RE: [Harp-L] virtuoso

["Steve Shaw" <moorcot@xxxxxxx>]

Robb wrote:  The word means, both, to have total mastery/understanding of an 
instrument [as in ~state-of-the-art mastery~] and being exceptionally, 
technically skilled at playing it....

Robert Bonfiglio wrote:  ?Musical communicator" describes Stevie and Toots 
perfectly.  They can play what comes into theirs minds at any given time.  
Technique is a 'given';  Toots and Stevie are "technically brilliant 
performers" but it is "artistry" that makes a virtuoso....


There was a guy in the 1930s called Artur Schnabel who recorded all 
Beethoven's piano sonatas on scratchy old sides of 78s.  His playing had so 
many fluffs and wrong notes in it that you could sit there and groan at 
times when listening to it....but, today, in spite of all the modern young 
bucks who can play the same stuff fast and faultlessly, he is revered by 
many (including a lot of the best modern-day players) as the greatest ever 
interpreter of Beethoven's piano music.

Was he a virtuoso?  I neither know nor care!

Steve

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