Manu Sinistra: Left-Hand Piano Concertos

A Severed Arm and Three Redemptions

The moment Paul Wittgenstein collapsed on the Polish front in the First World War, shrapnel severed his right arm.

For a young concert pianist from one of Vienna’s wealthiest families, losing a right hand felt like being stripped of one’s soul. Yet in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp, Wittgenstein drew keys onto wooden boards and practiced fanatically with his remaining hand. After the war, he used his family fortune to commission Europe’s greatest composers: write concertos for my left hand.

Ukrainian pianist Illia Ovcharenko calls this remarkable album Manu Sinistra—Latin for “left hand.” The moment the music begins, it seems impossible that only five fingers are touching the keyboard. They cascade across the eighty-eight keys, constructing the acoustic resonance of a gothic cathedral.

This is not an accommodation for impairment; it is an act of defiance.

From Bortkiewicz’s Elegies to Ravel’s Mud and Fire

The album’s most breathtaking revelation is the Second Piano Concerto by fellow Ukrainian Sergei Bortkiewicz. This forgotten jewel of late-Romanticism glows with Rachmaninoff-like melancholia and velvet orchestral warmth.

Under the baton of Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv with the MDR-Sinfonieorchester, Ovcharenko plays with an inescapable yearning for homeland—a cry for dignity arising from soil ravaged by war.

Ravel’s Concerto in D major plunges us into the trenches of the Western Front. Contrabassoon and lower winds murmur in the abyss before the solo piano erupts like artillery.

Ovcharenko refuses to treat it as a circus stunt. His left thumb sings like a burnished mezzo-soprano above the storm, while the other four fingers weave tempestuous currents beneath.

Prokofiev’s Irony and the Will to Live

Prokofiev’s Fourth Concerto proved too modern for Wittgenstein, who famously wrote back: “Thank you for the concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it.”

In Ovcharenko’s hands, those dry syncopations and razor-sharp accents become a celebration of black humor. It feels like a wounded soldier stepping out onto the ruins to dance a defiant tango.

If life cuts your wings, you dance on one foot; if fate takes your right hand, you conjure the universe with the five fingers you have left.