Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, a professional musician who had lost his right arm in the First World War.
"There were all these works written for amputees post-World War One," notes Nicholas Ross. Ross is a concert pianist who’s been playing since he was five.
"I have three degrees. I went to conservatory in the Netherlands and I studied in London in its college of music, and then I went to Rice to finish up."
He traveled around the world, playing as many as 30 concerts a year, but at the age of 39, bulging discs in his neck made it impossible to use his arms. After several surgeries, he recovered full use of his left but only partial use of the right.
"I can teach and I can play a little with my right hand, but my fourth and fifth fingers don’t work, so I can no longer perform the repertoire I played all those years."
Instead, he’s transitioned to a repertoire of pieces composed for the left hand alone.
"If you have an injury like mine, you’re lucky, because you can play left-hand music. There are not many instruments where you can get away with that."
It is, he explains, a more challenging way to make music. But the pieces he plays are rich and complex— produced by moving his left hand quickly across the keyboard and using the pedal to sustain sound.
"A lot of the pieces you have to leap a lot. To create a simple sounding melody with accompaniment, you’re actually jumping back and forth, and you have to use the pedal to make it connect as well, so the pedal usage is a lot more complicated."
One of the pieces he plans to play was commissioned by Gregory Mertyl, a composer who will also be on hand when
Ross performs at UVA, JMU and Virginia Tech later this month. When he accepted the assignment, he says, he had to re-think the piano.
"Let me put it this way. Imagine that I never knew the piano was played with two hands. It’s as if you introduced me to a new instrument, and you play it with your left hand. There’s nothing missing about it, right? It’s this new instrument. The left hand obviously can’t play something on the bottom and the top at the same time, but you can go from one to the other."
And by using a foot pedal that sustains previous notes while new ones are played, a musician can create a rich sound.
"You need to hold down the damper pedal and create a big chord from different notes in different ranges of the piano, and then you get this really big sound."
That was important, because Mertl decided his composition would be about trees.
"Which are big and beautiful – that was my own challenge to myself. When this idea popped into my head, out of the blue as all the interesting ideas do, I said, ‘Alright! So it’s this special instrument: piano left hand – and I’m going to be writing about trees.' It really excited me as a composer. How can I push myself?"
The piece, entitled In Time of Trees, was supposed to be about 15 minutes, but Mertl spent nearly a year producing a 30-minute composition in four movements.
“The first movement is a tree in the botanical garden in Visby, Sweden. The second tree is a ponderosa pine on a trail outside of Taos, New Mexico. The third movement is seedlings, and then the last one is a deep forest, old-growth stand.”
Ross will also play pieces composed by Virginia Tech Professors Charles Nichols and Kent Holliday.
Ross will perform Sunday, September 27 at Squires Recital Salon, 290 College Ave. in Blacksburg from 1-2 pm. On Tuesday, September 29, he'll be at Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge in Charlottesville, performing at 7:30 p.m. He'll be on stage at James Madison University September 30th at 3:30.
