Pianist David Torkanowsky seems to take the most left turns -- and the sharpest. His is a big bag of tricks and he seems to employ most of them on every tune, a practice that has caused some to describe his playing as “quirky,” he said.

"Due to my total absence of technique I'm more desperate," he said, though his listeners would surely disagree with his self-critique. "So I might take a harder right or a harder left than somebody who can skate around the corner real gracefully I'm not the...