When piano teachers encounter life and work problems, they can analyse the situation as a first step to finding solutions, or just keep grinning relentlessly and assert that everything is wonderful. These two approaches are exemplified in new books on pianism and didactic methods.

The pianist Zecharia Plavin was born in 1956 in Vilnius, where he studied with Marietta Azizbekova, a pupil of Samuil Feinberg. Long a fixture at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, in the 1980s he visited London for coaching from Louis Kentner. Plavin is also a composer. His lyrical sonata Full Freedom (2018) is written with reassuringly vigorous 1950s modernist lyricism.

As a performer, Plavin's securely idiomatic playing of Schumann and Ernest Bloch displays technique and artistic vision. He has even authored a fantasy novel, Requiem for a Holy Island (Wachtman's), about an insular Far Eastern land inhabited by ‘tall, gifted people plagued by malignant ideology and ruled by merciless leaders’. Yet in early years of teaching, his new book avers, Plavin was disesteemed by colleagues because his pupils did not immediately produce contest-winning results.

His delayed response is a devastating indictment addressing the ‘social wounds’ that pianists inflict on their unwary students, associated with professional anxiety about how teachers are seen when their mentees do not snap up prizes at international competitions. The message is that instructor anxiety about potential postgraduate failure by students can poison the didactic experience.

The bitterness of this rewriting of Philip Larkin's poem ‘This Be the Verse’ for a keyboard context is leavened by the author's modesty about his own international profile. Indeed, one potential solution he proposes to avoid thwarting grandiose career dreams is for students to think small, aiming for intimate recitals of rare repertory, rather than renting out expensive concert venues to no avail.

An admirer of the English piano pedagogue Tobias Matthay, Plavin dismisses masterclasses as transitory events in which even if students manage to improve instantaneously on command from keyboard superstars, they will be unable to reproduce the same effects in future. Advising an empathetic, rather than hypercritical, response to student failings, Plavin suggests that getting a student to relax at the keyboard should be recognised as a real accomplishment. As an idealist, he notes: ‘Students with “wounded talent” should only be mentored by teachers with extraordinary patience and a noble heart’.

Afterthoughts of a Pianist/Teacher: A Collection of Essays and Interviews

The New York-based instructor Donald Isler, who celebrated his 70th birthday this year, is a noble-hearted, indefatigable blogger who produces lightweight sketches about teaching and interviews with fellow pianists. Isler is also the head of KASP Records (http://kasprecords.com), founded to publish his own recordings as well as a few worthy reissues featuring his revered teachers, Australia-born Bruce Hungerford and the American Constance Keene, as well as Hungerford's Swiss colleague Adrian Aeschbacher.

While admitting that lessons from another noted pedagogue, Robert Goldsand, failed to leave any lasting imprint on his playing, Isler may best be described as an American enthusiast in the classroom, with a good word to say for everyone. His ‘Piano Teacher's New Year's Resolutions’ include: ‘1 To be cheerful at all times; 2 To be nonjudgmental’. So convivial and accepting is Isler that he even voluntarily spends time in the company of a couple of US critics, although one of these might be described as a critic-pianist.

The unrelieved sunniness, which some readers may find cloyingly monotonous, features obstinately cheery conclusions about pianists, some of which read like unabashed marketing hype: ‘Massimiliano Ferrati is a busy man, and a very likeable and admirable musician … Yuan Sheng is a wonderful artist whom you should go to hear, if you have the chance! … [Vadim Monastyrski] is a man with a very busy, productive, and accomplished life! … Dmitry Rachmanov is a busy man and an admirable musician! … Antonio Iturrioz is a hardworking gentleman, and a pianist with some special claims to fame!’

On other topics, Isler's enthusiasm is entirely justified, as when he lauds the Cuban-born instructor Solomon Mikowsky and the work of the Schnabel Music Foundation. And some advice recalled from his mentors still makes good sense, like Constance Keene's words: ‘1 Think of everything as melody; 2 Don't play fast pieces at the fastest possible tempo, at which pace you may lose some control, and don't play slow pieces at the slowest possible pace, at which speed they may drag’.

Apparently the only person about whom Isler is not wholly enthused is the pianist, teacher, and composer Abram Chasins, husband of his mentor Keene, whom he deems ‘one of the most unpleasant and cantankerous people I've ever known’. Since no further details are given, the reader is left mystified by this uncharacteristic slating. Perhaps the diagnostic skills of Zecharia Plavin might be applied to scrutinise this welcome whiff of discontent in an otherwise cloudless sky.