MICHAEL Nyman can rightly take his place centre stage as the everyman of the concert platform. Not many composers can claim to have their own symphony orchestra, to have written music for a computer game and a sex comedy (Keep It Up Downstairs), and to have worked with pop stars such as Blur's Damon Albarn on the score for Antonia Bird's 1999 film Ravenous. At 61, Nyman remains one of the darlings of Classic FM, most famously providing the music for Jane Campion's Oscar-winning The Piano (1992). The soundtrack recording, with the composer conducting and playing the solo piano part, has sold more than a million copies. And it was that movie which proved the starting point for Michael Nyman's latest tour, The Piano Sings, which sees him perform solo, presenting some of his best-loved film music. In some contexts, such pieces would be called piano reductions, but Nyman resists that label: "It's the opposite of reducing the music; it's returning it to its source. I write everything at the piano and then expand it. "Playing this music on solo piano is like sharing my own little secret with the audience, showing how the music first came out of the bottle, so to speak." Occupying the stage alone will in itself be an unusual challenge, but one Nyman is looking forward to. He says: "Playing solo can be lonely: it exposes me and it exposes the music. But it also allows me the opportunity to respond, not only to the musical material, but to the piano as an instrument. "Sometimes I may play these pieces briskly, which is what people might expect of me; on other nights I may play them as though they were 19th-century romantic piano music, not so as to overload the content but in terms of varying the articulation, the mood, the dynamic. "Whereas 10 years ago I might have felt that the fast and furious Nyman had to be represented, now I have the confidence to be simple and quiet." Audiences will also have the opportunity to see two classic silent movies, Paul Strand's 1921 portrait of New York, Manhattan, and Jean Vigo's boisterous snapshot of the French Riviera, A Propos de Nice (1929). The films will be projected while Nyman performs his own musical commentary-cum-counterpoint, part composed, part improvised: "With Manhattan, I shall be playing live over a pre-recorded track for two pianos, but although there is a score, I shall hardly bother to read from it. "With A Propos de Nice, I work from a sheet of paper with a few ideas on, but I change their order and articulation, and improvise around them. "What I play for both films will be different every night, and for me that is a new way of performing. It will keep me on the edge, to say the least." The tour serves as a launch-pad for Nyman's own record label: "At the moment of composing I am master of my own music, but it has been frustrating that recordings, the most public manifestation of my work, have been in the hands of five different record companies, each with its own attitude to back-catalogue, marketing and so on. "A conventional record company will release one album of my music a year, and I've found that process too slow. Now it will all be in my own hands, and the plan is to release as much as possible within as short a time as possible. "That may be considered foolish business practice, but I have a lot of music that I want to be heard." * MICHAEL Nyman's latest tour, The Piano Sings, is at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, on Sunday at 8pm. | 
