Brian Connor was born in 1962, first living in Bangor, and then in his grandfather's house in Belfast, which fortuitously came with a piano. At around three years of age, Brian first connected with the piano. He realised early on that he could make sense of the keys. In a world where perhaps not a lot made sense to him, he could see logic in the layout of the ebony and ivory, and he could hear logic, spoken by the keys.

That deep connection with music became an ever-present fixture in his life. He realised that he neither needed nor wanted notated music – he went straight from ear to key. He saw improvisation not as an option – it was just what you did: you hear the tune, you play the tune. You hear the language, you speak the language.

From this very early age, he loved playing the piano in the front room. Later in life, while playing a rhythmically complex Norwegian folk song – that he was breaking down into its unbalanced fragments – with traditional player Sharon Shannon, she said to him: ‘It’s a tune and it goes like this’. It’s a tune… And it goes like this. It’s a tune… a message simple and true.

Next, the family moved to Holywood – and the piano came too. Brian had lessons in the Ulster College of Music. His talent was nurtured by the head of the music department at Sullivan Upper School, Eddie McCombe, who was a heroic figure in Brian’s years at the School. A great sight reader, Brian played for the choir, the orchestra, the soloists, the singers, and he played violin in orchestra and chamber groups.

Musically, it was an intense time. Music almost succeeded in drowning out the noise of teenage demons. The intensity was always close to him as an extreme point on his spectrum of expression. His musical nature was improvisatory. Because it gave him freedom. He played a lot of jazz – the word ‘jazz’ soon becoming a word for him that covered all styles of music, a word that simply meant ‘simply’. Regardless of what he was playing, he thought with a jazz sense of mind – the shape, the harmonies, the movement. It was all jazz – all about freedom and the frozen architecture of the moment.

Ultimately, he saw any piece of music as an opportunity to find freedom. That caused some difficulty with teachers, who'd want him to play the actual notes. Brian would be the first to admit he was hard to teach.

LEAVING SCHOOL

Aged 17, the Irish pianist and teacher John O'Conor agreed to teach Brian, in what was the biggest juncture in his life so far. He left school before his A-levels to enrol at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. It was a chance to get ahead in music, and he soaked up the inspired teaching of John O’Conor as well as the high standards of other young students surrounding him.

It was also a chance to get ahead in adult life – though he was hopelessly immature and unable to negotiate the journey from misfit schoolboy to misfit student with much dignity.

He arrived at the Irish Academy at a special moment – it was a formative time for Brian, studying with incredible musicians, teachers and colleagues. Also, it was the beginning of a chaotic period in Brian’s life. Having graduated from the Royal Irish Academy of Music he took up a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London. But still unsettled, unruly and self-destructive, Brian yearned to get back to Ireland. After a couple of years, he returned to start a career as a performing musician.

Brian Connor

BEING A MUSICIAN

In Ireland, he became musical director at many theatre companies – large and small, north and south, and in 2004 he was Musical Director for the centenary celebrations of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s National Theatre. He composed music for plays at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, Druid Theatre in Galway and the Peter Ustinov Theatre in Bath. He became a versatile figure in the world of performing and recording, chosen to record on many of the film soundtracks recorded here by the Irish Film Orchestra in the '80s and '90s.

It was a time when he was able to enjoy his creative life and make connections in music and the arts that would establish a base for his subsequent career. He got married, and moved to Dublin. He continued to work in TV, theatre, musicals, and with singers – always singers: jazz and Lieder and everything in between. Throughout his career he gravitated towards singers. For Brian, the accompanist interplay was a conversation – a conversation that allowed people to listen in. And he liked every part of that.

Even in the Lieder world, he leaned toward making instant interpretative decisions. He played the notes on the page, but always looked to find the freedom that lurked, unwritten, between those notes. And behind all this, he was playing jazz. All the time.

And with the myriad styles he embraced – even in the classical world – Brian felt that he had a life as a jazz musician; not necessarily represented in repertoire choices but always in the performer’s task to bring music closer to the ear than to the page. The exploration of the sound, not the notation.

Brian’s career as an artist saw, time and again, professional relationships become important friendships. He spoke fondly of ‘getting to do a gig with your friend’. That’s ultimately what he sought. And getting paid to do it seemed to be the bonus.

In the '90s he was Riverdance’s musical director in London. It was an exciting time for music and arts – and self-confidence – in Ireland. It was a true renaissance in musical entertainment, Irish and international. With Riverdance, he toured the UK, Europe and the US. But with a tendency to get bored quickly, three and a half years later – what he once described as his attention span! – he changed path.

On a quiet Sunday night, in Chiswick – during his Riverdance MD tenure – with nobody around, he decided to draw a picture. With no talent, experience or interest in drawing, he went to his hotel window and began to draw the fast food restaurant across the street.

That very week he got a call. A meeting was set up with Eleanor McEvoy. Her arm had been hurt arm in an attempted mugging, and she couldn’t play on an upcoming tour. As Brian asked about the incident, it transpired that it happened outside the very fast food restaurant he had drawn.

It was a remarkable coincidence. A lovely, ‘meant-to-be’ kind of a friendship ensued – the kind of happening that seemed to embody what Brian was about. They went on tour, promoted her album Snapshots and then recorded Yola. It was another example of how his musical connections became important friendships.

And that kind of magic wasn’t a one-off. One day, Brian got a call to record with Christie Hennessy. He had a premonition that he had to give Christie a pile of papers.

