Truth or consequences

At the end of his life, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein played a lot of wrong notes -- but what beautiful notes they were. I doubt any of those wrong notes would have made it into a recording today.

Recently, I reviewed the CSO playing Tchaikovsky's Fifth. A reader commented on the review, why didn't I mention that the famous horn solo went sharp? Frankly, if the solo went sharp for a note or two, the beauty of the phrasing more than made up for it. Perhaps that, too, never would have made a recording.

Once, while sitting in on a Cincinnati Pops recording session, Erich Kunzel boomed, "This is very spliceable music. We can splice anything!"

Recently, one William Barrington-Coupe pirated famous recordings by other artists and passed them off as belonging to his wife, an obscure British pianist named Joyce Hatto. It's the fraud of the century. But it brings up an important question about how we in the public have come to expect perfection in recordings -- and hence, performance. And, how truthful are recordings, after all??