Seymour & Ben at the Piano is my favorite series

Agree

Yes, clearly there is so much mutual respect there. The banter is highly entertaining. :)

What did you learn from it?

Seymour and Ben are like Yoda and Luke Skywalker. I love watching every video of them together. 

I agree.

These two are the reason I joined Tonebase!  I just watched the documentary on Seymour and must have cried 5 times.  The wisdom this man puts out is profound.  I suggest we clad him bubble wrap; he must be protected at all costs!

Agreed. Watched a piece about a pianist playing a lesson coming from a pro that is using Seymour’s info about pins. Was news to him. 

Hairpins

My biggest ah-ha moment this past year was learning from Seymour Bernstein that hair pins are not for volume but for tone and rhythm adjustments. It has revolutionized my playing of romantic music (Chopin, Schubert, etc.). Other pianists including teachers that I know have never heard this and may times scoff at the idea  ….  Question: how late in the classical period did it start? Or early in the romantic period? Does it apply to Beethoven say?

Ditto 

Oh yes, hairpins. (Or as I used to call them as a child, crocodiles.) I walked away from the video thinking, how is this possibly the first time I hear about this?? I then got some music from the shelf. (1) It‘s exactly as SB says. Mendelsohn uses dim./ cresc. for dynamics, he also uses hairpins and sometimes both, which, as SB argues, would be oddly redundant of both were referring to dynamics. Once I looked at it, it was blatantly obvious really. (2) I realised that I’ve intuitively been playing these passages correctly all along - while I thought hairpins meant dynamics, I ignored that and instead adjusted tempo and tone, although I had no idea that this was actually what the score asked me to do.