THOSE DAZZLING FINGERS Everyone who loves the piano finds it fascinating to "watch the hands" of a sensational virtuoso - or even those of an ordinary pianist - yet few members of any audience have an inkling of what lies behind the technical feats that so attract our eyes. "How do they do that?" - people whisper to each other. "I don't know, but isn't it great!" - is a usual answer. And so, a kind of contentment is found in the mystery, rather like that which follows well-executed illusions by celebrated magicians. Houdini, Blackstone, Copperfield, even Siegfried and Roy are names associated with effects of "magic." Their forms of entertainment have always succeeded because of the public's inability to discern the means of their eye-defying effects. How the public loves being fooled into thinking that the impossible is, somehow, possible! But the dazzling finger-work of pianists involves no sleight-of-hand nor any special equipment with hidden trap doors or mirrors. It is real, and all the more valuable because it is not mere entertainment but part of esthetic expression. Its acquisition requires years of teaching, drill and practice - uncountable hours of conscious effort to develop the mental power needed to direct the tiny muscles of the hands and the larger ones of the arms and shoulders to achieve incredibly swift, certain responses with maximum efficiency. No wonder that critics used words such as "wizardry," "magic," "sorcery," and "diablerie" in trying to convey to their readers the impressions made by the playing of Chopin, Liszt, Rubinstein, Busoni, Godowsky, Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, Rosenthal, Horowitz and other towering pianists. Most of us enjoy being astonished, if not by magicians then by athletes. We relish athletic prowess by contestants in the Olympics in much the same way we respond to the sporting aspects of piano playing. Who has not thrilled to the sweeping scales at the beginning of Liszt's Mazeppa, throughout Chopin's Heroic Polonaise, or at the end of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto? The hands - exactly together - race impossibly fast across the keyboard, a sort of hundred-yard-dash in the world of musical sweepstakes. And what about the endurance, not to mention the speed, needed for the extended passages in left-hand octaves that build to such mighty crescendos in the Chopin Polonaise and in Liszt's Funérailles, and those for the right hand which bring Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 to so riveting an end? Just to move the wrists so quickly up-and-down - with such unfailing power - 360 times in the Chopin Polonaise, 642 times in the Liszt Rhapsody - seems impossible. Then there are the musical equivalents of the high hurdles and broad jumps required by certain of the more exuberant sonatas by Scarlatti and Soler, by the Paganini section of Schumann's Carnaval and by the second movement of his Fantasy in C, as well as by Liszt's glittering La Campanella. Genuine danger lurks in each, for the slightest mistake spoils the effect. As for those crashing chords which open Tchaikowsky's Concerto No. 1 and the others which threaten to burst apart the first-movement cadenza of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3, their bravura seems to call for the strength of a bench-press strongman.  We hold our breath - and sometimes gasp - as these fierce difficulties are tossed off by the young performers gathered at competitions such as this one. But it is a mistake to judge these displays only for their athleticism. Rather, it is for their contributions to the musical effect intended by composers that listeners and jury members should pay heed. Listening for the integration of technical gestures into a work's musical fabric lets the "big picture" - or form - emerge. Whether sonata, rondo, A-B-A, or theme-and-variations (to mention the most frequently encountered), the form is there to be projected by the performer, not just the details of isolated episodes. Consider Michelangelo's giant David. How satisfied could the viewer be if only shown photographs one at the time of, say, a hand, a knee, the hair and so on until the entire work had been covered - but without our ever being able to perceive how they all fit together to result in the statue's phenomenal form?  