Monday, January 27, 2014

To Empathize, or Not to Empathize

At the CMA conference I heard a brilliant two-piano team strut their stuff.  Strut they did, and admirable strutting it was.  Stuff it was.  Stuff was all it could be given the circumstances:

Two pianos, perhaps initially a parlor genre, had, by the time of Liszt, become an inexpensive alternative to the orchestra.  Loud.  Lots of notes.

But do I play that instrument?  Would I want to play that instrument?  Would I kid myself into thinking that wanting to play like that was a good idea for me?

Apparently many people who study the piano do so because they aspire to that kind of brilliance.  It's a bit like getting delusional from looking at the ads in fashion magazines.