Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Donal Henahan

The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it.

It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg.

Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.

The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.

On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive.

The more disastrous the mishaps the simpler the reviewing task.

Pianists of extraordinary talent, such as Christina Petrowska,spend a large part of their early lives perfecting technique…Miss Petrowska,a Canadian with a phenomenal ability to play the most difficult music cleanly, gave a demonstration of her achievements at Carnegie Recital Hall. A product of the Juilliard School who studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti in Europe, Miss Petrowska built most of her program around fiercely difficult contemporary works. She has fingers that work like chrome-plated pistons, and her high-seated position let her bring pulverizing power to bear.

[Rubinstein was] a fountain from which music spouted, not a recitalist.

Miss Petrowska,an excellent pianist, held the audience transfixed with Chou Wen-chung’s work. Miss Petrowska was coolness itself in getting the hardware into the piano and out again…in Messiaen, a feeling for the music’s reverent sobriety combined to produce an absorbing performance.

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.