Big forms such as concertos and sonatas usually project big musical ideas. Think of Mozart's Concertos Nos. 20 and 25, Beethoven's Concertos Nos. 4 and 5, Brahms' Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, and Busoni's Concerto. Think of Beethoven's Sonatas called Waldstein, Appassionata, Hammerklavier and the last one, Op. 111; of Schubert's Sonata in B-flat, Liszt's in B minor, and Brahms' Sonata No. 3. Colossi all, destined for performers who grasp the magnificence of their form and its content and who have the skill as executants to reveal it, these masterpieces test pianists' artistic maturity to the fullest. So, too, do large-scaled sets of variations such as Beethoven's Diabelli, Brahms' Paganini, Schumann's Symphonic Etudes and Godowsky's Passacaglia. They challenge even the greatest masters and can prove devastating to lesser talents. This holds true for certain short pieces as well. Consider the type called étude (or study). Before Chopin, études were almost solely repetitive-pattern exercises for practice purposes, often to be played privately at great speeds. Cramer and Czerny wrote droves of this type. But Chopin, starting in his teens, composed études as works of music, incomparably valuable gems for the hands and the heart (27 of them), for public performance. Liszt followed suit with his Concert Etudes, Paganini Etudes and Transcendental Etudes - sometimes going beyond Chopin in his demands upon the pianist's arms and imagination. Liapounov and Moszkowski, less often heard today, made important contributions to the étude literature. Rachmaninoff called his works of this sort Etudes-tableaux (literally, Picture-Studies). And Scriabin used the étude as a medium for the expostulation of original timbres and textures in ways that impose newer pitfalls for the pianist.  When any of these pieces appear on a recital program, the audience is in for a special treat: a concentrated few minutes of highly specialized playing so carefully prepared and polished that the inherent difficulties seem not to exist at all! We listeners shiver at the bone-chilling drama of Chopin's Winter Wind or bask in the evanescent flickerings of Liszt's Feux-Follets (Will-o'-the-Wisp) - noticing at some point (in marvelous performances) that we were less aware of the fingers at work than we were of the illusion they conjured: the wind was blowing; we saw the elusive lights. Etudes which have "grown up" are called toccatas. They are finger-pieces usually on a larger scale (occasionally even in sonata form). Clementi created the modern, motoric toccata in the 18th century (to Mozart's chagrin). In the 19th century, Czerny took up the cudgel first, followed by Schumann. Then, in the early 20th century, Prokofieff gave us his. And pianists have sweated blood over these ever since, for they take complex patterns in double-notes to extremes of tone, endurance and velocity. Technical challenges in music, however, are not always tugs-of-war designed to strain both spirit and body. Many are quiet, marvelously delicate intricacies which test suppleness of touch and subtlety of thought - as in Mozart's A-minor Rondo, Chopin's Berceuse, Schumann's Prophet Bird, Mendelssohn's Spinning Song, Ravel's Jeux d'eaux and many of Debussy's Preludes. Famous passages calling for this skill are heard in the opening pages of Liszt's Concerto No. 2, in the slow movements of both concertos by Chopin and the Ravel G-Major, as well as in the scintillating Scherzo of MacDowell's Concerto No. 2. Crystalline tones cast their own spells of enchantment upon us as surely as do great floods of sound such as are produced by the big works cited earlier. A critical factor in both extremes of keyboard sonority is the pedaling used by a pianist. There is no virtuoso musician who is not a virtuoso with the pedals. We see the two feet working away, often without noting that the up-down motions correspond directly with the musical effects. Tones seem to melt into each other, or to emerge song-like, the piano's inherent percussiveness conquered by pedaling and touch together. At other times, the piano is brought to levels of sonority rivaling an organ or an orchestra, again because fingers and feet cooperate so closely. Haydn was the first great composer to explore, then to call for this mutuality in a few of his sonatas. Beethoven absorbed the idea and expanded it into a major element of his keyboard aesthetic - and the Romantic generation throve on it. So did Debussy and Ravel. In fact, truly pianistic music depends on constant employment of both feet and hands to achieve the musical ends required by each composer. Thus, as the array of young pianists participating here exhibit their talents via a vast panoply of repertoire from three centuries, we listeners become the subjects of their mastery of public performance - as a medium for entertainment, for communication and, in rare cases, for transcendence. The bedazzlement we experience comes from fingers and feet, but only as they are guided by musical minds, hearts, souls. And we seek within ourselves to answer whether it is art, sport or magic. Frank Cooper, an authority on keyboard music, is Research Professor of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.