26 July, 2024

Esteemed pianist hits the scales for 20th anniversary

Paddy Cornfield gives another annual performance with the Devonport Chamber Orchestra this Sunday, his 20th in a series much appreciated by local music lovers. Helen Vause reports.

Piano man… Paddy Cornfield at the keyboard of the grand piano he has at home in Stanley Bay

When the gleaming grand piano is rolled off the truck and into Holy Trinity Church on Friday morning, Paddy Cornfield will be very pleased to see it.
The Steinway is being trucked over from the Aotea Centre for Cornfield to play on Sunday 28 July in a concert with the Devonport Chamber Orchestra (DCO).
The timing is pretty tight, but he’ll have a chance to rehearse before the concert.
“It’s a bit like an old friend turning up and you are really pleased to see them, says Cornfield. That’s the way it usually goes with the orchestra, where Cornfield claims everything runs like clockwork on a tight but expertly crafted schedule he’s proud to be part of.
It’s Cornfield 20th anniversary year with the DCO. The engaging Englishman has played 19 concerts in two local venues since a fortuitous introduction in 2004, not so long after Cornfield and his family chose to settle in the neighbourhood.
There have been lots of other gigs in many other venues – and other instruments – but he clearly loves this orchestra and looks forward to being part of what he fondly refers to as the annual ritual.
“The Devonport Chamber Orchestra is quite unlike anything I have known before. It is amazing to me that it is run by Roger Booth with such efficiency, without any politics or mucking around.
“The resources are not great but he always pulls it together so well, with the right people when we need them. And he’s the guy that gets the Steinway here,” Cornfield says with a chuckle. “It always seems to all make for a great concert.”
As Cornfield says, the reputation of the DCO and the standard of these performances means they are eagerly anticipated by a growing audience.
When concert day comes around, some people arrive up to an hour before the music begins, to ensure they get seats close to the front, says Cornfield. “I think there can be a line out into the street as the hour comes around.”
For this occasion Cornfield, with just one rehearsal on the Steinway (but an earlier one on the regular piano), will play Brahms’ first concerto, a very long piece which he muses may tax his memory.
He always commits his performance pieces to memory and so far, so good, he says – apart from “getting a little lost once or twice and busting my way back in”.
He makes it all sound a bit of a lark but his performances are always of a high standard.
Cornfield points out that the concerts in the church are very inexpensive to attend ($25 for adults and $20 for seniors and students) and pretty much accessible to anyone.
Although the DCO is a community orchestra with a modest and tight rehearsal schedule – right before the concerts – the musicians are not afraid to tackle the most ambitious works.
The Brahms, Cornfield says, will be challenging, not that he won’t be ready for it by performance time.
In his bubbly, engaging style, he writes entertaining programme notes, sprinkled with anecdotes.
This year, whilst hoping not to get too emotional about the Brahms concerto and its significance to him, he also reminisces about what else goes on at the DCO concerts from crawling babies and the odd stray dog circling the piano.
A few years back he’d talked of retirement, then changed his mind. There are always snippets about playing other instruments – or failing to progress with the cello.
He was indeed a drummer for a while and he taught himself to play the violin. In the programme notes for the 12th concert he noted “my fingers are getting stiffer and it’s becoming harder to arise early on a cold, dark morning to practise scales before going to work”.
It’s easy to see – and hear – just how much of a buzz playing with the DCO gives him, but yes, he says, at 62 those fingers are getting a bit stiffer and it’s getting harder some days to make musical magic of the sort he wants on the keyboard.
Before performances, the practice routine is a disciplined daily thing, with an hour and a half of scales to be done for starters.
Instead of treating the household to that repetitive sound on the grand piano in the living room, he’s on a smaller upright piano at the end of the hall, with the dampening pedal working hard.
Amazingly, he says he can now run through his keyboard exercises while watching Breaking Bad with his headset on for the dialogue. Apparently his fingers just know their way over the notes on repeat after all these years.
Cornfield describes his musical career as ‘chequered’, running alongside his working life in IT for airlines.
Before he came to New Zealand with his wife, Julia, a clarinet player, he did part of a chemistry degree before he made a late entry into the Royal College of Music.
Although his interest in the piano and studying music had cooled in his late teens, he shone at music school. And although he was unsure of his direction there always seemed to be jobs.
From the way he recounts it, the unexpected has seemed to mostly dictate his next moves.
For example, by chance he saw a scrappy note on the music-school notice board, looking for someone to write advertising jingles. It looked like eaqsy money, and it worked okay for a while in a glossy world just off Carnaby St in London and frequented by celebrities of the day.
Then the young musician, who says he never really thought he was going to make it as a concert pianist, wandered into popular music, playing the keyboard with a British band called November One.
The group had some high points. In typical jocular style he recounts the story of a song, actually written by his mother, called ‘Big Boy Little Boy’. November One had a flutter up the pop charts in the late 1980s but the deals they may have hoped for seemed tantalisingly elusive.
“I thought, ‘Screw this for making a living,’” Cornfield recalls.
He scored an airline job working in data before a chance call from a friend working in recruitment sent him and Julia off to New Zealand.
They found their way to Devonport and a big villa in Stanley Bay where they raised their family.
In another of those unexpected turns, Julia mentioned to an acquaintance at preschool that her husband was a pianist.
He remembers an instant connection with the DCO people but word of his talents spread fast and he’s frequently played elsewhere too.
Outside the classical realm, he linked up with the Wonderfish Collective, a local band of 13 pieces and sometimes more, playing keyboards but also sometimes drums and even saxophone.
He has sold the drumkit and hasn’t perhaps got to grips with the cello, but the organ has taken his fancy.
It occupies another room of the house and just recently he was the organist at Holy Trinity for a funeral.
The big villa is quieter these days with kids grown and flown. Somewhere in one of his chatty programme notes a few years ago he thanked the neighbours for their forbearance over the weeds and sometimes messy garden spilling out from the “music house” and the sounds floating out from the old sash windows.