Is pianistic perfection all that it's cracked up to be?

We demand note-perfect renditions from the musicians we hear, but do the right notes really matter in a great performance?Daniel Barenboim rarely plays all of the right notes. He certainly didn't get everything right a couple of nights ago at the Royal Festival Hall as the soloist playing Liszt's two piano concertos with his orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, conducted by Pierre Boulez. But as Andrew Clements says in his review, thanks partly to the mistake-swallowing powers of the sustaining...

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