Daniel Barenboim: Creating perspective on the piano

The fact that the piano is such a neutral, uninteresting instrument is precisely what enables you to create far more colours on it. The basic fact is simple - you cannot produce a single beautiful sound on the piano. By combining a wonderful Stradivarious and a great violinist, a single beautiful note can be produced by varying the colour, the intensity and the volume of the note. With the piano, the concept of beauty starts with two notes. As soon as one note is softer or louder or shorter and you are able to articulate the difference between the two notes, you can begin to create and expressive sound on the piano. If you take this to its logical, almost ridiculous conclusion, you see that one of the most important qualities required for playing the piano is an ability to create what painters call a perspective. When you look at a painting, you can see that some elements appear nearer to you and others further away. The piano works in a similar way. It creates an illusion. you can create the illusion of legato. In order to make a prtamento sound like a singer, you have to go from one note to the next without breaking it. All the great pianists of the past like Busonior Eugen d'Albert - I can only judge this from recordings - had this aiblity in one form or another.

The notes on the piano are balanced in such a way that some seem closer to the ear. It means, as I have said before, that the two hands do not represent two units, but one unit, or ten. The independence of the fingers is all-important, and I can only recommend, with great emphasis, that pianists should constantly work at the fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.