Professional, peer and personal pressures often encourage pianists to pursue ever more technically demanding repertoire, sometimes at the expense of artistic freedom and musical satisfaction.

This lecture explores how working on easier repertoire can create greater space for imagination, sound quality, phrasing, voicing, colour and character, allowing pianists to develop the most important aspects of musicianship more fully. Through examples from the concert platform, teaching studio and piano literature, the talk challenges the assumption that harder repertoire necessarily leads to better playing.