They call him page turner to the stars, and for Mike Oldham it's pure joy and little fear. So how did he get into the curious world of page turning? 

 

Getting into page turning happened by accident. In 1972, Alfred Brendel, who I’d known for a few years, invited me to a recording session. He was playing from the score and had someone turning the pages for him. On the second day of recording, I had lunch with him, and he said the page turner couldn’t come back after lunch, and did I think I’d be able to do it. And I just said ‘I’ll try!’ Aside from some small thing about a repeat I wasn’t sure about (I was too inexperienced to ask), it went well. And that turned out to be the first of an enormous number of recording sessions with him. Brendel and I have had 40 years of page turning, and we actually celebrated together last year!

 

To be a successful page turner one obviously needs to read music very fluently and it helps that you play the piano to some extent yourself. I’m an amateur pianist. I love playing and I still play pretty much every day. How good it is is another matter! I often play through as much as is playable of programmes in recitals I am going to attend. I fell in love with the First Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto at about age 13, and I worked through it for years, unsuccessfully. I would listen to BBC Radio 3, looking in Radio Times to see what was coming up, and then get the scores to read through. I had a real fascination with the score – I was a lousy sight-reader, but reading the score was a completely different thing. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of scores. My fascination with the score is most probably why I’m drawn to page turning.

 

My typical page-turning day or week varies. Sometimes it can be seven to nine concerts in a month. Other times, nothing. I’m a document controller at a firm of architects, and my page-turning work fits in quite well with my day job. I plan things well, and London concerts don’t require time off, so it doesn’t normally affect my job. I do find it more difficult to do a full day and then go over to whatever hall and do the evening too. The most difficult are lieder recitals or piano duets, because of the geography of it. For duets, the score is very wide and you have to be further away from the performers, because there are two of them! There’s a lot of stretching going on. It’s harder to stay out of the way. No banging into them! That’s the tricky thing with duets.

 

On the whole, I don’t need to do much preparation in advance, unless it’s something I know to be difficult. I did Boulez’s Second Sonata with Pollini some years ago at the Royal Festival Hall – and that’s very hard. Pollini was happy, though. I listened to it beforehand with the score numerous times. One thing I have learned over the years is that following a score with a recording is actually more difficult than when the pianist is playing it. It’s easier when you see the hand movements. I’ve done world premieres of pieces that I’ve not seen the score for. I’ve actually gone up there cold, just glancing over it first. I also ask the pianist if there’s anything particularly tricky.

 

I’ve hardly encountered any catastrophes. There was a small one once: Clifford Curzon and the Amadeus Quartet were performing the Brahms Piano Quintet at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. There was one point where Curzon wasn’t sure whether he wanted me to turn or he wanted to do himself. Before we went on stage, he said to me: ‘Just wait and watch. If I turn, I turn. If I don’t, then you just do it.’ Well, he decided to page turn himself, but so vigorously that the score fell off the desk. Fortunately I caught it, with the thumb in the right place – and we were saved. I teased him about it later! Once he played a little cadenza at the end of a Mozart piano quartet and I wasn’t ready for that. I’d then say, ‘Any cadenzas I should know about?’ He was delightful to work with though. Another thing one has to be aware of is ‘nods’. Nods are too dangerous. Pianists nod all the time! It has to be instinctive as to where one turns the page. There’s no formula – it’s not a bar before or anything as strict as that. Oh, and sometimes a pianist might not know the piece so well and tell me so in passing!

 

People ask if I get nervous walking on to the stage. Well, sometimes, and that’s when it’s a real ‘occasion’. Brendel and Fischer-Dieskau performed Winterreise at the Royal Opera House in the early 1980s, to a packed house. Now that was nerve-wracking! But you need the ability to keep calm and carry on. And look as if you’re calm, at least. Page turning is a strange thing to enjoy. It’s a big passion and I get a lot out of it. It seems that pianists are relaxed having me there. They know they can rely on me. They feel relaxed and it makes me feel good to know I can make them relaxed. I like to think that I contribute. Do I really enjoy the concert? The answer is yes, but it’s from a different perspective. You are so involved in it – I have no sense of time when we’re up there.

 

I have met lots of interesting people along the way, some of whom I’ve got to know really well. Curzon was the first important pianist I met. I’ve known Imogen Cooper for over 40 years! I met Radu Lupu at the finals of the Leeds back in 1969. I used to go to the Edinburgh Festival every year with András Schiff. We’d do endless chamber music, sometimes for almost two weeks. A few years ago I did the Messiaen Vingt Regards with Steven Osborne. I was just on another planet afterwards, and it took time to come down to earth. It was astonishing. After a concert I might go home, or sometimes have a quick drink with the artist and their friends. It can vary. There’s not a typical way of finishing. That first glass of wine after a concert is always very nice!

 

Mike Oldham spoke to Erica Worth.

 

Image: From the French film, The Page Turner