{"id":48882,"date":"2024-10-23T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/80fe3c18-d063-4b22-b6aa-aab0b77b1881"},"modified":"2024-10-23T11:07:15","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T09:07:15","slug":"5-musical-geniuses-who-could-sight-read-any-piece-even-the-most-fiendishly-difficult-ones","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/5-musical-geniuses-who-could-sight-read-any-piece-even-the-most-fiendishly-difficult-ones\/","title":{"rendered":"5 musical geniuses who could sight-read any piece – even the most fiendishly difficult ones!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By <\/p>

Published: Wednesday, 23 October 2024 at 08:00 AM<\/p>

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For most musicians – even the very talented ones – performing difficult pieces takes a lot of practice. Playing a piece for the first time is certainly not something us mere mortals can do perfectly… and we’d never do it in public!<\/p>

But some musical geniuses are blessed with such fantastic skill that no matter how fiendishly difficult the piece, they can play it perfectly at sight. Here are 5 of the greatest sight-reading musicians of all time…<\/p>

The greatest sight-reading musicians… Niccol\u00f2 Paganini<\/h2>

One of the most dazzling musical showmen of all time, the great Italian violinist and composer Niccol\u00f2 Paganini<\/a><\/strong> cast a spell over all those who heard his music. Some even claimed his virtuosity was the result of a deal with the Devil. Others claimed his enormous skill was the result of a hidden extra string on his violin<\/a><\/strong>. <\/p>

In fact, Paganini\u2019s contortionist innovations were facilitated by hands of remarkable flexibility, as a result of his suffering from the rare\u00a0Ehlers-Danlos\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>Syndrome<\/strong><\/a>. This enabled him to negotiate the violin at phenomenal speed without the inconvenience of having to constantly change position. It also meant he could achieve huge intervallic stretches with unprecedented ease.<\/p>