Maintaining skill across the life span: Magaloff's entire Chopin at age 77

The study is based on a corpus containing the entire works of Chopin performed by Nikita Magaloff at the age of 77, precisely measured and fully annotated with score information. On this data, we test a model of successful aging including selection, optimization, and compensation hy- potheses (SOC). We identify performance errors, compare Magaloff's etudes with recordings by 14 other renowned pianists, and investigate specific age effects in a selected nocturne in 14 different recordings. Many renowned pianists perform with great success up to old ages (e.g. Backhaus played his last concert at 85, Horowitz at 84, Arrau at 88). The de- mands posed by performing publicly are enormous (motor skills, memory, physical endurance, stress factors; see Williamon 2004). Theories of human life-span development identify three factors to be mainly responsible for "successful aging": selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC model, Baltes and Baltes 1990). Applied to piano performance this would imply that older pianists play a smaller repertoire (selection), practice these few pieces more (optimization), and hide technical deficiencies by reducing the tempo of fast passages while maintaining tempo contrasts between fast and slow pas- sages (compensation) (Vitouch 2005). In this study, we examine a unique corpus of Chopin performances by Nikita Magaloff, recorded on stage at age 77. We test whether Magaloff actu- ally used strategies identified in the SOC model to master this unprecedented project. First, we assess his performance by quantifying performance errors. Second, we analyze recordings of the etudes by other renowned pianists to test whether Magaloff's performance tempi were slower than those of the