Much of the whole classical music thing is a cunning fib. Such was my reflection as I chewed on my cigar in a brasserie in Paris after the recent finals of the Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris. These youngsters, aged between 17 and 23, play with the now commonplace almost superhuman competence. Yet something was missing. Not a note wrong, but something between the notes? What? – I wondered. Please imagine the musings that follow, prompted by the dazzling youth I had been watching at the Long-Thibaud inside the recently renovated 1898 Opéra-Comique, with a Havana and cognac …

During an interval I had mumbled that one can hardly expect maturity from these players. The vagueness with which my fellow jurors agreed with this self-evident proclamation confirmed that there was no specific shared idea of what ‘maturity’ might consist of. The whole thing a fib? That might suffice, but it doesn’t address the question as to what the ‘truth’ might be, the goal towards which this embryonic energy is directed. In sport, after all, the competition is the goal; here, competition is the starting block. This wicked web of deception has many complex and competing pressure points. We may best start at the beginning.

The history, where the spider begins, is simple enough: the Composer, creating a Piece, hopes to express a Something, that the Audience will relish, thanks to a Performer. That covers it. Of course, the story of music is a shade more nuanced. For one thing, Composer, Performer and Audience have not necessarily been distinct. In these past thousand years this simple pentagonal process became institutionalised once the Composer felt it necessary to write the Piece down, so that it would both last into history and be performed more or less as he or she wished, by a Performer distinct from the Audience – a process that introduced its own tangled web epitomised by the relatively recent concern for ‘authenticity’. Still, so far so good.

Whereupon, moving along, each of these five points took on their own evolutions. Composers started to address the Performers (virtuosity) just as much as the Something (depth) or the Audience (acclaim). Pieces started to relate between each other, evolving forms such as sonata, fugue or fantasy, creating Traditions. The Something expanded from serving usually sacred texts, to service pagan values of thrill, dance, drama and other secular concerns, the sacred sensual waxing ever more sexual, Machaut moving to Wagner via Mozart. The Audience evolved from a grateful and even participatory congregation to a possibly well-versed yet passive fan-base – a fan-base of the Composer perhaps, or the Performer, or even just the Piece, or indeed even the Something, and mostly a personal cocktail of all of these. Every seat in the hall is taken by someone in a different tangle of this web – including, in our niche, the pianist on stage.

Enter the gifted young performer, carefully amassing repertoire and daringly entering competitions, even if Charles Rosen expressed shock at how few students have taken the trouble to sight-read their way through the repertoire, and at how distorting the values of competition are. Where does our youngster position himself? With the Composer, the Piece, the Something, or the Audience? Ultimately the crucial target for success is to wow the Audience, most of all the gang of big names, the jury, who inevitably have a different perspective from the audience the pianist plans to serve for the rest of his career. After that career is under way – not necessarily as a result of prizes, it is refreshing to note – the player can afford to reposition himself in the web, thus selling his rapport with the Something such as serious transcendental works, say, or with the Composer, such as French Impressionists, or with the Piece, such as virtuoso transcriptions. From this emerges a ‘reputation’, the way that Schnabel equals Beethoven and Horowitz doesn’t, despite his bewildering Op 101 and the fact he regarded Schnabel’s finale to Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata the finest he ever heard.

Inevitably this process along life, with the repertoire increasingly fitting the Player’s own fond favourites, one hopes, means that maturity sets in, both through familiarity with the music and with life itself. The music feeds the wisdom and the wisdom repays the compliment. Inasmuch as we expect wisdom from the older of our friends or mentors, so too we expect some sort of greater depth from the elder performers. And wonder, too: I heard an elderly Vlado Perlemuter play Kreisleriana with so many memory lapses, drifting into and out of all sorts of other pieces by Schumann, that his love of the composer counted for more than anything that winced a purist.

