Alistair McGowan: Why I’m staging a piano festival – and banishing the German composers

When I finished my 20-date tour of my Piano Show, I breathed a sigh of relief. It had been the most challenging and draining thing I’d ever done. Yes, I’d been a stand-up comic since I left drama school but I had only taken up the piano, in earnest, aged 49, principally to get revenge on some very noisy Dutch neighbours in south-west London.

My mother had sent me for lessons at the age of eight. I gave it up at nine. I always regretted it. Finally, as my TV career nosedived and the Dutch neighbours got noisier, I had a lot of time to play and after only a year of pretty total immersion, I was overheard playing in public by Sony and was offered an album deal.

Anyway, on June 18 2022 my Piano Show came to an end with Satie’s Gnossienne 1 in the vast St Laurence’s Church in my newly adopted hometown of Ludlow. I swore to have a year off “Big Projects”.

Then, the following day, my erstwhile teacher, concert pianist, Anthony Hewitt, texted asking how my show had gone.

“Great night. Great venue. Great Steinway.” I replied.

“I’d like to play it one day,” came the response.

Immediately, my brain went into overdrive.

If Anthony would come and play it, would all the other leading pianists I had got to know during the life-changing seven years that I’d been playing also come and perform in beautiful Ludlow at the church? Or on the equally fabulous Yamaha concert grand at the equally fabulous, newly refurbished Ludlow Assembly Rooms ?

Could I create a festival in the town once described by John Betjeman as “probably the loveliest town in England” ? Could I interest the local arts organisers ? Could I, dare I, subsidise it with some of the money left to me by my music-loving mother who had died a few months before ?

My plans for a quiet year disappeared in the duration of a short and dreamy swim.

Over my short piano career I had taken part in several ‘celebrity’ concerts with Lucy Parham at Kings Place in London alongside Katie Derham (faultless), Garry Richardson (impassioned) and Ed Balls (most nervous). Could I entice such celebrities to Shropshire to do something similar as a festival curtain-raiser?

The emails began. Katie, Garry and Ed all said yes, straightaway. Then, I contacted my first choice squad of recitalists: James Lisney, Paul Roberts, Lucy P, Charles Owen, Christine McMaster and the mercurial pianist and composer Anne Lovett. Astonishingly, they all said yes. As did Viv McLean who taught me so much just from watching his concerts as I began my later-life piano odyssey, and Benjamin Frith whose recordings of John Field’s music had inspired me to write a Radio 4 play about the Irish Inventor of the Nocturne.

They even all agreed not to play any of the German behemoths who dominate the concert and radio output often, in my opinion, to detrimental effect.

Great though they undoubtedly were, I wanted to avoid the often long drudge of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and nudge my favourite soloists towards shorter, more romantic French, (Debussy, Ravel, Legrand) Catalan (Mompou), Argentinian (Piazzolla), Hungarian (Liszt), Norwegian (Grieg), Polish (you know who) and American (Glass, Gershwin) composers. Alright, we have a bit of Bach from Joanna MacGregor, but I wasn’t going to say nein to Joanna.

Choosing the pieces for recording and touring, my main aim was to bring in an audience that perhaps were ‘piano-curious’ as well as the piano cognoscenti. For years, despite my long love affair with piano music, I was put off by seeing too many long Germanic pieces which, as my hero Satie might have said were all about hearing the pianist and not the piano. I thought the shorter romantic pieces might be a better ‘way in’ to the full wonders of the piano for a new audience as they were for me.

To that end, with a big nudge from my main festival administrator, the invaluable former London Tube driver and now Aga-demonstrator and recipe-tester, Steve Catanach, I wanted to try and appeal to both sides of the town.

So, we are putting two pianos in covered outdoor locations for anyone to play and anyone to hear free music. There are four excellent professional and semi-professional pianists in the town and they (along with me) have done a concert for local schoolchildren in an attempt (when the government is shamefully slashing music education in state schools) to introduce them to the music that got us interested in the piano.

We are holding discussions and masterclasses to help and inspire students of the piano (young and old) and to aid new composers several of whom we are showcasing within the festival programming. And we have Rainer Hersch combining comedy and music as he tells the story of his love for the great pianist/comedian Victor Borge.

All in four and a bit days. I’m starting to think that it would just have been easier to spend another year touring my piano and comedy show.

Oh, and Ed Balls has since withdrawn from the celebrity concert!

The Ludlow Piano Festival takes place from May 24-28. Info: ludlowpianofestival.com