Status Updates From The Piano Shop on the Left ...

“when it works, neither of you is conscious of the various elements. It’s like a wonderful conversation where anticipation and communication merge. It’s almost as if you are breathing together and the music is your breath”

“The human qualities an accompanist needs most, he told me, are tact, humility, and kindness, but also a firmness about musical principles”

“The human qualities an accompanist needs most, he told me, are tact, humility, and kindness, but also a firmness about musical principles”

“you have to be careful how you assert yourself. You must earn the confidence, the respect, and the trust of notoriously willful and self-centered performers”

“You must be able to hear precisely in order to play precisely.”

“there was never for me a feeling of the music coming back to me. It was an ordeal that had to be tolerated so that I could then continue to learn to play music for myself.”

“Music isn’t music unless we share it with others”

"la frustration est notre ennemi"

“The piano became a kind of flying carpet by which I could travel to an entirely different place, and I would leave the room with the half-dazed sensibility that children sometimes show when they have discovered a new and agreeable and utterly private world of their own”

“we reveal far more of ourselves than we suspect when we enter the bedizened world of our passions and our longings”

What a delightful little book.