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 mentioned it used to be more than likely tension, however advisable that he make an appointment with a neurologist.

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

“It turned into straight away transparent that I needed to in finding out what used to be occurring,” he mentioned.

Dr. Klaus Schreiber, a neurologist and a classical track lover, seen Hodges acting a couple of minor bodily duties — strolling throughout a room, undressing and dressing — ahead of he despatched him for a chain of checks 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 track. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has premiered and recorded works by way of many vital composers of this century, and the ultimate. Not too long ago, his signs have compelled him to scale back and prioritize his acting commitments.

The worst signs, which hardly ever happen, can depart him feeling, he mentioned, 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 compelled Hodges to make “aesthetic selections,” he mentioned, to choose what track to fee and to accomplish with better rigor. The prognosis has “made me attempt to focal point much more on what a couple of contradictory issues are maximum vital to me.”

Hodges has bold 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 more than a few recent composers. In John Adams’s “China Gates” (1977), Hodges has blended 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 by way of Beethoven and Harrison Birtwistle, an in depth collaborator. The juxtaposition illuminates the complexity, unpredictability and orchestral scale that animate the track of 2 composers centuries aside. Taking a look again, Hodges learned 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 certified 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 line with the Perseus fable.

Hodges attended fundamental college at Christ Church Cathedral Faculty in Oxford, the place he took courses 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 “Struggle Requiem” on the Royal Competition Corridor beneath Simon Rattle.

“We had been woken up previous than the remainder of the college to observe,” Hodges mentioned. The scholars who didn’t play track “were given part an hour extra sleep than I did the entire of my early life.”

For secondary college, 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, offered Hodges to recent track by way of taking part in an LP of track by way of 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 “Buildings II” for his or her academics and fellow scholars at Winchester, to bemused reactions.

“I take into accout him being very actual — and inspiring me to be actual — and intensely musical,” Morison mentioned of Hodges in a telephone interview. “He used to be in a position to make the track discuss as track.”

In 1986, Hodges took a seminar with the composer Morton Feldman on the Dartington Summer season Faculty, the place Feldman inspired upon him the seriousness of the experimental avant-garde. Hodges additionally performed in a band that coated songs by way of 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 track, and taking part in Debussy,” Hodges mentioned.

For a number of years, he regarded as 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 mentioned. “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 automotive crash in a while after the transfer had ended her profession as a performer. “She used to mention to me, each time I’d come to her lesson and bitch, ‘Mr. Hodges, it’s a must 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 — typically in recent repertoire and continuously with items written for him. He’s a professor of piano on the State College of Tune and Acting Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and virtually continuously premieres new paintings solo and in chamber track formations.

“These kinds of composers that we had idolized once we had been youngsters, he has therefore commissioned items from,” mentioned Morison, who stays shut with Hodges. “It’s an odd thrill to witness that.”

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

When that section handed, Hodges felt aid. He had a transparent prognosis, and the dopamine remedies prescribed by way of Dr. Schreiber helped. “The drugs makes it conceivable for me to occasionally really feel and play like I don’t have it,” Hodges mentioned. “While you’re affected by one thing like that and also you’re untreated, you are feeling such as you’re getting outdated ahead of your time, you are feeling like your kids have worn you out — and my deficient kids had been blamed for that.”

Hodges has needed to make painful selections 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 crowd has toured Europe’s primary new-music fairs and recorded six albums of recent track in combination.

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

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

Taking part in with Trio Accanto “used to be ultimate chamber track for me,” Hodges mentioned. However, he added, “Parkinson’s makes it important for my lifestyles to be easy.”

Hodges has additionally realized 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 continuously 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 somewhat an excessive amount of,” Hodges mentioned previous that day, “however within the scenario of taking part in, that’s approach higher than having taken too little.”

In an electronic mail, Saunders mentioned 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 put in writing him an bold new piece she described as “a large, lengthy solo in line with the concerto.”

Seven different composers are lately 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 by way of Christian Wolff, “Scraping Up Sand within the Backside of the Sea.” Hodges additionally plans to document an album with works by way of 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 another way on account of his sickness. One composer lately “regarded instantly at my palms as though they might be twisted or bleeding,” he mentioned. However many extra of his collaborators were supportive, serving to him adapt with out condescension or pity.

Hodges says that his objective, now, is to regulate his profession “to make certain that I’ve the most productive probability to gradual the development of the illness and thus stay taking part in with any qualities I would possibly have had ahead of Parkinson’s roughly intact.”

He is aware of that would possibly now not ultimate perpetually. “If I must forestall taking part in, then I am hoping that my pals inform me I must forestall taking part in,” Hodges mentioned. “However, this present day, it’s running.”