The dilemma facing everyone who makes music at every level is very real and poignant: To what extent to trust one's own ear and to what extent to "take someone else's word for it." Each of us is alone with what we hear. The artist attempts to make what she hears audible to others. Whether or not it comes across is often not clear until after the passage of time--sometimes years. That is one reason why it is so hard to make a living as a performer. It takes time to develop the art and it takes time for the listener to process the levels of its meaning.

Aren't we in it for the long haul? Isn't the point of the good stuff that it remains good? Or do we do it just to pretend that we know what we are doing?

As long as children are under pressure to rattle off Beethoven sonatas before they have the slightest bit of auditory self-confidence--like eating broccoli--the dilemma will intrude upon early training with results exactly the reverse of what a reasonable person would desire: any reasonable kid will quit as soon as possible.

None of this would matter so much except that it influences listening for years and years.

When did I last sit through the consecutive performance of two major piano works lasting more than one hour in all with an impression that the time had flown by? Yesterday when Victor Rosenbaum played the Haydn F minor Variations and Beethoven Sonata in C, Op. 2, No. 3.

Mr. Rosenbaum is an attentive, meticulous musician whose respect for the score is total. But he goes beyond that, unearthing the essence of each work as it comes to life on the piano--ah!! that's the tricky part.

This is the aspect of piano playing that most interests me. The result, especially in the Beethoven, was revelatory: I heard the piece in a whole new dimension which is there to be revealed. Mr. Rosenbaum did not invent or contrive it. By respecting the score and by plunging in to its excesses of contrasting speed and slowness, bravura and intimacy it became clear that the piece has its basis in sound, not in a theoretical analysis.

Bravo Rosembaum!

Yesterday it was my great pleasure to see films of Artur Rubinstein playing the piano: one of a recital in Moscow, the other of the Chopin F minor Concerto played with the London Symphony, Andre Previn conducting. It was especially moving because I am not fond of that concerto; I find it too long and rambling despite moments of great beauty and vigor. The last movement is, however, a totally satisfying outburst of Polish peasant dance. The musicians all enjoyed it; I didn't want it to stop.

It was all the more moving in that Rubinstein was already at an advanced age and I suspect he might have had the feeling it would be his last performance of the work. But then he always played that way, savoring every nuance as if he were discovering it for the first time.

This quality directly affected a performance I played in Prague several years ago. Rubinstein's daughter was attending the festival of which the concert was a part. We had a pre-concert chat in which she confided that she didn't like the trio I was going to play. I agreed; it was not a favorite of mine, either. While in the wings ready to go on stage, I looked out and saw her face, which strongly resembles her father's, seated third row center and I knew he would never perform a piece bringing anything less than total commitment to its importance. I found things in the music that I had never known were there.

Afterwards she said: "I change my mind about that piece."

It was really surprising the other day to hear an excellent student orchestra playing well, every note in place, every entrance neat and tidy, everything as much in order as could be imagined in a very ambitious work -- except that the colossal humor of the piece was nowhere to be found.

I was reminded of a recent master class of Robert Levin which he concluded by glaring at the audience and growling: "Do you know what is missing in Classical music?"

"HUMOR!!!"

It may seem odd that a post about a painter appeared on this blog about listening. The connection is that it takes openness to see and also to listen. An image may continue to delight and instruct us years after we first saw it though at the time we didn't realize its potential impact. The same is true of sound.

People sometimes come up to me and recall a concert I played thirty years ago. I consider it an affirmation of our mutual capacity to open ourselves to sound--me as performer, the other as listener.

How nice that people can react even without the imprimatur of media fame.

Yesterday I attended the opening of a retrospective exhibition of paintings done by a woman who began painting in her 80's and continued until she died at 101. The paintings include some astonishing landscapes displaying an extraordinary sense of structure and color.

One of the most outstanding aspects of the show is that someone believed in her genius--actually two people, but one in a position to further her career as an artist. That one, Otto Kallir, was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. As a young student, new to New York City, I needed a job. With a fresh B.A. that qualified me for not very much, I consulted the Times Help Wanteds, starting with A for Art Gallery. That part-time job was one of the most fortuitous things that ever happened to me.

Kallir responded to the directly unique aspect of people. He supported people whose spark was vivid to him, whether a woman in her 80's -- most of the people around him thought he was mad to do that -- or a youngster still searching for the right road.

The painter was Anna Mary Robertson Moses. I recommend the show, running through March at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York.

The trouble with competition is that it implies leveling. If those who compete are being assigned to levels, some pronounced higher than others, those who do the assigning are also self-assigned to levels, unspecified.

The trouble with artistic gifts is that they are not level in any respect. That is why the highest level of artistry communicates to the general public in a way that is superior in all respects to judgment by adjudicators. Give me the general public any day.

One of the things Glenn Gould did was to blind young players to the power of the general public to get the message. Perfection has its limits. Artistry does not.