Four ways of playing in style, and the one worth aiming at

A few winters ago I played a student three recordings of the same Scarlatti sonata, the one she had just started learning. The first was smooth and warm, pedalled as though it were Chopin. The second was startling: sudden rubato, enormous dynamic swings, unmistakably the pianist rather than the piece. The third was scrupulous — no pedal, every ornament textbook-correct, nothing you could object to — and my fifteen-year-old had stopped listening by the second page. She asked me which one was right. That is the wrong question, but it is such a useful wrong question that we spent the rest of the hour on it. This article is more or less that lesson.

The first: playing everything in the same voice

The most common way of playing is not a style at all — it is the absence of one. Bach gets the same tone, the same pedal and the same shape of phrase as a Chopin nocturne, because that is simply how this player plays. It is rarely a failure of taste and almost never laziness. It is a listening gap: nobody has yet heard enough of the difference to want to produce it. The tell is easy to spot in a lesson. If your Mozart sounds like your Debussy — same weight in the hand, same pedal reflex, same generous rubato at every cadence — two hundred and fifty years of very different musical worlds are being flattened into one personal habit. The remedy is not a rule sheet. It is exposure. You cannot play a difference you have never heard, so before you try to sound "more Baroque", spend a fortnight actually listening to what a harpsichord does to a line, or how a fortepiano runs out of sound long before a modern Steinway does.

The second: the performer standing in front of the composer

The second style is often the most immediately impressive, and it belongs to genuinely gifted players. Here the personality arrives first and the music is what it happens to be carrying. You recognise the pianist within four bars — the held breath before every climax, the signature hesitation on the way into a melody, a rubato that is applied to Rameau and Rachmaninoff in exactly the same proportions. Audiences do respond to it, at least once. The problem is not arrogance; usually this is simply the only way the player knows how to be interesting, and it took real courage to find it. The problem is arithmetic. Originality that is applied evenly to everything stops being originality and becomes a mannerism — which means the second style eventually turns into the first one wearing better clothes. Every piece again sounds the same. Only now it sounds the same in a more expensive way.

The third: the museum piece

The third style is usually a reaction against the second, and it is very easy to admire. Every decision is documented, every ornament defensible, the tempo is the one the treatise recommends, and the whole performance is correct in a way that no one can argue with. It is also, quite often, airless. Correctness has become a place to hide: if I only ever do what can be footnoted, nobody can hold me responsible for anything. But a score does not determine a performance. It fixes perhaps a third of what happens and leaves the rest — the exact weight of a bass note, the length of a silence, which of three voices you want the listener to follow — entirely open. Declining to decide those things is itself a decision, and it produces a performance nobody has to answer for. There is an irony in it, too: the historical players being imitated were improvising, ornamenting and taking liberties constantly. Reconstructing the letter while discarding the freedom is arguably the least historical thing you could do.

The fourth: informed, and present

The version worth aiming at treats historical knowledge as vocabulary and personality as accent. You learn what a Baroque slur usually implies, what an eighteenth-century forte was measured against, what Beethoven's instrument could and could not sustain — and then you choose, on your piano, in your hall, for the people actually sitting there. Knowing more does not narrow your options; it is what turns a shrug into a choice. And your personality does not go into the piece as an added layer of effects. It shows up in decisions: where you breathe, which inner voice you bring forward, how long you are willing to let a silence stand, what you think the piece is about. The test I use is simple. After the performance, could a listener describe the piece to someone who does not know it? If they can only describe you, something has gone wrong. If they can describe the piece but nothing about how you saw it, something else has.

How to tell which one you are

This is diagnosable at home, and it takes about twenty minutes. Record yourself playing two short pieces from different centuries, back to back, and listen the next morning. If a stranger could not tell which century each came from, you are in the first style, and the prescription is listening rather than practising. Next, ask what you would have to change if you were playing the older piece on the instrument it was written for. If you have no answer at all, the first or second style; if you have nine answers and none of them are yours, the third. Then count your interpretive decisions in a single page and ask, for each one, whether you could point to something in the score that suggested it. If the only reason is "it feels good there", that is the second style talking. If you cannot find a single place where you decided something freely, that is the third. The fix in each case is small and specific: listen wider, play it plain once, or pick three moments and commit to a choice you believe in but cannot fully footnote.

The student with the Scarlatti plays it now with almost no pedal, crisp articulation, and ornaments that would survive an examiner — but she is not being careful. She decided that the piece is funny, which I did not suggest and would not have thought of, and everything else follows from that. The historical knowledge did not replace her; it gave her something to be personal about. That, I think, is the whole argument. Style is not a set of restrictions imposed on your personality. It is the language the music happens to be written in, and learning it is what finally allows you to say something instead of merely making a sound.