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Can someone mention some obvious mistakes by concert pianists?

Schnabel had a giant memory slip in the last movement of the Mozart K488 concerto, and improvised for a while while the orchestra stumbled confusedly along.

Rubinstein made the same memory slip twice in the scherzo of the Chopin B flat minor sonata, each time going back from the end of the A section almost to the beginning, until finally getting fed up and improvising into the trio.

I knew somebody would post that video.

Sviatoslav Richter split a note, very glaringly, in the first few seconds of Mussorgsky's Pictures at Sofia in 1958 - in a live recording which has become a classic ("The greatest recording of this work that I've ever heard, on record or off" - said a critic at the time, and quoted on the original LP sleeve).

http://youtu.be/CitIXrkQfzo (at 0:25)

There are many more wrong notes later on, but they're in tricky spots with large leaps (Baba Yaga especially). One doesn't expect a wrong note on the easiest page in the score, by one of the greatest pianists who ever lived......

The coda of the second movement of the Schumann Fantasy is a glorious passage, and notorious for being butchered even by the greats.

Anybody can find mistakes in performances by those crappy pianists from the past, but what about the modern titans of piano that have mastered all the proper movements?

There isn't a person alive or dead that has ever "mastered all the proper movements".

Tee hee hee:

http://brendankinsella.com/httpdocs/hall_of_shame.html

But I didn't think two people would post that video.

Harold Schonberg reports that once when Schnabel was playing the Brahms Bb with Bruno Walter in NY, Schnabel had a memory lapse in the slow movement and things came to a complete halt. After some consultation, the performance continued. Schnabel seemed unfazed, Walter not so much.

I once heard a pianist have a memory lapse in the first movement of the Schubert D845, but as it was faked so quickly, if one didn't know the piece, nothing would have appeared amiss.

Horowitz messed up the Rachmaninov Sonata pretty badly when he played here in Oakland. It was still exciting.

Where did those orchestral ones come from? What a hoot!

What's the interest in highlighting the mistakes that others make?

Horowitz messed up quite often.

I like to think it was because he was taking musical risks that paid off more than they detracted.

However, he quite famously totally honked it in the opening measure of the Bach Busoni Toccata in C Major in what was supposed to be his triumphant return to the international stage in 1965. After more than a decade of self-imposed exile, everybody wanted to know if Horowitz still had it. And that mistake brays out so obviously, not even two seconds after his fingers touch the keys.

My heart breaks for him. The more I learn about him as an adult, the more and more I feel for him. He was my formative piano sound as a kid, but I never really took the time to learn about his personal life. I idolized him and in a small way I was part of his problem. He really struggled with identity and felt more keenly than most famous people the essential disconnect between who one really is and what the world perceives one to be.

On the other side of the spectrum entirely was Rubinstein, who seemed to relish the attention and fame and thrived on it. He apparently had some serious stage fright as well, but unlike Horowitz, he transformed the moment he went out there. Horowitz wore his anxiety on his sleeve both on and off-stage until it finally got him in the end. He pulled it together for the very last part of his career, but he truly, truly struggled for a lot of it.

Duuuuuude! I think you've got some updating to do

Even Vika makes mistakes, she made a fairly big one playing some pop songs when she went to Iceland, and a couple playing live in Germany.

But she just carries on like nothing happened.

I'd note though that anything you see on youtube will probably be the result of many many attempts and restarts, so nobody is utterly perfect!

Don't you guys know that experts are the most experienced at mistakes?

I must be an expert pianist, then!