Sometimes in classes there were performances by pupils which, though far from being virtuoso achievements, moved me by their deep awareness of the musical and expressive content of the composition. Even now, after all these years, I can recall moments like that heavy-set Bernese girl’s playing of the slow movement of a Bach concerto; it had an inwardness, a touch of that something which is so rarely projected from the concert stage – something of what looks out at us from one of the kneeling “donor’s portraits” on the side panels of a Van Eyck or a Van der Goes triptych; or, to find a comparison nearer our times, out of the eyes of some Modigliani child-model. Years later I saw her, even heavier than she used to be, married, maternal, her violinistic ambitions relegated to the distant past. But nothing can alter what to me still seems a fact: that she had been visited by moments of grace in those student years. / To witness such moments is rarer than one would think, even in a lifetime of concert-going, and to recognize them while they are happening is one of the things I have learned from those contacts with amateurs. (Dilettanti really seems an apter word, because it is nearer to its root, 'dilettare': “to take delight in.”) I sometimes contrast their “raptness” with some of the scintillating, impeccable performances that recall Virgil Thomson’s devastating indictment of “the machine finish that is dead and horrid” in so much of our concert-hall music-making. << less