I started piano relatively late on, at nearly eight, but I took to it right away. I was obsessed with it. I was very lucky with my first teacher. Jacqueline Courtin was such a fine person, gentle but strict, extremely dedicated to the music. She had vast horizons, an immense culture, and she was very generous about sharing those. Progress went very fast: she introduced me to the Berg Sonata when I was nine years old. Her scores were always heavily annotated.
The first time I laid eyes on that Berg Sonata, the score was nearly illegible, because Courtin was so dedicated, so precise, that she had everything underlined: all the punctuation in red, every phrase, every marking, and God knows it’s heavily marked to begin with. So there was…
