Don writes:

>At this point, I'd like to veer off and reflect a little on romanticized
>piano music.  One of its key elements is a highly overt emotional
>intensity.  When I hear or see these extreme displays, my immediate
>question is, "Why is this happening?".  There could be very good reasons
>for the overt intensity, and I'm looking for its foundation.  In so many
>performances of romanticized piano music, I don't hear any foundation for
>the intensity.  It makes no sense and just seems like histrionics for the
>hell of it.

It doesn't have to make sense.

No one is denying the frivolity of excess; but how hard is it to
understand why performers or listeners might want to occasionally partake
of this incidental, if sometimes short-lived thrill.  Whether it be your
good-natured poke at the latest Volodos release, a compilation album, or
your dismissal of an artist whose performances you feel are too
self-serving, why do you so actively seek to distance yourself from such
a harmless thing? Why does there have to be a validating foundation for
tittilation; for extreme displays?

(All in good fun here:)

It reminds me of people who believe that any and all surface pleasures of
the flesh must be salutary, or reproductive in nature, as if anyone in the
entire history of mankind has engaged in sex expressly for the purpose of
producing a child!

So:

You show me the absurdly improbable truck driver who judiciously scrawls
FLASH ME YOUR EGGSACS in the dust on the back of his rig, and I'll show
you a sincere CM enthusiast, comfortable with his intellectuality, who
*doesn't* like to be wowed once and awhile by an indulgent or
emptily-virtuoso performance just for the hell of it.

John Smyth