On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive.

The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it.

Miss Petrowska,an excellent pianist, held the audience transfixed with Chou Wen-chung’s work. Miss Petrowska was coolness itself in getting the hardware into the piano and out again…in Messiaen, a feeling for the music’s reverent sobriety combined to produce an absorbing performance.

It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg.

Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.