Play It Again

June 24, 2013
The struggle to keep up an inspiring musical hobby while maintaining a manic, high-powered career animates this sprightly memoir. Rusbridger, editor of London’s Guardian newspaper and an amateur pianist, spent 18 months learning Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor, a piece whose treacherous rhythms, blindingly fast filigree, thunderous chords, and death-defying keyboard leaps give fits to concert virtuosos. Rusbridger’s account of trying to learn this widow-maker by practicing 20 minutes a day—longer sessions resulted in “burning shoots of pain”—makes an absorbing study in the intricate, exasperating physical niceties of high-performance piano playing. (His long-winded conversations with concert pianists from Daniel Barenboim to Murray Perahia on the meaning and emotional impact of the piece are less interesting, as talk about music tends to be; their pensées are usually as inchoate as Chopin’s chromaticisms.) Meanwhile, Rusbridger handles breaking news (at one point he finds himself rehearsing the piece in war-torn Tripoli) and collaborates with Julian Assange on WikiLeaks revelations. The reader follows Rusbridger as he squeezes practice and a social life built around impromptu musicales into an unforgiving news cycle; the result is a vibrant tale of work-life balance—and an imaginative case for the continuing importance of amateurism in a world fixated on professional expertise. Photos.