This is where the fascination starts. We all have our moments: for instance, I heard the 70-year-old Pollini play Chopin’s Revolutionary Study as an encore in Paris, in which he articulated with ever-so-slight emphasis the B natural in the right hand at bar 18, defining the melancholy falling motif with an unforgettable pathos heightened by all the underlying clatter of sinister semiquavers. His recordings from decades earlier, triumphant and arching as they are, but competitive, skate past that little glimpse of a tear captured, like Blake’s grain of sand, in a single note. Hence the vector of age, experience, familiarity through time, depth through cellarage.

Not that age is a guarantee of the maturity I’m after. Michelangeli’s Emperor Concerto with Celibidache from Stockholm in May 1962 is far more Beethovenian, tingling and raw, than their Paris performance 12 years later, both videos available on YouTube. Age at least permits quirkiness. Cherkassky, Arrau, Brendel and others can seem to squirrel into oddity as they aged, with success measured according to taste. Some become precious, such as Zimerman, who has refused to allow some of his wonderfully fresh, dance-alert early recordings to survive; I listen to my cassette of his South Bank debut Brahms F sharp minor Sonata, Op 2, with forbidden delight, the trio especially. Success and fame can yet tarnish age in different ways; it is usually impossible to prefer Rubinstein’s clattersome later Chopin recordings to the pre-War HMV versions – the Mazurkas especially defy sufficient praise. Still, he was around 50 when he made those HMVs.

Another vector in the story of maturity is restraint. This may partly be because there is nothing now to prove. Perhaps this explains the bewitching palette that Horowitz brought to Mozart in his late DG recordings, even his playing Mozart at all, but mostly his keeping the dynamic range to within the narrow range of the keyboard Mozart had to hand. Rachmaninov does something similar in his transcriptions of Bach, the largest hands in history giving us the gentlest silk in the boudoir. I dream that Morton Feldman’s favourite recording should have been Michelangeli’s first movement of the Galuppi Sonata in C major that the pianist took such perverse, Zen delight in.

Indeed, talking of Zen, the stasis of Richter’s first movement of Schubert’s final sonata, D960, the flat-line terror of cardiologists, comes from a restraint that understands the essential privacy of Schubert’s conception of performance, a luxury that I cannot imagine a competitor can afford in competition. Annekäte Friedländer, great-granddaughter of Rellstab and good friend of Karl Ulrich Schnabel’s, once told me that when she asked him about how he managed his fabulous pianissimo he replied, ‘I take the risk it doesn’t sound at all’. So, restraint can be another guise of risk. She also explained that she measured the success of her Op 111 by the time it took for the audience to be able to think of even applauding. Try that on the jury.

Re-shaping expectations: Glenn Gould recorded the Goldbergs twice

Restraint is at the heart of Chopin. Competitors cannot risk observing the restraint that by all accounts Chopin expressed, yet his fortissimos cry out for relative emphasis, not noise. As the old song goes, you don’t learn that at school. Even late Beethoven can survive the impetuosity of youthfulness, because of what we might call his fist about life. Es muß sein! Schumann’s madness can also cope with the spatchcock bewilderment of unwise youth. But with Chopin’s whiff of sickliness restraint is crucial, just as the muscularity is a factor of longing, not of bullying. My moment here is the terrifying hesitancy with which Rachmaninov delivers the juddering around bar 97 of the first movement of the ‘Funeral March’ Sonata, as if defying the stretto marking, dabbing the brakes as he accelerates. Leaving aside the Liszt Sonata, Chopin is surely the composer who has been most trampled by the eager troops of competition entrants, sadly shaping expectations in all other contexts.

Glenn Gould is of course the prime example of re-shaping expectations. In his 50 years he recorded the Goldberg Variations twice, at each end of his career. His hermetic lifestyle undermines the usual pattern we associate with ‘experience of life’; and in the terms of our spider’s web, he also dispensed with the Audience, giving a global crowd a glimpse of the sort of small room in which most music was composed and performed – a true authentic. Between the two versions he had evolved a drastically different conception of the Piece, coming to see it as one, not 30. It was music that moved his maturity, an osmosis unavailable to the youngsters.

