One of the things about teaching accompanying within an institution is that you find yourself in a sort of no-mans land between the piano faculty and the singing school. Vignoles puts his finger on the accompanist's central Conundrum. You really are a handmaid, says Vignoles. And that can be a disincentive to developing your own attitudes. And yet until you have your own musical personality, you're simply dull.
Singers can arrive very well coached.
But you have to find your own relationship with the music. Until you do that, an audience will feel it's watching a performance behind a sheet of glass. But some singers don't realise that it's our job to dictate, to create the structure. But you can easily bend too much and lose sight of fact that most of the song repertoire is constructed very much the framework of the piano part. Although it appears that you have no autonomy, you in fact need it tremendously in order to be a good, accompanist.