The best known of the 20th-century piano concertos composed for the left hand only – works by Ravel, Prokofiev, Britten, Martinů and Janáček, among others – were commissioned by pianists who had lost the use of their right hand. But, as Hans Abrahamsen puts it, his Left, Alone, first performed in 2016, was not written for a pianist with only one hand, but by “a composer who can only play with one hand”. Abrahamsen was born with restricted use of his right hand, and, though he played the piano from childhood, that limitation gave him “an alternative focus on the whole piano literature”.
