William Strother wrote:

>I haven't heard Barenboim's Beethoven, but experience has taught me not to
>trust my own initial evaluations.  Or anybody else's!

Interesting. Maybe it demonstrates the enormous power of music to adapt to
a variety of interpretations. I recall my first hearing of Furtwaengler
after years on a Toscanini diet.

A question: can anyone here share an experience of deciding an
interpretation was perverse after many hearings? One of the things I'm
wondering is: Do we too often listen to a performance once, decide it's not
for us, without giving it a second, or third, or 7th chance? To what extent
can repeated hearings of a recording actually change our notion of how a
piece should be interpreted? This could go quite far afield--for example,
could 10 hearings of Klemperer's St.  Matthew Passion turn around a diehard
Gardiner fan? Or vice versa? Or would one come to hear it as almost two
different pieces?

Chris Bonds