When I told a young pianist that I was planning to write a piece about wrong notes he nearly tore my throat out. ‘I’d like to see you on stage in front of thousands of people trying to play Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto,’ he snapped.
My friend hasn’t played the concerto yet and presumably he’s dreading it: even the most seasoned soloists describe its left-hand leaps as the equivalent of a motorcycle jump across the Grand Canyon. At any rate, he left me in no doubt that wrong notes are a seriously touchy subject for pianists. No other instrument commands such a thrilling emotional range — but its demands in terms of memory and motor skills are incredibly cruel. And we pianophiles are cruel, too. The more you train your ear to hear nuances of rubato and pedalling, the easier it is to spot a finger-slip or memory lapse. Which, inevitably, we tend to talk about after a concert, if only to prove we’ve noticed. (Though, in our defence, this is nothing compared with the cold-hearted glee of balletomanes discussing a fall.)
I didn’t go to many piano recitals until I arrived in London in my 20s. Until then, I’d assumed that the musicians with the most pristine technique in recordings would be the most note-perfect in live performance. Not so. I hesitate to single anyone out but, what the hell: Krystian Zimerman has made such a prat of himself with his anti-American rants that I don’t feel guilty mentioning how shocked I was by his fumbled notes in a recital 20 years ago. Also, as I discovered when I criticised Zimerman in a blog post recently, some of his fans are as unpleasant as he is, and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to annoy them again.
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