His example also brings to our attention the idea of consistency. The sundry eight performances we have by Gould of the Berg Sonata vary from 8 minutes in 1957 to 13 in 1969. Yet the score is the same. I suppose that leads me to the idea that a player should be able to suggest freshness over routine, the idea that the music is richer than one single occasion, let alone the gladiatorial of a competition. How? The only answer I can give is wonder. As one gets older perhaps you can afford to shed the pretence of all-knowingness in favour of sheer wonder. How to manage that? One of the performers at the Long-Thibaud did, or faked it rather well, but did not win.

This brings us to repertoire, often imposed in competitions but, one hopes, less so in a career. Many of the greats have a season’s programme: you can follow them around Europe and across to New York and hear the same pieces. Others, like Cherkassky, seemed to dance about among their favourites. And Richter of course would do a tour without even announcing the venue, nor what he felt like playing, till the night itself, in many ways the only truly honest thing to do. I mean, at what cost does a player unearth the Schumann Fantasie twice a week for almost a year?

Still, talking of the Something, how can you put Op 111 at the end of the first half? Liszt suffered. Yet, as one who once heard the Liszt Sonata at a competition five times in a single day, I can say that in my experience only the twisty-fingered masticating Chilean has spotted that with the simple jagged motif that appears after bars 179, 493 and 642 the composer is completely off his rocker. He came to play it that way in later life; he didn’t spot it, you may say, it may not even be there — but spotting what the composer didn’t is part of the whole creative fib we treasure. Some purists resent the glamour we give performers, but it is exactly for that unearthing that we treasure the careers of the greatest performers, in whose hands some sort of completion is achieved in the unending process of creation.

Hence too the delightful nonsense of interviews with performers who almost universally seem to have to insist they play what the composer ‘intended’. Best of all Wanda Landowska, whose famous quip, ‘You play Bach your way, I play him his way’, is gasp-worthy. As Tovey said of the plausibly misprinted A sharp at bars 225-226 of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier – which, it can be argued, should carry a natural sign – if it were a mistake, it was one Beethoven would have delighted in had he spotted it. This highlights the way in which performers have a right to see themselves as being more than a mere servant to the composer, a pretention that drifts from being a fib to the sheer flamboyance that goes with fibbing.

Oddly, this visual flamboyance – the grimaces, gazes and gestures – can be crucial to our hearing an art that is supposedly exclusively aural. I do wonder if this is part of any conservatory curriculum; perhaps it is a more intimate, exclusive lesson between the teacher and the pupil. The magical violinist Ernst Kovacic told me that when he spoke to Gidon Kremer about people telling him he moved about too much, Kremer responded: ‘Then move more.’ With Kovacic as with Gould it was difficult to discern the division between body and instrument, but with our young heroes it isn’t always easy to believe in the swooning or mooning of the performer. I have never seen a competitor risk the composure that is so mesmerising in the films we have of Bolet, Curzon or Solomon, nor the seeming awkwardness of cramped shoulder that is so unsettling with Richter or Cherkassky. When I watch Friedrich Gulda I just know that he was also a jazz pianist, his whole physical presence is one of fascinated un-expectancy, a touch of Brubeck.

All of which leads back to the question of maturity as depth. This is the crux, the fulcrum, the focus – call it what you will. The peak for most is attained in the Adagio of the Hammerklavier or the Adagietto of Op 111, but there are noble foothills too. How does a shared set of notes remain in some hands earthbound and in others’ sweep us out of worldly cares? Must the performer engage Stanislavsky and his Method? Jon Vickers, the greatest Tristan, saw this as an impossible ask; trusting Wagner to do the work, he said that he just sang a B flat and then a C and so on – it was all one could do not to go mad. In the wordless music the pianist must play that perhaps offers the solution: the meaning must come from the performer, and it is up to us to decide if it’s a fib or not. Throughout this magical process, like Schumann, we must believe in fantasy and the intimacy of sharing that multi‑coloured dream.

This feature originally appeared in the SUMMER 2025 issue of International Piano – Subscribe Today