For a different take on it from Heinrich Neuhaus who taught Richter, Gilels and Lupu:
"Godowsky, my incomparable teacher and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the post-Rubinstein era once told us in class that he never practised scales (and, of course, that was so) . Yet, he played them with a brilliance, evenness, speed and beauty of tone which I believe I have never heard excelled. He played the scales he encountered in musical compositions in the best possible manner and in this way learned to play ideally "scales as such".
[...] What was Godowsky's method of teaching? As everybody knows, he was reported to be "a wizard of technique" [...]. For this reason numerous young pianists from all over the world flocked to him, mainly in the hope of getting his recipe for attaining "virtuoso technique".
Alas for them! Godowsky hardly ever said a word about technique in the sense in which these youngsters understood it; all his comments during a lesson were aimed exclusively at music, at correcting musical defects in a performance, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and a broad interpretation of the written score. In his class, he valued above all the real musician and approached with obvious irony those pianists whose fingers were fast and agile while their brains were slow and dull"
"Godowsky, my incomparable teacher and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the post-Rubinstein era once told us in class that he never practised scales (and, of course, that was so) . Yet, he played them with a brilliance, evenness, speed and beauty of tone which I believe I have never heard excelled. He played the scales he encountered in musical compositions in the best possible manner and in this way learned to play ideally "scales as such".
[...] What was Godowsky's method of teaching? As everybody knows, he was reported to be "a wizard of technique" [...]. For this reason numerous young pianists from all over the world flocked to him, mainly in the hope of getting his recipe for attaining "virtuoso technique".
Alas for them! Godowsky hardly ever said a word about technique in the sense in which these youngsters understood it; all his comments during a lesson were aimed exclusively at music, at correcting musical defects in a performance, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and a broad interpretation of the written score. In his class, he valued above all the real musician and approached with obvious irony those pianists whose fingers were fast and agile while their brains were slow and dull"
(from The Art of Piano Playing)