What is it about the way children listen? They hear everything. Just as they can smell onions cooking the minute they walk in the door, they are aware of a range of sound lost to most adults. That is why playing to children is so satisfying: you can feel them paying attention.

That is also why teaching them has to address the full range of what they hear, including overtones, right from the start. Having raised awareness of all that activity there is no way for them to find music boring or repetitive.

My teenage students have much greater attention spans than I had at their ages. That is why they do not quit.

That is also why they are not crushed by being reminded of how much more detail inevitably remains to be worked out. Quite simply, it is utterly and endlessly fascinating.

Yesterday I enjoyed playing chamber music after a necessary break in all my musical routines. It was good to be reminded of how I got into music professionally, which is via my work with children. That is the critical stage in putting 2 and 2 together, one of which is analog the other digital. The analog element is the one at risk in early training.

Am I the same listener who hears a severely developmentally challenged student the morning after hearing Anderszewski perform magnificently?

Most definitely! Anderszewski causes me to listen with him, not to him. The same is true for my needy student--indeed, for all my students. No one is being compared to anyone else. Each loves the sounds in a way unique to them. When they play they are sharing their otherwise secret attachment to the music.

In every circumstance it is a privilege to listen that way.

Still thinking about the Anderszewski concert: The program order was changed so that his concerto followed immediately after the overture to The Magic Flute--an opera that means so much to him that he knows it by heart and "performs" it often.

Pondering this made me better understand the quality of the supposedly out-of-tune piano entrances to which I referred a couple of days ago. Viewed operatically, it's not that they are so much out of tune as tremendously exposed. The sound waves are the subject not the notes per se, but the way the waves strike the ear. How like the unaccompanied voice in opera entering without the glorious support of the orchestra!

As I am a great admirer of Anderszewski's playing I hope you will understand that I refer to him from time to time. He is the kind of player who gives one courage to listen for oneself. When he plays it is as if he is hearing for the first time.

I find that less true of his Bach performances but then, Bach did not compose for the piano; the relative cool may reflect Anderszewski's instinctual response to that music's detachment from the sensual sound of his native instrument. The same music played on the instrument for which it was written--a harpsichord or clavichord not tuned in equal temperament--is deeply and exquisitely sensual. When I was too young to know anything about temperaments the distinction caused me nightmares. This is why I do not play Bach on the piano except on rare private occasions.

I saw the film Unquiet Traveler, available on DVD, about Anderszewski, in which he is heard playing, singing all the roles in The Magic Flute and commenting on quite a range of music.

He is not a sentimentalist. His use of the word "drunken" describing Chopin's Barcarolle is absolutely brilliant. I often characterize difficult pieces with melodies in thirds as drunken: two guys out on a toot after a bit too much to drink sing just like that, at least they do in Eastern Europe. I've heard it.

There is a loose fearlessness, recklessness, that comes with inebriation. Try it.

Yesterday my youthful four-hand duo were sight-reading two of the Variations in G by Mozart, K. 591. They are not expert, in the way that the word is usually defined. But their grasp of the content of what they were reading was right on target. After each variation I asked what was the main point of the variation and their answers were not only accurate but insightful.

At their age I would have been able to play every note up to tempo - I would have scored 100 on a sight-reading test, but I would not have been capable of that other level of precision.

It is like the difference between pronunciation and comprehension.

Last night I had a concert experience that shows how hard it is for us modern mortals to trust that sound conveys meaning beyond technical perfection.

Piotr Anderszewski played Mozart's Piano Concerto in B-flat K. 456. It is conspicuously written so that when the piano's entrances follow wind sections the piano sounds out of tune. One can only conclude that this must be intentional since the piano sounds perfectly in tune the rest of the time.

A colleague in the audience (not a pianist) was, however, shocked. "The piano was so out of tune!"

Could there be a more convincing demonstration of the rich complexity of the piano sound?