Derek Paravinci has been called a musical savant, an autistic genius and, less flatteringly, the human iPod. Born in 1979, he is blind and has severe learning difficulties, but he is also a gifted pianist. Since the age of four, he has been able to reproduce almost any music that he has heard just once. His talent has made him the object of academic study and a biography (called, with some hyperbole, In The Key Of Genius) but, although he has often played in public, this short tour represented his first full-length concert with orchestra.

As the players showed in their opening medley from West Side Story, the Emerald Ensemble’s sound leans towards the tea dance, but individual members showed a funkier side. In the end, it might have been better to hear Paravicini with a smaller band: the classic jazz quartet of piano, sax, bass and drums would have allowed more room for his rhythmic and melodic flair to shine through.

The programme wandered idiosyncratically from Bach and Debussy to Meade Lux Lewis by way of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, the piano part delivered, with no little style, as if it were by Rachmaninov. Classical music, though, even in customised arrangements, does not show him at his best; or rather, he invariably refashions it to suit his style, which emerges most clearly when he stays closest to jazz.

At one point the audience, encouraged by Paravicini’s biographer Adam Ockelford, was invited to name three notes, from which emerged a credible new piece, entitled South Bank Blues. This is probably where Paravicini’s true gift lies; his improvisations may not be wildly adventurous, but he is not score-bound, not least because he does not read music, even in Braille.
It is hard not to detect elements of both case study and circus act, but there was also a genuine sense of someone ordering the world through music.

Paravicini’s talent is still developing; he may yet become a pianist who astounds us in purely musical terms, without any reference to his circumstances.