Within the fall of 2018, the pianist Nicolas Hodges spotted his frame shaking. He introduced it up at a regimen physician’s appointment in Tübingen, Germany, the place he lives. The physician stated it used to be more than likely rigidity, however advisable that he make an appointment with a neurologist.

Hodges didn’t make that appointment straight away. However then, in January 2019, the shaking brought about him to play a improper word all through a efficiency.

“It changed into right away transparent that I needed to in finding out what used to be occurring,” he stated.

Dr. Klaus Schreiber, a neurologist and a classical tune lover, seen Hodges acting a couple of minor bodily duties — strolling throughout a room, undressing and dressing — sooner than he despatched him for a chain of assessments that showed Hodges had Parkinson’s illness.

Dr. Schreiber estimated that Hodges were acting with Parkinson’s for 3 years.

Hodges, 53, is a number one interpreter of recent classical tune. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has premiered and recorded works through many necessary composers of this century, and the ultimate. Just lately, his signs have pressured him to cut back and prioritize his acting commitments.

The worst signs, which infrequently happen, can depart him feeling, he stated, as though he “simply couldn’t play the piano.” However the prognosis has additionally bolstered his willpower to his artistry and the recent repertoire.

Bodily limits have pressured Hodges to make “aesthetic choices,” he stated, to choose what tune to fee and to accomplish with larger rigor. The prognosis has “made me attempt to focal point much more on what more than one contradictory issues are maximum necessary to me.”

Hodges has ambitious methodology and a capability to make the type of even extremely complicated items obviously audible. His tone colour at the piano can shift from vinegary to supple in seconds. He’s strikingly adaptable to the generally divergent visions of quite a lot of recent composers. In John Adams’s “China Gates” (1977), Hodges has mixed rhythmic propulsion with tiptoe delicacy. In Brian Ferneyhough’s opera “Shadowtime” (2004), he tackled a prismatically virtuosic solo whilst asking enigmatic questions out loud, like “What’s the dice root of a counterfactual?” In Simon Steen-Andersen’s Piano Concerto (2014), he confronted off in opposition to a video projection of himself at a smashed grand piano.

In 2020, Hodges recorded “A Bag of Bagatelles,” which wove in combination works through Beethoven and Harrison Birtwistle, a detailed collaborator. The juxtaposition illuminates the complexity, unpredictability and orchestral scale that animate the tune of 2 composers centuries aside. Taking a look again, Hodges discovered that he had recorded the album with untreated Parkinson’s illness.

HODGES WAS BORN in London in 1970. His father used to be a studio supervisor on the BBC who later labored in computing, and his mom used to be a qualified opera singer. Hodges started taking part in the piano at age 6 and composing at 9. Amongst his early items used to be the primary scene of an opera in accordance with the Perseus fantasy.

Hodges attended fundamental faculty at Christ Church Cathedral College in Oxford, the place he took classes at the viola, the oboe, the harpsichord and the organ, along with the piano. He sang within the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, acting works like Benjamin Britten’s “Warfare Requiem” on the Royal Pageant Corridor beneath Simon Rattle.

“We have been woken up previous than the remainder of the varsity to follow,” Hodges stated. The scholars who didn’t play tune “were given part an hour extra sleep than I did the entire of my youth.”

For secondary faculty, Hodges went to Winchester School, in Hampshire, the place Benjamin Morison, a pianist and composer who’s now a professor of philosophy at Princeton College, presented Hodges to recent tune through taking part in an LP of tune through Birtwistle and Gyorgy Kurtag. Hodges and Morison carried out an association of Stravinsky’s “The Ceremony of Spring” for 2 pianos and Pierre Boulez’s stressed “Constructions II” for his or her lecturers and fellow scholars at Winchester, to bemused reactions.

“I consider him being very exact — and inspiring me to be exact — and intensely musical,” Morison stated of Hodges in a telephone interview. “He used to be in a position to make the tune talk as tune.”

In 1986, Hodges took a seminar with the composer Morton Feldman on the Dartington Summer season College, the place Feldman inspired upon him the seriousness of the experimental avant-garde. Hodges additionally performed in a band that coated songs through the Intercourse Pistols and the Sisters of Mercy.

It used to be a heady and influential time. “I used to be improvising; I used to be taking note of bizarre, darkish, funky tune, and taking part in Debussy,” Hodges stated.

For a number of years, he thought to be pursuing composition, to the dismay of his extra historically minded mom. At age 23, he determined to refocus at the piano. “I simply used to be having extra a laugh as a pianist,” he stated. “Composing is an excessive amount of arduous paintings.”

