After more than fifty years of performing, teaching, and living with the great piano repertoire, one conviction has only grown stronger: music is fundamentally an act of communication. Technique matters enormously, as do style, structure, historical understanding, and fidelity to the score. But none of these is an end in itself. The purpose is to bring a piece alive so that an audience can enter its world and experience something meaningful.
That is one reason I have always been drawn to large bodies of work—the complete Beethoven sonatas, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, Brahms, Debussy, Liszt. To spend months or years with a composer’s music is to witness an extraordinary process of development. Beethoven is perhaps the clearest example. His sonatas trace a journey from a young composer determined to establish himself to an artist who completely transformed the possibilities of musical expression. Performing the works chronologically makes that evolution palpable. It becomes possible to hear not only individual masterpieces, but a human being changing over time.
The score must always remain the starting point. Composers give performers an extraordinary amount of information: articulation, dynamics, tempo, phrasing, character. Those indications are not restrictions; they are the framework within which interpretation becomes possible. No two pianists will ever play the same work identically because no two musicians hear, feel, or physically approach the instrument in precisely the same way. Individuality emerges naturally. It does not need to be imposed on the music.
At the same time, understanding the architecture of a work is essential. Beethoven could take four or five notes and construct what I once described as a musical skyscraper. That ability to perceive the large structure—to understand where a phrase is going, how tension accumulates, why a seemingly small musical idea matters twenty minutes later—is what allows a performance to feel inevitable rather than episodic. The pianist has to inhabit both levels at once: the immediacy of the individual phrase and the architecture of the whole.
With maturity, the relationship to familiar music also changes. Pieces performed at twenty-five cannot simply be reproduced at seventy-five. Experience changes hearing. Teaching changes hearing. Life changes hearing. Returning to Brahms decades after first performing his complete solo works, I found myself asking whether years of experience might enable the music to speak more naturally and more deeply. That process of reconsideration never ends. A great work remains larger than any single interpretation of it.
Teaching is inseparable from this philosophy. A teacher’s responsibility is not to manufacture replicas. Demonstration can show what is possible, but the purpose is to inspire a student to discover an individual musical voice. Performing remains important to teaching for precisely that reason: ideas tested on the concert stage carry a different authority from ideas that exist only in theory. The relationship works in both directions. Teaching forces continual examination of assumptions, while performing keeps that examination connected to the realities of sound, communication, and risk.
Ultimately, a concert should transport an audience. I once compared the experience to sinking into a chair with a great novel and being taken into another world. That remains an apt description. Whether the music is Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, or Shostakovich, the performer’s task is to create the conditions in which composer, interpreter, and listener can meet. When that happens, the duration of a concert almost ceases to matter. Performer and audience travel through the music together, and both emerge from the experience changed in some small way.