★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Light Room Bar at ILA. 26 Feb 2025
Aidan Jones is a pianist, and a comedian. There have been others before him who have successfully paired the two ‘disciplines’, such as the iconic Victor Borge, but Jones is an altogether different proposition. His show, Chopin’s Nocturne, is an homage to Chopin’s much-loved Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2. Audience members of a certain type and of more mature years would recognise the tune as the theme from the 1956 film Eddy Duchin Story starring Tyrone Power and Kim Novak. Younger members of the audience who are students of the piano might remember it as a Grade 8 examination piece for piano. Regardless, it is a beautiful piece of music, and Jones extolls its virtues as he dissects and questions it, and muses how it appeals to his thinking mind and what Chopin might have been thinking about as he composed it.
For fifty fast-paced minutes he trots out oh-so-funny anecdotes about his first job (as a shelf stacker in a supermarket), through to his failed audition as a piano student at the Elder Conservatorium of music (he chose not to learn the all the required pieces – instant fail), and his desire to be a comedian. During the lock-down years early in the COVID pandemic he set himself the task of learning the Nocturne, and succeeded, although when he finishes the show with an almost full performance of it, it is clear that he is still a maverick and he doesn’t quite follow the score as originally written, but it’s fun! As Jones quipped, “Sometimes you just say f**g stuff” and that’s what he does throughout his performance, and the one liners come thick and fast. Even Goya the artist slips in. You have to be there to see how it fits with the narrative about the music.
His dissection of the piece would enrage a musicologist – oh so offhand – but he demonstrates passionately to the audience what he has personally found in the Nocturne and what it means to him. It’s almost a theory lesson in music – chord structure, phrasing, voicing etc - but it’s not at the same time. What it is, is funny, very funny! And the audience laps it up.
Kym Clayton
When: 21 Feb to 8 Mar
Where: The Light Room Bar at ILA
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
