After the first run of notes, the music gathered.
That run of notes legato or non legato?
"The way you speak the German is clear, but you lose the sense of the legato line, which is where the expression comes from," Ms. Ludwig said.
In his new book Everything is Connected (subtitled The Power of Music), Barenboim considers how 'when one plays five legato notes... each note cannot be self-assertive, wanting to be louder than the notes preceding it; if it did, it would defy the nature of the phrase to which it belongs'.
The note was all run-of-the-mill, derivative material.
And Mr. Iyer's piano figures -- sketched in between vamp chords -- were swift, knotty and leaped around in pitch; his strong legato made unlikely strings of notes sound right together.
"They also cultivate that laserlike gleam you need when singing Wagner, so different from the sort of velvety legato required for a typical Verdi choral line.
He had also absorbed some of the elegantly legato manner of the West Coast "cool school" players.
As performed by Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans on this occasion, it appeared to be little more than a series of legato crossings of the stage.
Portamento, the carrying-over of one note into the next by a gentle curve of sound rather than a clean-cut interval, is a feature of the legato style, and that is not what is in question here.
In one corner, Harvard musicologists cite Adorno; in another, sweatshirt-clad Longy School of Music students complain of insufficient legato; meanwhile, the sages of Brookline fondly recall Koussevitzky.
