Amanda is, as she says, the Blog Mistress, so I'm starting by responding to her latest post. (I'm also going to try to fold as many points as possible into this post as it may be my last - I don't have any more transatlantic flights this week which will provide me with hours to write/a valid excuse not to practice.)In answering Amanda's question about where the responsibility for making concert presentations special lies, I'm going to return to one of my original points (fine, OK, Alex Ross' point, which I seem to have unofficially co-opted): … [Read more...]
Not all “special” is created equal
Wow. One day, five posts (four not written by me), and a lot to think about. As I read each post the first time through, I diligently made notes. Unfortunately, if I attempted to address all of the points in them that intrigued me, at the end of the week I'd no longer be a professional pianist, special or otherwise. One thing I've noticed which I do want to address, though, is the very wide variety of attributes/activities/priorities landing under the "special" umbrella. That's natural, and good, given the different perspectives the five of us … [Read more...]
It’s the music, stupid
First off, I'd like to thank Amanda (and ArtsJournal) for providing this forum for discussion of a question I think is really, really important, and for (inadvertently?) starting the discussion with this post. Because I'd been interested in "the special problem" for a while (and because I was involved in one of the concerts that inspired the post), I emailed Amanda in response to what she'd written. I'm sort of unspecial, myself, but I have heard some version or another of the phrase "a great performance of a great piece is not … [Read more...]