Classical piano presented with jokes by a bald, Australian dickhead with a beard.
TICKET LINK: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/aidan-jones-chopins-nocturne
Chopin’s Nocturne blends stand-up with classical piano performance — what interested you in bringing those two seemingly very different art forms together on stage?
When I came back to the piano in lockdown, I was so excited to rediscover this thing I loved in my youth. My instinct when I get excited about anything is to try and share it with people – first the people in my life, and then audiences on stage – but I also know I’m not a professional pianist. No one is coming to see me play a straight classical piano show, but I thought if I could use comedy to give mainstream audiences a way in to appreciating this music and get them excited about it in the same way I am, then maybe that could be a really unique and different experience for people! Like the music is all there, people just need someone to help them appreciate it.
The show revisits your experience of failing a conservatory audition at 18; how has returning to classical music later in life changed your relationship with success and failure?
Oh, this is such a good question! The story of this show sort of begins at a moment in my comedy career where I felt like I had absolutely failed. I was 32 years old, had been a comic for over ten years, and had seen people around me go on to achieve success while I myself felt like I’d not been able to get to where I wanted. I was incredibly frustrated and felt lost, like maybe pursuing comedy was a bad decision and I’d wasted a decade of my life!
Returning to classical music and playing the piano in my 30s was such a breath of fresh air because, for the first time in a decade, I had a creative outlet that I wasn’t trying to make into my career. When I first started stand-up I was doing it just for fun, but at some point I got the idea from myself or other people or society or wherever, that I could – and even SHOULD – be making money out of it. Playing piano was never going to be a career for me, so it took that pressure off and allowed me to just enjoy it, and the feeling in turn reminded me of the way I felt when I started stand-up, and helped me reconnect with my joy in a really profound way.
Your comedy is often very personal and conversational — did performing music require a different kind of vulnerability compared with stand-up?
I think in stand-up – especially the kind of straight man side of stand-up – there are a lot of ideas about what comedy should look like. It should be just the jokes, just you and a microphone up there “telling it like it is,” and anything else you use is just a crutch. I had absolutely internalised a lot of this judgement, and so when I started going to gigs with a keyboard and setting it up I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment.
The first jokes I wrote about the piano were less about the music I loved, and more just making fun of other comedians who used music in their act. I think I was trying to tell the audience – and really myself – that I wasn’t like those OTHER comedians. It took me a while to realise that rather than rant about what I’m not, I should just get down to the business of SHOWING the audience what I am. I came here to share the music with them, so the jokes should be about that, and people can make up their own minds.
Chopin’s music has endured for generations — what do you think contemporary audiences still connect with emotionally in works like the Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2?
I think musically it isn’t that different to the music we listen to today. Chopin had an incredible ear for a catchy tune, and he was relentlessly driven to communicate his musical ideas in the simplest way possible, which makes pieces like the Nocturnes, Etudes and Preludes incredibly accessible for people who don’t know anything about classical music. He was also a Capital A-Artist in a very modern sense – he expressed his own personal emotion through his work in a way that we are very familiar with now. He was somehow both completely raw and open, while also being very aloof. Kind of like a lot of social media creators, you feel like you know him, until you realise you’ve never met him and never will!
You’ve described rediscovering piano during the pandemic as falling back in love with the instrument “on your own terms” — how important has creative freedom become in shaping your work now?
I think ultimately I am a very stubborn person, and I don’t like being told what to do. When I went to the conservatory audition, I was supposed to learn a piece of Bach, but I didn’t like it so I didn’t learn it, and I didn’t get in. I’ve started playing a lot of Bach recently. And found that I loved it, but it took me years of hearing how influential Bach was before I looked at his music myself. I think a part of why is as drawn to Chopin, other than that the music is so beautiful, is that I’d never played him when I was young, so I felt like this was a new thing I’d found for myself.
The show introduces classical music through humour and storytelling rather than traditional concert form; do you think comedy can make audiences feel less intimidated by art forms often seen as inaccessible?
Absolutely! One of the main skills of a comedian is showing people the world from your own perspective and inviting people to see things in a new way. We work to be aware of the energy in a room, so while many forms of performance like classical music almost exist as a spectacle that the audience is invited to witness, stand-up comedy involves the audience every night as part of the show. That relationship forces comedians to make sure what they’re saying is getting through to people, because if it’s not, then they’re not going to laugh. A musician might be able to say “they didn’t get it”, and they might even be right, but by and large, for a comedian, if the audience doesn’t get it, that can only really be your fault.