On the whole, I’ve been blessed with an excellent memory – I suppose some would even say prodigious as I’ve performed the complete solo keyboard works of Bach (the exception being The Art of Fugue), the 32 sonatas of Beethoven, and who knows how many millions of other notes from memory over the years. You feel so ashamed – but we’re only human, and sometimes it happens. That night, however, I went wrong in the big A minor fugue from Book 1 and couldn’t find my way out. It was part of a world tour in which I played that mammoth work 56 times in 26 countries. My own turn came when I was 50 years old, playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (all four and a half hours of it) from memory in Stuttgart. A friend in attendance jokingly said: “The beginning of the concerto!” When, a few hours later, Vlado walked on stage in Paris to perform Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (which famously begins with a quiet piano solo), he couldn’t find the notes. Then there was Vlado Perlemuter who, upon leaving home to go to the concert hall, was asked by his wife if he had forgotten anything. By the time he got off stage to find his score it came to him, but his evening was ruined. My former teacher, Jean-Paul Sévilla, was once playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations when, at the end of Variation 7, he couldn’t remember how Variation 8 began. I t happens to all pianists at some point: that terrifying moment when you’re on stage and can’t remember what comes next.
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