Nick van Bloss’s extraordinary talent as a pianist is inextricably bound up with the Tourette’s Syndrome he has suffered since the age of seven. The piano represents his sole release from the estimated 38,000 tics he undergoes each day as his muscles contort and contract involuntarily, usually in a strict motor rhythm.
A Londoner, he began to learn the piano 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. I would always be 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.”
A Londoner, he began to learn the piano 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. I would always be 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.
In 1994, aged 26, Nick van Bloss played a televised recital in Poland at the Chopin Festival. This, 15 years ago, proved to be his last public appearance before his return to the concert hall with the performance of Bach and Beethoven at Cadogan Hall in April 2009. His Tourette’s had reached a level of severity that prompted a retreat into a personal, rather than public, world of music, freeing him from competitive pressures.
In 1994, aged 26, Nick van Bloss played a televised recital in Poland at the Chopin Festival. This, 15 years ago, proved to be his last public appearance before his return to the concert hall with the performance of Bach and Beethoven at Cadogan Hall in April 2009. His Tourette’s had reached a level of severity that prompted a retreat into a personal, rather than public, world of music, freeing him from competitive pressures.
In his years away from the concert platform, Van Bloss wrote an autobiographical book, Busy Body, published in 2006; the following year he was the subject of a BBC Horizon documentary, Mad but Glad, which explored the connection between neurological conditions and creativity. It featured an encounter with the renowned neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks who, having documented van Bloss in his book Musicophilia, infers a link between Tourette’s and his prowess as a pianist. Highlighting the compulsion of Tourette’s sufferers to touch objects repeatedly in a strict motor rhythm, Sacks describes touch as “an essential form of exploration”, and music as “a heightening and intensification of emotion that is immediately translated into action”.
Since 2008, van Bloss has been recording with award-winning producer Michael Haas, who says that “in polyphonic music, such as Bach, Nick offers a superhuman degree of precision and individuality with each voice, while never losing overall transparency,” and who feels that van Bloss’s Chopin and Rachmaninov are characterised by a “crystalline solidity” which enables him to build and shape works with total security and “achieve a near-perfect balance between vibrancy of keyboard playing and sweep of musical vision.”
Nick van Bloss is in little doubt of a connection between his neurological 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. I know that, without the Tourette’s, I wouldn’t feel creativity in the way that I do.”
Written by Yehuda Shapiro
Nick van Bloss is in little doubt of a connection between his neurological 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. I know that, without the Tourette’s, I wouldn’t feel creativity in the way that I do.”
Written by Yehuda Shapiro
