Piano performance is one of the most interesting skills for a musician to possess. You use 2 hands to play completely different melodic and rhythmic patterns at the same time.  The musician has to develop a keen sense of mental balance to read and play with accurate sound. This achievement is an indication of the passion for the arts.

“Performing a piano piece while sight-reading the music score is an exercise of fluency  that requires a great level of maturity in manipulating music symbols melodic and rhythm patterns.” Edmond Saint-Jean

Piano performance is the ability for a player to interpret a an instrumental piece to reflect the vision of the composer or to rearrange the piece according to his own understanding of the musical motives. This can be achieved by ignoring the written the tempo and dynamics without changing the basic structure of the piece itself.

What is the meaning of interpretation?

In performance the word interpretation can have the traditional meaning that everything written on the sheet music represents “the Medes and the Persian Law”. The latter means anything that is written cannot be altered or changed. The tempo, the dynamics, the melodic motives must be played as written, no matter your likes or dislikes.

Another aspect of interpretation is purely subjective. it consists of your analysis and understanding of what the composer may have meant to convey. Then your interpretation becomes the new and better narrative of the composition. It will sound the same with a twist to those who know the composition very well. I am emphasizing that the core of the composition is quite the same but its presentation changed.

Sight-reading and piano performance.

As the word indicates you are reading on sight. What you see is what you play. Sight reading is the ability to read groups of notes aligned vertically in a horizontal motion simultaneously. This level of skills require an intense training in melodic and rhythmic patterns based on the coordination of the left hand and right hand most likely playing opposite melodic and rhythmic phrases.