So when he first met Christie, he told him, “At some stage I have to give you a pile of papers”. Christie – who couldn’t read – wondered why?

The recording progressed, until a chamber ensemble had to be added. A couple of arrangements couldn't be completed in time, so Brian was asked to step in. And so, four weeks after his initial conversation with Christie, he turned up at the studio with the string arrangements written out, and handed Christie a big pile of papers.

There was an understated magic to the moment. It was something that could only have happened between Christie and Brian. And they both understood that something a little special had happened. It didn’t need explaining, it was right there in front of them. It was a moment of chemistry, musical or otherwise, who knows?

In many ways, Brian’s career as a freelance pianist can be seen as a sequence of shows, an ongoing tour, with each gig being consequential, leading directly or indirectly to the next.

His production, and playing, on Eleanor McEvoy’s seminal album Yola, had people sit up and listen. Soon, a decades-long relationship with RTÉ and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra began, as a player, arranger, composer and producer – including his final work as producer of The Songs of Leonard Cohen in Bord Gáis Theatre and the 3Arena in Dublin, and a remarkable show celebrating Emily Dickinson for RTÉ / The National Concert Hall with music by Damien Rice, Aaron Copland, Carla Bruni, and Billie Eilish.

Although based in Ireland, he travelled endlessly for projects in the West End, to Broadway, and to Chicago and New York.

RE-LEARNING & DIAGNOSIS

And then, heading for 50 years of age, Brian had a thought that not a lot of musicians of his calibre might have: ‘I’ll take some piano lessons’.

And so, drawn in part by their extraordinary abundance of Steinway pianos – but perhaps also by something unknown even to him at that point – he began a Master’s degree at the Cork School of Music. He completed his first year, living an idyllic life in West Cork, and getting back to more classical sensibilities.

But he wasn't achieving – or experiencing – the sound that he wanted. He had an odd feeling. He repeatedly asked to be shown by the ever-patient teacher Eleanor Malone “how to play one single note”, because his playing wasn’t sounding or feeling the way it should, when he played.

Brian didn’t realise it at the time, but the real reason he went to the School of Music was because he wasn’t feeling what he needed to feel – it took a year for it all to unravel. Little did the three-year-old who was drawn to the piano keys in his grandfather’s house know that nearly 50 years later, it would be those same keys that would lead to his diagnosis. A Steinway triggered the alarm. The keys were the canary in the coalmine.

Brian couldn’t feel the vibration that had been ever-present before. It turned out that he had a giant tumour in his chest, which was stopping his frame from vibrating when he played. That's why it wasn't sounding right: his body wasn’t free to vibrate.

It was the diagnosis from hell. A devious tumour. An exceptionally rare case. But a brave surgeon stepped up, and said he’d remove it. Mr. McGuigan and the Royal Victoria Hospital did a fantastic job. Recovery was slow, but it was an enormous recovery. He came out of it much better than any of us could have thought. And what followed was a really fulfilling decade, for which he was always thankful.

But along with that single note (!), he had to choose recital repertoires for his degree. He was drawn to John Cage. “That's actually my voice, what I want my voice to be," he thought.

John Cage was, in some ways, Brian’s closest partner in life. Not unlike the three year-old understanding the logic of the keys, Cage made sense of the universe for Brian. He found security in indeterminacy.

Cage was Brian’s Jesus figure. Without him, he wouldn't quite accept the way things were. With Cage, he accepted the ambient, whatever the situation. Any sound that happened, whatever pitch, rhythm, or duration, it was simply a consequence of being alive, and therefore it was fine. It was only when you removed ‘duration’ that you were in trouble.

A NEW BEGINNING

The diagnosis, and the subsequent surgery, nudged him further into the classical world. At first, he mentored music students at Queens University, Belfast, and began working with the Ulster Orchestra. He believed he would need to concentrate his life and work locally due to the inevitable disability brought about by his major surgery. But his recovery was so complete that the world of national and international travel opened up again, and in his last few years he became well enough to undertake performance tours to China, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.

Brian always searched for the peculiarity, the individualism, the interpretation of the singer, enabling countless solo performers to find their unique voice, in a world intent on reading notes from a page.

Brian Connor with lyric opera soprano Danielle de Niese at the NCH, Dublin

He read the rules – he didn’t quite agree with them – and he brought something else into the musical equation; that thing that turns notes on a page into something beyond. A feeling. A moment. A fresh reality every time.

And it was always there; it all stemmed from his improvisational instinct as a three-year-old. Brian was a rule-breaker from the off. He was instinctively – and always – about interpretation. He questioned the rules: does this ‘classical’ song, for example, require a lighter sensibility?! Do we need to bring a comedian into the fray? (The answer is ‘yes – probably’). Whatever it takes to make the song belong to the singer. And that’s not a role that usually belongs to the pianist. But it’s one thing that made Brian different. He understood the brief like no one else.

He strove for things to be sung right, in a way that was natural. He wanted the singer to sing like the way they were, not just how they thought they were. And it was that nuanced, musical idiosyncrasy, that moment of sonic individualism, that Brian sought out. In a moment where he could have delivered the brief with ease, he searched for that rare thing that was devastatingly beautiful – and more often than not, he found it.

And musically, that is what set Brian apart. In the world beyond music, it was the world of real-life, human relationships where Brian created moments, changed lives, charged lives, and allowed everyone to find, and sing, their song – and sing their song, and sing their song.

Brian Connor passed away on December 28, 2024.