Gwilym Simcock: The prodigious pianist reveals the music that gets his fingers twitching

You are in a concert hall. You don't know where it is located or why you're there. The lights are down. A man you don't recognise, wearing unremarkable clothing, walks across the stage, towards a grand piano. He faces the keyboard, sits down, cracks his knuckles, levels his hands and... you wake up.

It was a dream, a frustrating dream. Your mouth is wet with the anticipation of what you were about to hear, which was surely going to be beautiful. But the realisation now dawning is that you are never going to know, let alone hear, the music the man was about to play. It could have been anything, from baroque to classical to jazz to blues to boogie-woogie to rock'n'roll to Coldplay's greatest hits. By all the subtle shades of Schubert, it could have been anything. Anything at all.

That's the trouble with pianos. They can be anything, go anywhere – or they would if they weren't so bulky. The piano is the instrument commonly to be found close to the centre of almost every habitat of Western music.

Gwilym Simcock's slightly aquiline, boy-ish features may not fit those of the man in your dream, but he fits the bill all right. Simcock also plays the French horn, but the piano is his main squeeze. He is a prodigious musician of negligible vintage. In his 27 years he has enjoyed a full-scale classical training in addition to several years spent swinging gracefully on the international jazz scene. It is some CV. He plays solo and runs a trio, not to mention a quintet/sextet and a big band. Nor should we forget his role in the sepulchral, pan-generic improv group Acoustic Triangle.

Simcock is endowed with perfect pitch (present him with a note or cluster of notes and he can name them all). Show him to a piano stool and he will just take flight: he is a proper 21st-century musician to whom genre boundaries form no obstruction. Jazz? Funk? Boogie? Shostakovich? It's all just music to Simcock's ears. But then he is a pianist.

He is also a composer. Before the première of his first piano concerto at this summer's Proms, there will be the airing at the City of London Festival on Thursday of a piece he has specially written for the six-piece string group, the Aronowitz Ensemble. He will, of course, be joining in. He is a musician of parts.

For that reason, The New Review has decided to challenge him to take us to the heart of That Simcock Thing: to name, and discuss while listening, six favourite pieces of piano music that have served to shape the multi-talented renaissance musician that he is today.

He did almost as he was asked.

Grieg: Piano Concerto

"It's hard to describe why this piece affects me as it does. It is just so sad, so inherently beautiful. The sound of a full orchestra when you're sitting in a concert hall... my God, you cannot get that from anywhere else. I get that tingly thing every other minute in front of an orchestra.

Harmony is my favourite part of music. Of the three elements of music – melody, rhythm and harmony – it's the hardest part for most people to get their heads round. You can sing along with a tune, you can tap out a rhythm, but it's not so easy to participate in harmony.

I have to be careful because my pieces can sometime be too harmony-driven. And coming from classical music into jazz, I'm aware that the harmonic aspect is the one where the two forms are closest.

The funny thing with the piano is that you have all the harmonic alternatives mapped out right in front of you. It freaks me out slightly when I'm playing the French horn that I can use only one note at a time. But one of the most important lessons you learn about improvising is to ignore the first idea that comes into your head and to do something different. That applies to harmony too. It's a journey. You've got to get to a certain point – so how are we going to get there? That's one of the reasons I love doing open introductions to pieces [when playing jazz], because all I know is that I've got to get somewhere. OK, let's go! Pick a note, start playing and see what happens."

John Taylor: "Clapperclowe" (from Blue Glass)

"Clapperclowe is a place in the Lake District. John Taylor is so English. But what does that mean? Well, as with some other obviously English jazz musicians, such as Julian Argüelles and Iain Ballamy, you could say it means that the music doesn't take itself too seriously. In among all those moments of great beauty there is great character; it's very human. I always think that when I hear JT's playing.

I've done a couple of concerts with him – just two pianos, where we both play solo and then duets. I've never been so nervous in my life as when I was playing the solo set; I was making sure I was grooved, making sure there were no wrong notes and being completely inhibited in terms of how far into it I got. But when it came to his turn, John just got up and the music poured out, fluffed notes and all, in wanton abandonment. I was sitting there thinking, God, why didn't I do that?

Listen to him play. The music is just flowing through him and out through the piano with nothing stopping it. I aspire to that degree of wantonness."

Take 6: "A Quiet Place" (from Take 6)

"Take 6 are a jazz vocal sextet. So obviously this isn't piano music, but I love it and I love it because of their harmony. The inner parts are just astonishing. Listen to this chord here: a D-flat chord over an A-flat. It's not just the chord itself but partly the context of it, coming as it does straight out of a change of key. Listen... Wow! Ah, yes, there's a ninth in there too.

The downside of having perfect pitch is that it's sometimes difficult to get straightforward enjoyment from music. But then again, I don't know what it's like not to have perfect pitch. My enjoyment is a very analytical one because of the processes going on inside my head. So the first time I hear things there's a special edge of enjoyment, because as soon as you've clocked what it is you're hearing, it instantly becomes slightly less enjoyable. I mean, when you kiss a girl for the first time, it's a very a special experience which can never be repeated..."

Keith Jarrett: "Belonging" (from Belonging)

"This is possibly my favourite ballad tune of all time. What makes it beautiful for me is... Can I show you? Just pop downstairs with me. [We head south into a sauna-sized music room somehow encompassing a Yamaha baby grand, where Simcock demonstrates Jarrett's subtle ambiguity and his unusual shifts in the harmony.] Well, that's what makes it beautiful to my ears. It's all about context, I think.

Why is Jarrett great? It comes down to that word yet again: beauty. But he is also an explorer. When I put together a set for a jazz concert I regard it as my job to offer listeners a story. I like being taken to different places when I listen, so I apply the same thought to the presentation of my own stuff."

Chopin: "Fantasie Impromptu"

"A few months ago I got asked to do a concert entirely based on the music of Chopin, and for once I said no, because I didn't know what to do with the music. It is so complete in itself as piano music. There's nowhere you can take it. In the past, I've worked on Shostakovich and Ravel projects because the elements of the music can be separated – you can remove the harmony or the melody or the ostinato [repeated musical motif] from a piece and do something else with it.

Chopin and Rachmaninov are the guys who wrote completely idiomatically for the instrument. All of Chopin is fantastic. I listened to it in the car when I was little, on a cassette, and before I knew anything about music I loved it. A year or so ago I went somewhere with my parents and I found all these old cassettes of music I used to listen to when I was nine or 10, and we listened to them again. I hear them in a completely different way now... There is beauty in Chopin, but there is also something else. It is profoundly impressive."

Herbie Hancock: "Hang Up Your Hang-Ups" (from Man-child)

"For me to relax to music, it has to be something groovy, something funky. It's my down-time music. Anything any more engaging than this and I'd be right back into it.

This is great: just a one-chord vamp. And because I'm so sensitised to harmony, anything without much in the way of harmony won't pull me into musician mode. Perfect. It's not that there's no harmony; it's just that harmony isn't the story, or the point, of it. And in among all the funky squelching there is... a fabulous piano solo."

Listen to performances by Gwilym Simcock:

"Time and Tide"

"Almost Moment""Message"

Gwilym Simcock plays with the Aronowitz Ensemble at St Stephen Walbrook on Thursday and at Stationers' Hall on Friday as part of the City of London Festival, tel: 0845 120 7502, www.colf.org. He is also performing in Prom 31 with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday 9 August, tel: 0845 401 5040, www.bbc.co.uk/proms

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