April 26, 2014 SPA

Lise De La Salle

April 26, 2014 — Lise De La Salle, so young, so contained made the sounds I thought she would, those fast, fast scalar passages, so energetic, so accomplished, but soon into her solo concert performance on piano I found that I couldn’t stop watching her right hand. She was elevating her middle finger like she was trying to give herself or the ceiling the ‘bird’. Could it be an artifact of the repertoire she had chosen? The first act went on a bit long but I stayed intrigued by her lifted middle finger.

After the show, when I asked her about that elevated finger, thinking some piano master might be working with her, thinking that, over the decades she will be playing, maybe that repetitive lifting and tension and all that holding up might cause injury to her muscular mechanism, she said “I never noticed it”.

I then asked other piano virtuosos if there could be any purpose for that extra tension caused by the constant lifting. The consensus was that there was not, that it could harm her in the future. For that reason, I mention it here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLCwQjOcDg&list=PLEFE6E4D43ED92197