Forgive me if you grow weary of reflecting on this familiar quotation from LESCHETIZKY AS I KNEW HIM, where the great Leschetizky is giving a timeless piece of advice to Newcomb:
"I have yet to discover whether you can ever put freedom and sureness together. I want you to know that you can," he went on, in almost pathetic tones, "for accuracy without expression isn't worth THAT," snapping his fingers.
"Our lessons from now on must have a different character entirely. You must play your pieces too freely for a while, and learn sureness from a different angle. Don't be afraid to express yourself. One player you may like to hear; the other, who knows far more perhaps, you do not care a bit for. Why is it? Your audience does not know either. They only know that there is something they like with the one; with the other they are more apt to say they never liked the piano anyway, and your audience longs to be pleased, and your uneducated audiences are also hard to please. They want emotion and expression more than technique. Educated audiences will give you credit for all kinds of things that the other audiences will not, and how every one loves beautiful tones and stirring rhythms!"
Several recent comments on this forum keep recalling the above passage to my memory. In all that I have learned and read about the piano, perhaps nothing else has been quite so meaningful.
When people complain, for example, about how Horowitz should have preferred "controlled tremolos" over "daemonic banging," I am thankful that Horowitz never listened to them. Few things in piano are more exciting than listening to a pianist--like Horowitz--who dared to play this or that passage just a bit faster than even he can. Remarkably often Horowitz would make a "mistake," i.e., hit a note that is not strictly on the score, in the midst of a torrent of passion--and the magnificent results will be heard and enjoyed and loved centuries after the admirable but dead plunking of technicians is forgotten.
I cannot really blame pianists who refuse to take such risks. Nor can I stop longing that they will change their minds, approach sureness from the angle of freedom, and recreate on stage some of those magical moments--which we all can remember--when a very happy pianist is at home without an audience, feeling profoundly free, lost in the moment, playing away with joyful abandon, generating their most beautiful and genuine music.