Is listening to recordings good for piano students?

We are often told that listening to recordings is good for piano students.  Yet, recently, on one of my favourite Piano Facebook Groups, there was an interesting post.  It came from one of the Admins (Rami Bar-Niv).  He posted that in his view, one of the most over-used and least useful pieces of advice proffered was to ‘listen to recordings’.  Coincidentally, at around the same time, I was reading ‘Rough Ideas’ by Stephen Hough.  He too said that he would generally advise students against listening to recordings.  I also have it on good authority that many Juilliard professors were also against it.  

However, Heinrich Neuhaus (perhaps one of the most famous piano teachers I’ve heard of) makes the following statement in his book The Art of Piano Playing:

It would be highly desirable if the greatest masters of the piano were to make records of not only technically easy musical masterpieces which not very advanced pupils can play, but also of “educational music” such as the études by Czerny, Clementi, Cramer etc.  Many of the Clementi Sonatas have now been recorded by Vladimir Horowitz and we teachers cannot but welcome this.

Clearly, he has nothing against recordings!  In fact, in this same book Neuhaus goes as far as to suggest that teachers might substantially be replaced by recording technology (see this article).  So, as always, very differing opinions by highly respected members of the piano community.  I thought it might be interesting to explore the question ‘is listening to recordings good for piano learners’.

Recordings instead of …

Before going any further though, I think it is worth stating up front that I’m not thinking of the idea of using recordings as a way of learning a piece.  Musical notation was invented for us to learn a piece and I’m sure it should definitely be our starting point.

The danger of copying

One of the general reasons people might say not to listen to recordings is that there could be a tendency to try to ‘copy’ rather than find our own voice.  There is definitely of course some truth in this idea.  If every pianist simply duplicated what those who have gone before did, then there’s little point perhaps in listening to them.  I read (again, I think in Neuhaus book) that to him a problem with listening to many Conservatory Students was that, whilst they are technically accomplished, everything just sounds the same.  There is, he says, often little to distinguish one from another.

However, I don’t think listening to recordings needs to be about ‘copying’.  First, as amateurs, are we even capable of copying?  Perhaps a good, conservatory level student might be able to ‘copy’ Rubinstein (to some small extent at least).  As for me, I can’t even get a single mordent to sound as understatedly elegant as he (and, believe me, I’ve tried and tried).

The music is behind the dots

Rather, recordings can permit us to understand what great pianists see in the music.  This, I believe, is what Neuhaus was driving at.  Ultimately, great pianists have a fantastic musical education.  They have been exposed to, and played, many different genres of music.  We know they have spent thousands and thousands of hours exploring tirelessly what the piano is capable of doing.  Clearly, they have also learned to study a score in its absolute finest detail.  Therefore, they are likely to see things that would go completely over our heads!

To me, it is fascinating to take a piece I intend to learn and to analyse how different pianists approach it.  Sacrilegious though it might be, I don’t always like every interpretation of every pianist.  I’ve heard versions of Chopin’s C Sharp Minor Waltz that are simply exquisite.  There are others that seem closer to simply pedestrian.  However, in reality such opinions are no more than my own subjective taste.  I always work on the assumption that a great pianist plays every note in the way they do for a specific reason.  Therefore, there is real value, to me, in listening even to interpretations that aren’t necessarily to my taste.  The objective of the exercise is to take the time to understand what the pianist is doing and why they have chosen that particular route.

Horowitz and Traumerei

I published a video on my YouTube channel some time ago on Horowitz playing Schumann’s Traumerei.  When we listen to Vladimir Horowitz play this piece, we might be forgiven for thinking he had a completely different edition of the score in front of him.  In fact, I think there are three different versions of him playing this floating around on YouTube.  Each one is very different!  However, when you listen very carefully with the score to hand, it becomes apparent that almost everything he does is in some way supported by the dots themselves.  The way he interweaves the voices might not be notated on the score.  Yet it is evident that Schumann intended them as distinct voices.  If the voices are distinct, why wouldn‘t you choose to bring out certain ones from time to time?  He sometimes exaggerates phrasing – letting the last note in the phrase almost disappear – yet he is following Schumann‘s phrasing.

Equally, there are times he departs from the score.  At one point for example, Schumann marks “(a tempo)” followed by an opening hairpin.  However, in one recording, Horowitz chooses to actually slow down quite markedly with a diminuendo.  A ‘purist’ might say that he has absolutely no right to do this (by all accounts Richter is someone who would not condone this type of thing).  However, even in this case what he does is ‘supported’ by the score to a degree in that Schumann marks a change in tempo and Horowitz simply chooses to change it differently!

Subjective of objective advice?

When people post videos of their playing for advice, you will often see people commenting a wide range of things.  You’ll see ‘more dynamics’, ‘less dynamics’, ‘more rubato’, ‘less rubato’, ‘too fast’, ‘too slow’.  However, very frequently, you will be able to find a recording by a master pianist that does the opposite of what is being advised. Therefore, my view is that often it’s not that what you’re doing is ‘wrong’.  It is simply that it is not to the personal taste of the commenter.  I would, therefore, doubt the value of such ‘interpretive’ advice.

On balance, I think listening to quality recordings serves us well.  However, not to copy, but to understand the art of the possible.  It is not about knowing ‘how’ something should sound, but about knowing what the greats see in the music.  What better way to understand why a particular ‘stem’ points up and another points down than to listen to how a top pianist makes an audible difference as a result.  Once we understand such things, surely our own ability to develop an artistic vision for any piece will increase?

In the words of Horowitz

I’d like to finish on one of my favourite quotes of Horowitz:

However, before we can dare, it does us no harm to understand how others have done it (or not!).

If you haven’t yet read ‘Rough Ideas’ by Stephen Hough I highly recommend checking it out on Amazon.

Rami Bar-Niv’s autobiography is also a fascinating read.  You can catch my video review of it here for more details.