On Top Gear, James May said something to this effect:
Cars are fun when they are driven at their limit. The problem with a powerful Ferrari is that it has so much horsepower and grip that you'll never approach the limit of the car on public roads. With a small car like a Fiat Panda you can all of the power, almost all of the time -- it's more fun to drive.
While I wouldn't compare my technical ability on the clarinet to a supercar, it is more than adequate for ensemble repertoire I'll encounter at a community level. The experience playing such music, if I'm not careful, quickly becomes boring. However, when I had the chance to fumble around and learn a second instrument, I found that on the bassoon I used all of my talent, almost all of the time. I played at the limits of my ability and the experience was fun.
The second anecdote comes from a masterclass Glenn Dicterow, concertmaster of the NY Philharmonic, held at the Music Academy last year. I forgot the details, so I'll just jump to the point. There was a passage that was impossible to play on the violin, not difficult -- impossible (a string crossing or something). In any case, his advice to fake it: identify what the composer wanted to say and find a way to say it.
I took this idea and ran with it! While my limitation were not imposed by the instrument, in practice they were the same -- I can't play what the composer wrote. What did I do? In a couple of words, fake it. It was often a case of musical triage, but by thinking musically I tried to stop technical problems from becoming musical problems.
