twocats I think it's about soloists being expected to memorize!
It wasn't always that way. Blame Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt. As to playing "with the notes", it's something I've done after losing my way playing something I'd done successfully several times in public at a recital given at the end of the first master class I attended with Peter Feuchtwanger in Germany. I was so wrapped up in HOW it was that I was playing, having just had major work with him changing some of the basic things about my playing including but not limited to how high I sat, how far from the piano, releasing the "hold the ball" way that I'd learned from David Saperton many years previously, that I lost my way. I had no idea where I was in the piece; I thought I was playing one section, but I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. So I improvised for a while until I could remember how the next section started, and continued from there without further incident to the end! Only Feuchtwanger knew, and he was quite congratulatory about how I'd done, proving my performer's chops. Me - I was exhausted. I dripped sweat from every pore of my body as if I had been in a sauna.
Since then, I play with the notes. First with paper. Now I'm on my second tablet device. The first was a Lenovo Yoga; the latest is a PadMu.
Like Dinnerstein, of course, I study the music and have it "memorized". Having the notes in front of you is no cure for not knowing the music.
I saw Leon Fleisher play a Mozart Concerto with the BSO using the score. It was beautiful playing.
Also, by way of reminisce and offering a slightly different perspective, one of my teachers, Bela Nagy, for whom I was his TA for several semesters, had a true eidetic memory. He could look at a score at the piano, or away from it, and after that it was available to him. I remember him, on occasion, playing some things (from memory of course) that sounded like, well, very good sight reading vs things that he REALLY KNEW, e.g., Bartok and Liszt pieces that he'd played for years.
