The great pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff once said, “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” This is true not only with respect to the infinite scope of feeling, fascination and joy that music offers, but also with respect to the virtually infinite repertoire. Pianists in particular are faced with impossible decisions about what to play. Will they enter the sublime world of Bach? Will they spend years mastering the Beethoven sonatas — each an entire universe unto itself? Will they enjoy the passionate reverie of Chopin? Even the most dedicated and virtuosic pianists can never play it all.
But what if this impossible decision was made more impossible still? What if today’s great pianists could play one piece — and one piece only — for the rest of their lives? What would they choose, and why? Here’s what they told us.
Alessio Bax
I would be so sad, since what I cherish the most is our huge repertoire. I can’t pick a single work, so it would have to be something like Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. That would keep me busy and content for a while!
Lucille Chung
What a difficult question, but Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488, the second and third movements would be my choices. The Adagio is one of the most poignant and immediate works ever written, and the spirited Allegro assai brings back wonderful memories of my childhood.
Aaron Diehl
Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose.” Duke wrote this for Queen Elizabeth II as a part of his Queen Suite. It is simple in its design, but a work that only someone like the late Joe Temperley (who played with Duke) could perform and put one on the verge of tears.
Simone Dinnerstein
Bach’s Goldberg Variations could occupy me for a lifetime. It contains everything — every subtle change of character, from deep pain to joyful frolicking. There are variations that are pure fun and acrobatic, and variations that are remarkable contrapuntal structures. It can be interpreted in an endless variety of ways. It is its own imaginative world.
Joel Fan
It’s hard to imagine playing just one piece for the rest of my life! My teacher, Leon Fleisher (quoting from his mentor, Artur Schnabel), would speak of finding and working on music that could “never be played well enough,” meaning that to discover all the nuances and expression could take a lifetime. For me, Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E-flat Minor, Op. 26, is the one I can’t live without. I love it deeply for the intense emotional places that it takes me. The work has an enormous range, combining the many diverse elements you would want in a single piano piece — grandeur, tragedy, humor, soulfulness, anger and ending with a hellacious Fuga. It’s also really fun to play, with plenty of challenging, massively polyphonic passages that were written for one of my pianistic heroes, Vladimir Horowitz.
Lara Downes
Oh, impossible question! I’m a serial monogamist — passionately in love with one piece of music at a time. Right now it’s the slow movement of the Ravel G Major Concerto. That extended, crystalline melody feels like my meditation. I’m starting my days at the piano exploring the possibilities of suspending line and sound to just hover and linger in air.
But if I truly had to pick only one piece of music forever, maybe I’d choose Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, because within the eight mood poems that make up that set is an emotional range that could sustain a lifetime of inquiry and evolution. I’ve grown up with this music since I was about 12 years old, and I can easily imagine myself 30 years from now, finding different, deeper layers of expression in Schumann’s fantasy world.
Marc-André Hamelin
The piano repertoire is so huge that this question is almost impossible to answer. But Schubert's last sonata holds a very special place in my life. And I've always said that if I included it in every recital until the end of my life, I would be perfectly happy. I'm in awe of Schubert's ability to express the deepest emotions with such simple means. What he conveys in the sonata is so magical and so mysterious that I'll be forever possessed by it.
Angela Hewitt
The complete 48 preludes and fugues that make up the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. There is endless variety, endless inspiration, challenges that keep you going for a lifetime, a piece for every occasion. I have already memorized it years ago, but it would be work just to keep it in your memory, and definitely would keep the grey cells active! There is no greater music than this. Each time I take it back in my repertoire, I marvel at it all over again.
Igor Levit
If I absolutely had to choose, probably Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Or ... oh, there are just too many, to be honest!
Orli Shaham
Any one of several hundred pieces would do the trick, so long as I’m lucky enough to be able to play for the rest of my life. I could climb the mountain that is Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto forever, for instance, and still feel like there’s a long way to go, because I will never be its equal. If not that, I could also live with any or all of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for a lifetime, as my brain will always feel stretched by those movements. Likewise for the Chopin etudes, because they will always stretch both my technique and my hand. I could keep coming up with these, but the wonderful thing is that so many of them are in my memory; I can always practice them in my head.
Conrad Tao
A work that I could play for the rest of my life would have to imply within itself an entire life as well, full of possibility, mystery and expression. And so my impulse is to answer with Schumann’s Kreisleriana, perhaps because it is a piece that — as of 2018 — I’ve not yet performed publicly, but have spent time with in private. My relationship with the work, built sporadically over the past six years, is still in an initial, intimate, impulsive and intuitive stage; there is still much to explore! And with a piece so personal, so poetic, so simultaneously coherent and modular, I trust that there will always be much to explore.
Daniil Trifonov
I don’t think I would happy about constantly playing only one work — that would be a nightmare after a while. In order to keep the love for my favorite pieces, it’s good to leave them aside for a while and then come back to them. If that is the case, then it’s Schubert’s Sonata in G Major, D. 894. I’m happy to come back to it many times.