Saturday, July 24, 2010

Today a student rewarded me with a beautifully fluid reading of the Chopin G major Prelude, under tempo, of course, because she doesn't practice, but full of entirely pianistic nuance. In such hands, it is a study not in mechanical regularity but in the infinite color potential built into an instrument on which the smallest variants in finger position express nuances in the line.

I was not aware of the expressive power of the differently shaped and sized fingers of the two hands until after much damage had been done; I had believed that what looked regular on a piece of paper was supposed to sound that way.