Today's CD buyer/internet downloader demands, and mostly gets, a ‘perfect’ soundworld: sonic sumptuousness is as important as compositional content, and the performer's prowess goes without saying. If, in so-and-so's new Chopin recording, the piano is too distant, or too tinny, or in an acoustic so reverberant as to blur detail and condense the dynamic range, then it will simply collect dust on the shelf. Recordings with performer errors are similarly undesirable. I am, however, fond of Mary Garden's 1904 recording of Debussy's ‘L'ombre des arbres’ from Ariettes oubliées with Debussy at the piano – an important document of course, but also memorable because after the opening piano introduction Garden enters on the wrong note. This is swiftly corrected by Debussy, who also (just in case) gives her the starting note for the second-verse entry. It always raises a smile. Wrong notes, untidy ensemble or imperfect intonation in live performance are, to some extent, the fragile nature of the business, and Garden's recording is a performance preserved for posterity. Yes, audiences are impressed by impeccably virtuosic playing (a spectator sport akin to gawping at a freak show), but we performers are also curiously and necessarily fallible: attempting, say, the extraordinarily slow speeds Messiaen asks for in the solo movements of Quatuor pour la fin du temps, or a real tutta forza fffff in works by Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies, is certainly technically challenging, and these kinds of dangerous moments in performance, even when they don't quite work, are exhilarating for performer and audience alike.