Life and Letters

I attend a piano recital today and it was bad. I didn't even stay past the first piece. The pianist, to me, had no concept of what the rudiment 'tempo' means - There was a new tempo every few bars and while i was tapping my fingers along to the music, I realised that the tempo fluctuated drastically. Even though the piece was from the Classical period, it sounded atonal at some points. Basic chords like II, IV, V as the music approached a cadential point actually sounded like II(+9), IV(+4), V(+7) simply because the pianist failed to play the correct notes. There was no concept of touch as well - lots of banging out chords instead of projecting them through body strength. It was just BANG BANG BANG! The first five chords of the piece were really BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG. Shocking! I can understand the pianist's desire to project the sound, but he didn't have to bang the piano so hard! And what's with all the weird hand gestures after each phrase? He looked like he was just flicking his hands around... like a little bird with wings but hadn't learn to fly yet.

I had a look round the hall - one guy stretched his upper body over two chairs and was falling asleep i think, another looked rather bored while leaning his left cheek on his left arm. By the end of the first piece, 8 people walked out of the hall, 6 of them were regular patrons for these afternoon concerts. I wonder what made them leave. For me, I felt like i couldn't sit in the hall and actually feel soothed by the music that was being belted out from the Steinway. I thought it might be my 'selective taste' in music playing devil's advocate again, but today, i genuinely felt that it wasn't my fault that i failed to enjoy the music. Maybe i'm being harsh, maybe i'm just too arrogant a musician, but after today's experience, I really can't think of any recital i've been to which has been this bad.