As both composer and performer, I’ve long been drawn to the paradox of fidelity in interpretation. What does it mean to be “faithful” to the work? As I work intensively—four hours a day, seven days a week—on the Chopin Ballades, I keep circling this question.

Of course, authorial markings matter. They are a kind of case study in intent. But they can never be exhaustive. And if interpretation were merely the perfect execution of notational data, we would never need more than one great performance of any given work. The notion that fidelity demands suppression of the interpreter’s voice seems to me not only incorrect, but creatively barren.

My approach is to honour the structure, yes, but to allow for a reading that may be, in some small way, “unauthorised”—not in the sense of betrayal, but of illumination. An angle of light falling across a familiar figure in a way that reveals something newly alive.

That image—of light—brings me to the analogy I often use:

The score is the painting. But the performance is the gallery space in which the painting is hung. Its dimensions, its walls, the placement of the canvas and—most crucially—the light. The light may be deliberate: the conscious interpretive choices of the performer. But it is also seasonal and circumstantial: the weather outside, the hour of the day, the unconscious being of the one who stands in the space.

In this analogy, I am both the gallery architect and its lighting designer. But I am also a 21st-century Australian man living in a semi-rural environment. That part—the part of me that I didn’t script—is like the sun streaming in through the high windows, casting shadows I did not plan.

So when I play Chopin, I aim to understand the truth of the work, but not to fix it in amber. Even if a miraculous cylinder recording of Chopin himself playing the Ballades were to surface tomorrow, I wouldn’t imitate it slavishly. Reverence, yes—but not ossification. A great work endures not because it is frozen in a single ideal performance, but because it can refract across the centuries, through changing seasons, and still reveal more.

And in that refracting light—sometimes warm, sometimes strange—we find the work not diminished, but alive.

What pianists most need to cultivate is the capacity to listen when they’re no longer physically involved in sound production. On the surface, the piano is an instrument of impacts — a key is struck, a hammer hits strings, the note sounds, and from that moment on, the pianist’s role appears to end. Unlike a wind player who supports the tone through breath, or a string player who continuously draws the bow, the pianist is not required to do anything further once the note has been played. And so, many do nothing. They abdicate responsibility.

But this gap — this so-called inactivity — is in fact the crucible of higher pianism.

When I strike a note or chord, and then wait before striking the next, I can no longer influence the note already sounding, at least not in the usual sense. Yes, adding sustain pedal after the fact induces subtle sympathetic resonances, but beyond this nothing more can be done to the tone itself. And yet, something essential can still occur: I can listen. Deeply. Even transcendentally. And that listening is not passive. Though it does not alter the note that has already sounded, it profoundly shapes the next one.

This is not a mystical abstraction — it is a practical reality. The manner in which I listen to a ringing note or chord, the fullness of my attention to its decay, directly influences how I approach the next sound. So even though the piano offers us only a chain of percussive events, how we live in the space between those events determines the shape and arc of the music. The piano begins to sing. We approach, through consciousness, the continuous expressive worlds of singers, wind players, and string players.

When I listen to pianists I don’t connect with, I often hear: hit, hit, hit, hit, hit — each note isolated, inert, nothing in between. But real music exists between the notes, in the invisible threads of intention, resonance, and responsiveness.

There’s also a physical analogue to this. Sometimes, after playing a long note, I find myself gently wiggling the finger holding it down — a kind of faux vibrato, as if I were a string player shaping the tone. It’s a gesture without acoustic effect. An instrument builder once challenged me on this: “What in the hell is the use of doing that? It doesn’t change the sound. It doesn’t do anything to the instrument.” And he was right. It doesn’t.

But it does do something to me.

It sustains my engagement with the sound, deepens my awareness, and alters how I will approach the next note. This act — part listening, part physical attention, part ritual — keeps the chain of music unbroken. In that sense, the secret of high-level pianism lies not only in how we strike the keys, but in how we attend to everything between the strikes. Our silence is not empty. It listens back.

© 2025 Mark Isaacs