It is the Pablo Casals comment I find a bit jarring. I think that raw musical charisma (if not simple “musicality”) still trumps note perfect technique, as witnessed by some current young (or older) conductors who are not note or baton perfect. Also, while I was never an audiophile or young connoisseur, the note perfect Jascha Heifetz never warmed my imagination (as it did some of my peers and elders) as did the less perfectly in-tune playing of Pablo Casals and Henryk Szeryng. David Oistrakh, who I do believe was always note-perfect, warmed my imagination the most. (I heard him in West Berlin and almost heard him in Vienna three months before his death). Rostropovich, in a messier way, warmed my imagination as well.

I think one possible takeaway lesson from this is that, for performers as much as for composers, difficulty is not sufficient, in and of itself, to make a piece “work.” There has to be something else to the music, beyond virtuosity, because what’s a nearly insurmountable technical hurdle today will be private lesson-fodder for conservatory students tomorrow. And once the sheen of technical prowess has worn off, what’s left?

Basically, it’s still possible to pull off a thrilling performance of, say, the Ravel Piano Concerto in G, which I saw played by the NY Youth Symphony (all players were under the age of 22). The soloist was, I think, 10 years old.