Any 14-year-old who starts learning piano because they want to go to music school is generally in for a rude awakening, especially if they have their eye on a prestigious institution such as the Guildhall or the Royal College of Music. Typically, teenage students at these places will already have well over a decade’s worth of playing experience before they even pitch up for audition.

If you’re a 14-year-old latecomer with only one hand, you could be forgiven for thinking it pointless to even try. Plenty of people will tell you it is. Thankfully, Nicholas McCarthy is made of sterner stuff and is not so easily put off – though as he tells me when we talk, the head of one music school he applied to hung up on him when she realised he had a disability.

Nor did the prejudice end when his career as a concert pianist finally began. “Some of the things that have happened to me and been said to me in the music industry by very well-known and influential people would probably be grounds for lawsuits in today’s society,” he says.

Now 35, McCarthy was born without his right hand, but a teenage encounter with classical music lit something in him which made him determined to learn the piano. His eureka moment came at his Surrey state school when a friend (“she was really the only good musician in the school”) performed in morning assembly.

“I just had one of those epiphany moments,” he says. “I was filled with teenage naivety and teenage ambition and I thought: ‘I want to do that. I want to play the piano.’ Then very quickly I decided not only did I want to play the piano, I wanted to become a concert pianist.”

He had no training and there were no musicians in the family. What he did have was latent talent and a thing he describes as the “Kevlar exterior” which becomes second nature to many people with disabilities – determination and an ability to shrug off the looks and the comments.

By age 17 he had been accepted into the Guildhall’s junior department, and in 2012 he made headlines when he became the first one-handed pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music in its 130-year history.

In the same year he performed alongside Coldplay at the closing ceremony for the London Paralympics. Today he is one of the world’s leading exponents of what’s known as left-hand only repertoire – developed in the 20th century in large part by a trailblazing Austrian musician who lost an arm in battle, and augmented in the 21st century by works written specifically for one hand.

It’s the world premiere of one of these new works, by young Aberdeenshire composer Joe Stollery, which brings McCarthy to Edinburgh next week for a concert in a programme of events organised by disability arts organisation Drake Music Scotland. McCarthy will also play works by Liszt, Wagner, Schubert and Bartok.

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So what does a left-hand only piece sound like?

“Most of the time you wouldn’t be able to tell and that’s the amazing thing,” he says. “It’s almost like an aural deception. You’re seeing one hand on the piano but your ears are hearing something that sounds like two or three hands playing. So it is very cleverly written, and obviously I have to travel incredibly fast [on the keyboard] in order to fake that sound.”

As a result, it’s more physically taxing. “For me to do a 90-minute recital there’s no let-up at all whereas with a two-handed pianist, the left hand isn’t frantically moving for the entire concert. Likewise, the right hand. There’ll be moments of semi rest, whereas for me it obviously doesn’t work like that. So yeah, stamina is very important.”

The injured war veteran who McCarthy describes as “the Godfather” of left-hand alone repertoire is Vienna-born Paul Wittgenstein, older brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lost an arm fighting the Russians at the Battle of Galicia in 1914. After the war Wittgenstein approached composers such as Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel and commissioned left-hand only works from them. Ravel’s 1929 piece Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is the best known.

McCarthy has since made a documentary on Wittgenstein for BBC Radio Three and he remains a hero for the young pianist. As for why the works tend to be made for left-hand only, it’s partly a quirk of fate – Wittgenstein lost his right arm, as did another early pioneer, Hungarian composer Géza Zichy – and partly a fact of war. Tens of thousands of soldiers lost arms in the First World War and it tended to be their dominant one, the right. As a result, the repertoire for right-hand only is vanishingly small.

“I’m born the right way round almost,” McCarthy says. “If I was born without my left hand and only had my right, it would be very tough to have the kind of international concert career I have due to the lack of repertoire. I’d have to be very much arranging all the time, commissioning all the time. But thankfully there’s 3,000 works for left hand alone and 30 plus piano concertos, so there’s a real career’s worth of repertoire there.”

 

And so where Zichy and Wittgenstein led, McCarthy follows – touring the world’s top concert venues, championing the cause of wider access to music for people with disabilities and always expanding the repertoire of works for left-hand alone.

“I’ve continued the tradition of trying to commission as much as I can to develop it,” he says. “We have amazing composers in the UK, so I feel very passionate. Hopefully in the next century someone might be talking about me like I talk about Paul Wittgenstein, so I want to provide that pathway – and light it for future generations.”

 

Nicholas McCarthy performs Joe Stollery’s The Salmon Crossing and other works at St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh on June 6. On June 13 Drake Music Scotland’s Digital Orchestra for disabled young people performs works by disabled composers in collaboration with the Hebrides Ensemble at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh.