Back in 1998, the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires was at a rehearsal with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, ready to play one Mozart concerto when Riccardo Chailly launched into the orchestral introduction to another. Another Mozart Concerto, that is. Photos captured the stunned expression on her face, but she somehow picked up the "wrong" solo part without a moment's hesitation.
For some reason, last week, the Telegraph picked up the story as if it were new. Well, even after a while, it was still a good one.
To make this trip down memory lane more interesting, in the same issue, pianist Stephen Hough mulls over the case from an unexpected angle:
... is it a stranger story than it seems? I don't want to minimize the shock of hearing an orchestra start to play one piece when you were expecting them to play another but — wait a minute.Firstly, this is obviously a rehearsal — no one on stage is dressed in concert attire. And the presence of an audience suggests a dress rehearsal — it would be highly unusual for a first rehearsal to be open to the general public. But that would mean that they had rehearsed the piece earlier, which is obviously not the case.
Then there's the question of meeting with the conductor to discuss tempos, phrasing, cadenzas, ornaments. Again it would be strange in a Mozart concerto to start a rehearsal completely cold. I'm not suggesting that there's any deception in the story, merely that it's puzzling in many aspects ...
And so on. Yes, many questions, few answers — and the story keeps getting better.