The best seat in the house?

Byron Janis writes in the Wall Street Journal about the vicissitudes of playing in various types of performing spaces, from the pianist's point of view. A snippet:

As you are rehearsing on stage, you wonder why you have spent so much time at home fine tuning the pedaling, the dynamics, and the tempos when they will all need altering in this new acoustical environment. These last-minute adjustments remain one of the concert pianist's major challenges. Whatever sound we hear on stage governs our performance and, one could almost say, becomes our "co-creator."

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