist of solid international reputation. Then, during a recording session, he felt a sudden cramp in his right hand, was barely able to finish playing Liszt’s Melancholy Waltz. Although X rays disclosed no abnormality in the hand, neither cortisone nor treatment by a neurologist was able to restore full use to De Groot’s fingers. He set about learning what left-hand compositions he could find, soon decided that there were not enough to keep a concert career going.

At that point, De Groot’s friend, composer Juriaan Andriessen, announced that he was going to compose a piece for the left hand. As the news spread, other composers volunteered to do the same. Virtually every top Dutch composer is working on a piece for De Groot to be finished before February, in time for a new radio series. The new works will nearly triple the left-hand repertory.

In the meantime, De Groot is filling out his concert season with old standbys, e.g., the Brahms version of Bach’s Violin Chaconne, which he played last week to critical huzzahs on the Dutch radio. He is also rearranging pieces by Debussy, Grieg, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. And if the day should ever come when he exhausts both the old and the new repertories, he sees an almost endless future in recording. Under the name “Guy Sherwood,” for instance, he appears in a radio series on which he plays numbers such as Kitten on the Keys, for which he has deftly recorded first the left-hand part, then the right-hand part (played with the left hand). When the whole thing is glued together, De Groot sounds like his old two-handed self playing like sixty.

* Although some left-hand pieces are written as mere musical oddities, most are commissioned or written by handicapped pianists, e.g., Hungary’s famed Geza Zichy (1849-1924), who lost his arm in a hunting accident, but developed into such a virtuoso that he played three-hand recitals with Liszt; Vienna-born Paul Wittgenstein, who lost an arm in World War I, and commissioned Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, Britten’s Diversions on a Theme.