I wonder why this board has no female members. 
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To be honest other boards have relatively few female members and if having no female members is the price we pay here for having this kind of banter, I’d rather have this freedom.
I don’t see it as misogynistic, someone may interpret it that way but they’d be presumptive in associating our entire attitudes toward women on a few light hearted remarks.
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Tru. I would.
And needless to say I’m as 
as everyone else!!!
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True, and honestly I remember there being hardly any female members on the more hardcore pianophile lists and usenet groups anyway. So it’s not just because of the banter.
Edit: I didn’t even read your comment properly, but concurred.
We could try and curb our banter and then no one would join anyway.
Banter is what da SDC is about, freedom.
We respect women and if a woman has banter she’s welcome. It works both ways.
Let her join in and share her fantasies of being cuffed and whipped by Pollini, or being sodomized by Pogorelić. Women love that 50 shades shit, there’s no denying.
Having her blood sucked, twilight style not by Edward Cullen but by Alfred Cortot.
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I didn’t mean for it to be about the ticket price. If a pianist is charging 40 euros, but is so overworked that her performance sounds like, ‘Oh she’s not having her best night’, well that’s more a rip-off than a pianist like Zimerman who shows up and plays out of this world for 75.
I see. For me it’s all about value for money. I’ve seen YW 6 times, and she’s always played above a certain level, even if she was only extraordinary once. Kissin, I’ve seen 4 times and each time I enter the hall thinking it will be the last time, due to his astronomical price. Yet somehow, he shows just enough to make me attend again. And Pogo, I’m going anywhere near at 130 euros.
How big a part do the artists play in the ticket price and how much is their management etc.? Is the policy not to basically demand the largest fee they can get away with and still sell?
They seem like absolute cunts to me.
I saw Hamelin for free(student) and he thanked ME for coming after our brief chat.
Some artists just seem genuinely good people.
Does he really charge prices like that now? I thought Ivo charged in the 40-60 range.
If the pianist cannot tell when they’re over-touring (which is just another way of saying under-preparing), then someone they trust should tell them.
Yes he still does. Kissin too. I agree with your second statement.
Side note - Still got this!
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He spelled his name wrong.
Hmm so I seem to be the only one here who thinks it’s arrogant and greedy of a pianist to over-tour and be ok with the audience paying to hear drained, sloppy or ill-thought-through performances. Y’all just desperate to hear your stars?
It’s pretty rare to hear playing like that these days, at least in my experience. At worst you’ll get a phoned in performance, but usually all the notes will be there, in an acceptable interpretation. The only exception in the 100+ concerts I’ve attended in recent seasons was Lisitsa.
No not at all, but I can’t think of any good examples. Yuja is uneven, but I think she would have been even if she had only played 1 concert per week. Kissin is actually quite consistent from my experience. The most clear cut case which springs to mind is Demidenko, whose decline in the early 00s was supposedly from taking on too many engagements and playing too much rep according to people around him (though there were also personal things which led to it). Maybe Hamelin too - I think he sounded like an empty shell during most of 2002-2016, or as if he hadn’t properly thought through and gone to the bottom with what he was playing, which could have been due to taking on too much rep.
True definitely Lisitsa as well, from 2013 or thereabouts, but her complete crash last year I think was more likely due to personal stress than playing too much.
To turn this around – is there any pianist who tours regularly (a lot) who maintains such consistently high quality? I suppose we could name Sokolov, but I don’t really count him because he plays the same program over and over again.
My feeling is nearly all these popular pianists overplay and overtour, and all their performances suffer from it. A phoned-in perf isn’t acceptable. This is where art turns into commercialisation and we just tolerate it like it’s normal, and that feedbacks into more of the same. Just running through a perf OK and note-perfect isn’t good enough. Art and music are experiences, Tarkovsky would say spiritual experiences, and are there to change lives. I think some young pianists, maybe like Tyson or Grosvenor, get that. I think others like YW and Bunyat have no idea at all about it. For some people that’s ok, and it’s no problem for me if you’re ok with that. But I got into piano music because of the huge swell of emotion and change that it engenders, like film, like literature, they’re kind of connected at the hip, and I think the over-touring aspect of this, which is just a kind of mindless commercialisation, is a dumbing-down anti-art that is business-minded, not art-focused. That’s a large part why I repeatedly shit on YW and these popular pianists, because this isn’t just piano and piano playing–some tiny narrow focus–it’s like a mystical experience of instilling emotion and image and narration through sound, achieved through total selfless dedication, that can change someone’s life for ever. Ticket prices are irrelevant to this. Wearing yourself down so you can only give 70%, and neglecting preparation, and research, and focus, and the strength to share (which is hard to do) – yeah that’s not acceptable. To put it plainly, for me it’s closer to the Hollywood version of film.
Some of this just has to do with the times we live in. But that’s what makes those who persevere and play with that intensity of communication just so much more special.
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Agree kinda,
Compare rep girth at same age of Trifonov and Yuja with maybe what we know of richter and hamelin (at high end of capacity/prep excellence) - its insane
Very roughly, since I can only dedicate a quarter of my brain to this screen atm, but I think you’re possibly overestimating the musicians. To do this
it’s like a mystical experience of instilling emotion and image and narration through sound, achieved through total selfless dedication, that can change someone’s life for ever
is a rare ability, and I’m not sure you would begin to see Buniatishvili do it just by cutting her concert schedule.
If you ever become a viking, or if I ever become a Czech mofo, I’m going to put a straitjacket on you and carry you to one of Wang’s recitals. If Sokolov isn’t a pianist I think you need to hear in person to get, Wang is a bit like that. I’ve never felt I’m in the presence of a higher power when she plays, but she has tremendous charisma and definitely emanates something which is lost through recordings.
pheromones?
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