Listening differently

A concert isn’t just a performance for Aidan. It’s a conversation.

Beyond concert halls, he also performs for students and younger audiences. Not performing at them, but including them — explaining things as he goes.

With younger audiences, the questions change: what makes the piece move the way it does? What gives it its poetry? Why does Alexander Scriabin sound like everything’s on fire? What are you actually hearing?

Once, after a concert, a man came up to him. Not a regular, just someone who had wandered in. He wanted to say thank you for the Scriabin. “I would have spent my whole life,” he said, “not knowing this great mind had ever existed.”

Where music meets people

That same curiosity shows up in how Aidan builds his programmes.

He likes mixing things that don’t usually sit together: music with literature, fragments of film, different worlds crossing over. The idea is simple: give people a way in, whether they’ve grown up with classical music or are hearing it properly for the first time.

Because at its best, music tells a story. You just have to find the thread.

A performance for Dan Brown

That connection between music and storytelling goes back a long way.

When Aidan was twelve, Dan Brown’s Dutch publisher called, a week before the writer was due to appear at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam for the launch of Inferno.

“Could Aidan arrange Liszt’s Dante Symphony for solo piano and perform it on the night?” He said yes. Most of the audience hadn’t come for a piano recital. They came for Dan Brown. But somehow, Liszt and Dante fit perfectly.

🎥 Watch the Dante arrangement