Christine Croshaw - Musical Opinion Magazine

As a student at the Royal Academy, I was
obviously aware of Saint-Saëns’ music,
although I didn’t really know much of his
piano music, and then one day I heard a
fellow -student practising a piece that she
was going to play. It was the Étude en
forme de valse and I immediately fell in
love with the music, and although I’ve not
thought about how I first came into contact
with Saint-Saëns’ piano music from that
day – it must be thirty years later or what -
ever – until now, later on I had a student
who came along to a lesson and said, ‘Oh,
my father heard this piece on the radio
and he wants me to learn it’, and that is
the first piece on the Meridian recording
(Allegro appassionato in C-sharp minor),
and so she worked on this piece, and I
thought it was fascinating music. And so
there were these two pieces floating round
in my mind, and I started to look at some
of his other works and I was just
completely knocked out by the variety.
I already knew the cello and piano son -
atas, and I had played the Second Piano
Concerto when I was young, that is before
I got to the Academy, which I adored – it’s
lovely, and I just loved playing it. And then
I was fascinated to discover that he was
such an extraordinary man, a true renaiss -
ance man if you like, and you can hear
such remarkable things in his music – he
was a colossal figure, really – and also he
must have been a fantastic pianist and
organist. I found his music to be rather
surprising, in many ways – quite unlike
anyone else’s.
There would have been a link also with
Fauré’s music – I’m going to record a
selection of his next year, and this has
been a project which I have had in my
mind for a long time. Among the other
French composers of that era and later I
have played a lot of Grovlez, but no-one
plays him today, and although I don’t know
his solo piano music at all I’ve played his
flute and piano music because I’ve played
with a lot of flautists and they tend to play
French music of that period, and I love
much of Debussy, as well as French music
of the 1920s and ’30s. When I was a
student I loved playing Ravel, but I didn’t
understand Debussy at all, and Fauré was
a complete blank for me – but it was
through the French language and French
films that I came to Debussy and Fauré,
with Fauré last of all, but more especially I
first properly understood the music of
Fauré, Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Debussy
through playing for the singing lessons of
Dame Flora Nielson. Fauré is such a
distinctive – some would say difficult –
composer; you have to get the ‘line’ in his
music, which you hear when you listen to
recordings of his music by Vlado Perle -
mutter and Marguerite Long for example
(you should read her book ‘At the Piano’,
which is lovely), and also Kathleen Long –
funnily enough, it was Kathleen Long who
gave me the scholarship to the Academy,
she was a very fine pianist. When I did my
finals for the scholarship she was listening
to me in a long dress! – perhaps she was
going on to a concert.
But it was interesting when somebody
said when they listened to some of Saint-
Saëns’s pieces they could hear aspects of
Fauré’s music – but then they obviously
had a very close relationship and their
mutual musical influences were just a
happy accident – yet the incredible range
of Saint-Saens’s interests is absolutely
fascinating.
When I’m asked about how I coped
with my disability I think it’s just a question
of survival, or not. It has been a huge
learning curve which you either take on
board or you don’t – so I ignore it. It’s very
interesting – I was thinking back to soon
after when it first happened (I had the
most fantastic support from Ian my
husband) I think I was going through a
victim stage and I thought my musical life
had ended, we had moved to the seaside
and we were sitting in the garden and I
was listening to the radio – and I began
thinking that was as far as I could see my
life – and that would be it. This was about
eight years ago; I had been very ill as well,
I was rather embarrassed, very fragile, and
had lost two stones in weight, and one day
Ian brought me two Talking Books – one
was Jane Austen’s Emma and the other
was Barchester Towers. And I began
thinking, because reading books had been
my passion, that maybe life might be
worth living again – that was the first
glimmer that there might be something.
I began to think of ways of playing the
piano again, but I thought how am I going
to read the music? I actually thought of a
scheme where I would get someone to
read out the names of the notes to me,
and then somebody told me that you
could actually get that done through a
blind organisation – anyway, that’s by-theby
– and there was a definite moment, like
a ‘eureka moment’, when suddenly I
changed from thinking of myself as being
a victim to being somebody who played
the piano (rather differently from anybody
else, and with a few problems!), after that
I’ve never referred to myself as being blind,
although it gets me into trouble some -
times because I tend to disregard it, and
blunder into things. In any situation – and
before I lost my sight it was all about how
you use your senses and how you create
your own experiences – I’ve become very
interested in how we use our senses, in
the sense of experiencing music and life
in general, and the loss of my sight has, in
a way, facilitated me in exploring those
things much more and the overlap of the
senses – so I have really had to rethink
such things as the performing experience;
some people suffer from various kinds of
anxiety – but they are creating that
themselves, and you can just change the
programme!
In terms of playing from memory, I had
a ‘block’ for playing from memory. I was in
my late twenties but now it’s as if you and
I were listening to a piece of music, we
would hear it completely differently but we
would experience it perhaps far more than
the ordinary man in the street, because of
our experience as musicians, but many
people with impaired eyesight would also
listen differently to normally-sighted people.
It really comes down to thinking something
I realised early on: it is not about what I
can’t do, but what I can do, a more intense
way of listening which certainly helps
concentration and memory.
One thing that my disability has
enabled me to explore is through my
work as a performance coach, using
NLP (neuro-linguistic programming
of which I am a Master Practitioner)
to help musicians overcome per -
form ance anxieties, issues with sightreading
and memory, etc.
Turning to my recordings, some of
them – the Hummel, for example –
were record ed when I could see,
and of course I was playing chamber
music as well, but I had to stop that
completely. For most of my career I
had been playing chamber music
and duos; among those I have
partnered are Nathan Milstein, Alan
Civil, Antonio Janigro, Peter-Lukas
Graf, Jacques Zoon and Robert Winn.
I learned so much from these
eminent soloists that they gave me
“some of the best piano lessons of
my life.” But if your sight is impaired
you cannot play chamber music – I
don’t think, as it would be a huge
undertaking to play it from memory
– because the pianist is the one with
the score. It would be too risky – and
also you would have new repertoire,
what with playing a piece once, and
never repeating it – so it’s just an
impractical thing, and for my future
recordings which are planned, they
will be of solo piano music, the
Fauré project especially, and perhaps
later some Spanish music by Gran -
ados and de Falla.
With regard to the classics, I have
no wish to play Beethoven again in
public – except for one work, the
Fourth Piano Concerto, which I
learned when I was ten years old,
and which I have kept coming back
to. I would so dearly love to play that
work again – after all, I started as a
soloist and now I end my career as
one, after a career partnering some
great musicians who taught me so
much.
Christine Croshaw’s website is at
www.christinecroshaw.com