As a part of that call, Hodges started learning with the pianist Sulamita Aronovsky, who had defected to Britain from the Soviet Union. A automobile crash in a while after the transfer had ended her occupation as a performer. “She used to mention to me, each time I might come to her lesson and bitch, ‘Mr. Hodges, it’s important to settle for everybody has those issues,’” he recalled. “‘It’s the individuals who get previous those issues who’ve careers.’”

Hodges has since carried out as a soloist with orchestras together with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — normally in recent repertoire and frequently with items written for him. He’s a professor of piano on the State College of Song and Appearing Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and virtually repeatedly premieres new paintings solo and in chamber tune formations.

“Some of these composers that we had idolized once we have been youngsters, he has due to this fact commissioned items from,” stated Morison, who stays shut with Hodges. “It’s an atypical thrill to witness that.”

WHEN HODGES RECEIVED his prognosis, the inside track got here with conflicting feelings. The primary, Hodges recalled, used to be a definite cockiness. “I’m going to be a scientific miracle,” he concept to himself. “I’m going to hold on no matter occurs.”

When that segment handed, Hodges felt reduction. He had a transparent prognosis, and the dopamine remedies prescribed through Dr. Schreiber helped. “The medicine makes it conceivable for me to from time to time really feel and play like I don’t have it,” Hodges stated. “While you’re affected by one thing like that and also you’re untreated, you are feeling such as you’re getting previous sooner than your time, you are feeling like your youngsters have worn you out — and my deficient youngsters have been blamed for that.”

Hodges has needed to make painful choices whilst prioritizing acting commitments. Since 2012, he has performed in Trio Accanto, an ensemble consisting of Hodges, the German percussionist Christian Dierstein and the Swiss saxophonist Marcus Weiss. The gang has toured Europe’s primary new-music gala’s and recorded six albums of recent tune in combination.

When Dierstein and Weiss discovered of Hodges’s prognosis, they have been shaken. “We’re scared, and we’re as involved and unhappy as we have been once we first came upon,” Dierstein stated in a video interview. “Nevertheless it used to be all the time transparent to us that we need to proceed taking part in with Nic and that we’ll take the sickness into consideration.”

After a duration of mirrored image all through the coronavirus pandemic, Hodges determined to withdraw from Trio Accanto. He discovered the logistics all in favour of touring to live shows and coping with the complicated instrumental setups required through many items too taxing. The 2024-25 season will likely be Hodges’s ultimate with the gang.

Enjoying with Trio Accanto “used to be perfect chamber tune for me,” Hodges stated. However, he added, “Parkinson’s makes it essential for my existence to be easy.”

Hodges has additionally discovered to construction the doses of his medicine — together with a dopamine inhaler, a receptor agonist patch and extended-release capsules — in some way that helps his live performance roster. This frequently calls for stark sacrifices: He necessarily schedules the worst of his signs.

In February, Hodges carried out Rebecca Saunders’s “to an utterance” for piano and orchestra, a piece composed for him, on the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. A last practice session the afternoon of the efficiency intended he needed to take dopamine as soon as at 4 p.m., and once more at 8 p.m.

“There may well be moments after I really feel like I’ve taken a little bit an excessive amount of,” Hodges stated previous that day, “however within the state of affairs of taking part in, that’s approach higher than having taken too little.”

In an e mail, Saunders stated that Hodges nonetheless performs with depth. “His contemporary efficiency of the piano concerto ‘to an utterance’ used to be good, and I discovered it deeply expressive,” she wrote. She is making plans to jot down him an bold new piece she described as “a large, lengthy solo in accordance with the concerto.”

Seven different composers are recently at paintings on new piano concertos for Hodges. This spring, he recorded Betsy Jolas’s whole solo piano works and premiered a brand new piece through Christian Wolff, “Scraping Up Sand within the Backside of the Sea.” Hodges additionally plans to document an album with works through Debussy and recent composers, very similar to his double portrait of Beethoven and Birtwistle.

On uncommon events, Hodges has felt he used to be handled otherwise on account of his sickness. One composer just lately “regarded instantly at my palms as though they’d be twisted or bleeding,” he stated. However many extra of his collaborators had been supportive, serving to him adapt with out condescension or pity.

Hodges says that his purpose, now, is to regulate his occupation “to be sure that I’ve the most productive likelihood to sluggish the development of the illness and thus stay taking part in with any qualities I may have had sooner than Parkinson’s kind of intact.”

He is aware of that may now not ultimate perpetually. “If I will have to forestall taking part in, then I am hoping that my pals inform me I will have to forestall taking part in,” Hodges stated. “However, these days, it’s running.”