John Ogdon's troubled genius: a new biography of the Piano Man

As the first full biography of pianist John Ogdon is published, hear how his astonishing music-making transcended his psychological difficulties

Twenty five years since his death, the story of John Ogdon's life in music has just been told in his first full-length biography entitled Piano Man. Charles Beauclerk, a friend of the Ogdon family, gives what I think is a fascinating, unflinching, and honest account of Ogdon's astonishing virtuosity, his victory at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1962, and his friendship with the other firebrands of New Music Manchester – Elgar Howarth, Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and Peter Maxwell Davies.

In what may seriously be one of the most amazing feats of musical brilliance of all time, Peter Maxwell Davies found a copy of Kaikhosru Sorabji's titanic four-hour behemoth, his Opus Clavicembalisticum, in a second-hand shop, and Ogdon promptly played the whole thing, some of the most mind-bendingly, finger-destroyingly demanding music ever conceived for piano, at sight. There's also an account of Ogdon's marriage to Brenda Lucas and their life of outward glamour and inner turmoil, as Ogdon's mental illnesses and obsessions became ever-more present in their life together, and the tragedy of his death in 1989, aged just 52. This tragedy came from the bouts of violence that would explode from Ogdon, the cocktail of drugs he was taking to attempt to deal with his psychiatric problems.

But there are moments of humour too; like the time he turned up to play Beethoven's Emperor Concerto in Essex and was momentarily and understandably astonished to find a collection of Peugeot cars on the stage as well as the orchestra (Peugeot were sponsoring the concert). When he made it to the piano, he fell asleep during the long orchestral exposition and had to be prodded awake to play his next entry.

Above all, though, there was the transcendence of his playing when he was on form and his unpredictability when he wasn't. There were his performances that inspired and changed the lives of audiences and musicians who heard him – like the pianists Leslie Howard, who told me for this week's Music Matters for Radio 3 how Ogdon's playing remains a talisman for him, and Peter Donohoe, who gives a tribute recital you can hear on Radio 3 next Wednesday, including some of Ogdon's own music. There's a whole ocean of Ogdoniana out there on YouTube; among the highlights I've found, are these concerts that he gave in Russia in the 1960s and 70s, which preserve him at the heights of his inspiration, intensity, and technical capability. In the Liszt Sonata or Busoni's arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach's D minor solo violin partita, Ogdon makes you feel the music is being composed in real time, such is the ferocious vitality of his playing. That's what still makes Ogdon a unique figure in the pantheon of 20th-century pianists.

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