MICHAEL SHERARD was amongst the last valiant British dress designers to attempt a full-scale couture house run on Parisian lines. And for pianism in the classical period, look into the superb Mozart Compendium or its Beethoven sibling (Thames & Hudson), both of which - Cambridge nota bene! - are exemplary works of reference.. For a history of the repertory, consult F E Kirby's exhaustive Music for Piano. Some chapters feel curiously arbitrary, others hopelessly cramped. Only Brian Priestley - dispatching "Ragtime, blues, jazz, and popular music" in 16 pages - manages to make sense of his near-impossible brief.I'm still glad to have read this book, if only for the incidental insights along the way.

But for the history of pianism in all its variegated glory, read Harold Schonberg's The Great Pianists. Was this august publisher unable to afford an in-house editor, or did he or she fall asleep on the job?If the latter, I can quite see why.To divide the story into two parallel sections - "Pianos and pianists" and "Repertory" - was not a bad idea, but with the strands so inextricably intertwined the job needed great editorial skill. The chronological structure implies that it should be read, rather than consulted, yet to read it through is to be hit over the head by clonking repetitions. It is, in sum, well suited to critical circumambulation.Yet this book misses the mark by a mile. It was a mistake to imagine so compendious a subject could be jammed into 240 pages, and a worse one to entrust it to an editor who does not seem to understand what editing means, and whose prose is as leaden as David Rowland's. And, as a piece of engineering, it has scarcely changed at all.

In the hands of Alfred Brendel, it's an orchestra; in the hands of Cecil Taylor, it's 88 tuned drums; when "prepared" by Lou Harrison, it's a Balinese gamelan.In the 19th century, the piano was the focal point of every bourgeois home; in our century, it's the glue for social gatherings. In the Romantic era virtually all pianists were composers, and routinely played their own works. They improvised and took liberties which would now be anathema, rewriting Chopin and Schumann to display their keyboard talents to more flattering effect.Now, textual fidelity is a fetish, and we are the poorer for it.Throughout its 300-year history, the piano has inspired the greatest composers to their highest flights of creativity. It sounds a great deal healthier than the strait-laced concert culture of today.We have lost something, moreover, through our disdain for improvisation and our rigid distinction between "classical" and "new" music. As he began, he vehemently threw his gloves and handkerchief on the floor."Audiences behaved like modern rock fans, shouting out the pieces they wanted, interrupting works which bored them. At a recital in 1848, Liszt "burst two bass strings, and personally fetched a second...