It is probably no accident that the conversation following my recent private recital was about cooking eggs.

Few things are as delicate as an egg. Temperature, humidity, proportions of wet and dry ingredients--any and all factor in as critical.

For the pianist every sound is a different specific egg. The hand is thermometer, hydrometer, scale and balance. Touch is the handling that produces if not a perfect, at least a memorable result.

In the presence of properly trained gross-motor skills children are fascinated by such playing and seek instintively to emulate the finesse that only sensitive touch can produce. Fingers drilled without the support of large muscle coordination are too busy to respond to the ear.

Is that why so many young players do not listen?

Competition, comparison -- these are synonyms for leveling off, stifling individuality.

At a critical moment in my life I lived in the midst of an old-fashioned family where music was assumed: everyone played an instrument, assigned at birth most likely, assure a resident string quartet. At first I found it wonderful. Then I realized my great good fortune to have had the opposite experience. The piano was my own, a special private space in which my imagination was free, unfettered by expected behavior. It was all a gift.

Why should it be otherwise?

Now I find to my astonishment that many families in America are using music in more or less that old-fashioned way: to assure a conformist security for their children.

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.