Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Do you recognize these quotes by famous pianists? Who said these:

1. "My great sadness is the realization that the first ten minutes of every concert are lost to me, while I get accustomed all over again to being there. In these ten or fifteen minutes, I suffer agony, because even it if is a heavenly piece of music, I can't feel deeply about it, as I am still in the process of getting over my embarrassment and discomfort. When this short but of so long time has run its miserable course, I am all right, but until then, I must submit meekly to slips of the fingers, and to a heart that beats, but not enough to obliterate me, which is what I want . . . . I am nervous and apprehensive because I may not 'have it' that particular night. Because I feel the piece is bigger than me, so big I may never be able to even touch it, let alone be the master."

2. "Bad music disturbs me, but wonderful music disturbs me even more."

3. "I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare."

4. "When I am playing, I am in ecstasy; that is what I live for."

5. "Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents."

6. "Their's [the Beatles'] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)"

7. "I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!"

8. "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes- ahh, that is where the art besides."

9. "Today's audiences go to the concert hall to hear Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms and so on. But back in Godowsky and Hofmann's day, we went to hear what the pianists had to say about the composer; we went to hear the pianists, and the same thing went for every other great pianist. When you went to hear Cortot play an all-Chopin recital, you went to hear what Cortot had to say about Chopin."

10. "Play Mozart in memory of me."