Music
Defying Tourette’s Syndrome, pianist Nick Van Bloss's first public performance in 15 years
The concert at Cadogan Hall, sponsored by Matrix, saw Nick van Bloss banish his demons; returning to the stage after 15 years in the wilderness and delivering a ‘tour de force’ performance. The roaring standing ovation bore testimony to Nick’s incredible artistry, but also to his bravery, determination and willingness to test his limits in returning to public performance.
Read the reviews in The Times and The Telegraph.
Visit www.nickvanbloss.com for more information.
Concert Press Release
“How does he do it?” audiences often ask themselves when confronted with an exceptional musician. As the performer’s brain and body interact, technique and expression, intellect and emotion come together in a way that remains largely mysterious.
The nature of the pianist’s physical and psychological relationship with his instrument is of the essence for Nick van Bloss, who is both an extraordinary talent and has suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome since the age of seven, although the condition went formally undiagnosed until he was 21. He estimates that he suffers around 38,000 tics a day - there is not a moment when a muscle in his body somewhere is not contorting or contracting - usually in a strict motor rhythm. “It’s a constant battle,” he says, “I’m given no time off.”
His only release from Tourette’s is the piano. He began to learn the instrument at the age of 11, and found that his symptoms went into abeyance as he played. “As soon as I touched the keys, my tics went away,” he explains. “Everything that the piano gave me was satisfying my Tourette’s. It was almost ecstatic. I would always be thinking of music and dying to get to the piano, to place my fingers on the keys and just have a feeling of absolute, tactile delight. Now, as then, those 88 keys still implore me to touch them.”
He entered the Royal College of Music at the age of 15 as a Junior, attending full time from the age of 17, studying with Yonty Solomon, taking master-classes with figures such as Tatiana Nikolayeva, and winning prizes for his playing: “When I play, physically my brain’s got me where I want to be, living without a body that constantly contorts.”
Fifteen years ago, aged 26, he played in public for the last time, appearing in a televised recital in Poland at the Chopin Festival. Because the severity of his Tourette's had reached crisis point, he no longer felt able to balance performing with his condition. He thereafter retreated into a personal, rather than public, world of music - one where he was free to be himself without competitive pressures. His first public appearance since that crisis will be his performances of concertos by Bach and Beethoven at Cadogan Hall on April 28th which will mark the first time that van Bloss has felt a level of self-acceptance that will enable him to perform in public again.
Van Bloss has not been idle over the intervening period: he wrote an autobiographical book, Busy Body, published in 2006; in 2007 he was the subject of a BBC Horizon documentary, Mad but Glad, which accompanied Nick as he went on a journey of self-discovery exploring the connection between neurological conditions and creativity which featured an encounter with renowned neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks (who featured van Bloss in his book Musicophilia) Over the past year he has been busy in the recording studio working with award-winning producer Michael Haas.
“Nick brings a nuclear-powered clarity to everything he plays,” says Haas. “In polyphonic music, such as Bach, he offers a superhuman degree of precision and individuality with each voice, while never losing overall transparency. The first work we recorded together was the Goldberg Variations; Nick feels that he has a special response to Bach’s polyphonic writing. My recording team has decades of experience at the very top end of classical recording, and we were utterly flabbergasted at the results. And when it comes to late-Romantic repertoire, such as Chopin and Rachmaninov, he plays with a crystalline solidity, building and shaping works with total security ... He achieves a near-perfect balance between vibrancy of keyboard playing and sweep of musical vision.“
The concert at Cadogan Hall, with the English Chamber Orchestra and conductor David Parry, features Bach’s G minor keyboard concerto and the 5th Piano Concerto, the ‘Emperor’, by Beethoven – who, of course, fought enormous physical adversity in his own career.
In the BBC documentary Mad but Glad Dr Oliver Sacks implies a connection between van Bloss’s Tourette’s and his prowess as a pianist. Describing touch as “an essential form of exploration”, Sacks points out that a symptom of Tourette’s is the compulsion to touch things repeatedly in a strict motor rhythm, while he also describes music as a heightening and intensification of emotion that is immediately translated into action.
Michael Haas readily admits to being no neuroscientist, but he feels that: “given the fact that Nick’s keyboard technique is unsurpassed and that one of the characteristics of Tourette’s is an extreme sense of the tactile, I would suspect that there is a link between Nick’s condition and his pianism. I also suspect that it informs his ability to unravel complex and dense voicing, such as one finds in Bach. Beyond this, Nick uses his gifts to realise his own musical ideas and, as an extremely thoughtful and intelligent musician, can build works architecturally … He has something to say musically and has the ability to say it superbly.”
Nick van Bloss himself is in little doubt of a connection between his condition and his desire to make music: “I am more convinced than ever that the Tourette’s is the fuel. It’s the fire within, the burning energy. If I didn’t have the Tourette’s, I know that I wouldn’t be able to feel creativity in the way that I do.”