Yes, you can hear a large amount of classical music under the direct control of the composer. Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg (conducting), Busoni, Part, Rautavaari, Messiaen and Ravel (playing) to name just a few. Some even playing their own music in the case of Busoni and Ravel.
Since you brought up Bach, I was thinking more of his general contemporaries, the old dead guys, a couple hundred years in the dirt.
But you start by saying one can't compare classical composers to guitar players and then do so.
I brought up the Hendrix analogy to show why it
wasn't a good comparison.
But I've kinda forgotten what we're talking about...
Oh, the pursuit of perfection. When I think of that I don't think of someone like Bach, but more of someone like Robert Schumann, who refused to accept that his physical injuries would prevent him from being the great pianist he thought he could be (and by all accounts he
would have been), sitting at the piano with a counterweighted pulley system he devised pulling his lame fingers upward as he struggled to pound them down onto the keys...
But then I appreciate that kind of crazy, tunnel-vision single mindedness, so maybe that's not a good example. And he wasn't really striving for perfection, he was trying to overcome adversity, so scratch that.
Anyway, again, my tastes are not typical and I know that, so I go into any conversation like this already on the defensive.
