Grace Francis - Music and the Troubled Mind

Solo piano recital with Grace Francis: Watch Grace play here

In this recital the pianist Grace Francis, described by the The Sunday Times as a “phenomenon…of uncommon fire and energy”, explores the minds of composers closest to her heart.

Grace’s chosen works were composed in varying degrees of distress and mental anxiety. Through her exceptional playing Grace will also show us how we can find astonishing beauty through anguish and how exquisite art can often be the fruit of psychotic states.

Today we hear a good deal more than was ever the case concerning the problems associated with mental health. However, despite this, many people with psychological problems still feel shunned by modern society and statistically, men in particular, continue to suffer in silence. Grace works with Hennessey Brown Music whose founding director, Jonny Hennessey-Brown, lives with bipolar, as did Robert Schumann. Jonny has lost many friends to suicide through mental health issues and addiction. The depth and beauty of Grace’s playing in this recital is dedicated to them.

Grace believes that only in the music created by composers of the standing of Frederic Chopin can we feel the kind of pain and anguish that he certainly experienced himself in his own life. However, despite the darkness in many of the works played, is there always hope in the undeniable beauty of the music?

Listen and make your own choices as to what the answers might be for you.

Programme:
Schumann Carnaval, Op.9
INTERVAL:
Rachmaninov Elegie, Op.3 Nr.1
Rachmaninov Variations on a Theme by Corelli, Op.42
Chopin Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, Op.35 "Funeral March"

Composers and Notes:

Schumann's Carnaval is another deeply relevant work. The American psychiatrist and amateur pianist Richard Kogan said "it is a catalogue of bipolar symptoms and could't have been written except by a bipolar person".

Florestan and Eusebius show the extrovert and introvert and the two sides of bipolar which is omnipresent in Schumann’s writing. For further reading click here.

Rachmaninov suffered from paralysing depression that lasted for years. He couldn't compose or function for years at a time. With the help of a psychologist and amateur musician named Nikolai Dahl, Rachmaninov climbed out of despair and he completed his "Piano Concerto No. 2" in 1901 and dedicated the work to Dahl. We can perhaps hear the joy that comes when a depressive leaves a depressed state mixed with the intense melancholy of having to live with it and the fear of when the next bout might come in his two works of this recital.

Chopin wrote most of his Funeral March Sonata when he was in Mallorca with George Sand and she writes in a letter that he was very up and down and melancholic. He wrote in a letter that he saw apparitions coming out of the piano lid during his performance of it!