The dawn of performance day was fatigue and spite, I didn’t know it until later in the week but I was starting to get sick. My first class is a group performance class, and spurred on a bit by my irritability, I sat in the early morning class with three other people and immediately raised my hand to volunteer. Low stakes, low audience, and I was getting my money worth.
By the time my turn had come up, right after a Chopin Ballade No. 1, the room was full, but undeterred I sat down and played the passage within the Rachmaninov Prelude that I was struggling with and the teacher, patient, explained some exercises to deal with a passage that was chunky at best.
Everyone politely clapped and I took my seat, impressed with myself for my second group performance. It was after this class that I ran into the Americans in the large dining hall.
The Americans, four women (save for the Japanese man I met the night before last the outlying American) mostly travelled in a group, led by one who was insistent that all Americans stick together. The retired cellist talked about the difference between the first session and the second session.
“The teacher didn’t seem to want to teach amateur’s at all, I’m not an amateur musician, of course, I’m an amateur pianist. It shouldn’t matter.”
“Well,” I said, repeating what had been said to me. “If they didn’t want amateur’s here they shouldn’t allow us in.”
We talked a little more about the order of the day and I mentioned I was performing that evening in the Baronial Hall, the cellist again chimed in.
“I think I am scheduled for a performance, I was last week, but I’m not performing, no one goes to student recitals anyways.”
I am sure for a lot of people this was heartbreaking news, but for me I was elated! To not have an audience was a dream. The rest of the Americans agreed that student recitals were too late at night and that it wasn’t worth the stress of performing and that 75% of the students scheduled didn’t even show.
I had quite a busy schedule that day with classes and I had also asked my usual piano teacher to FaceTime me for some pre-concert prep.
My morning class was in the concert hall and the teacher was playing through some Schumann that she would be playing that evening for the Faculty Recitals and I watched from the balcony.
“So, are you in conservatory or are you an accompanist?” She asked as we sat down for our next lesson. “What do you do?”
“This is just a hobby for me, I just really like piano.” I laughed taking a seat at the Steinway concert grand. “My job doesn’t involve music at all.”
My second teacher changed her entire teaching methodology after that, a tense first lesson bled into a friendly second lesson and I played over the Chopin Nocturne we had covered the day before and I had worked for two hours to correct, and she was impressed with the turn around, and we went on to do tweaking or small changes in musicality rather than polyrhythms.
I left feeling elated and ran into the Americans again who wanted to do lunch together but I had other plans (watching tiktoks and eating a sandwich and crisps in my airbnb) and I had a lesson to quickly get to right after.
My piano teacher, Rachmaninov, and I, had a difficult afternoon, but she gave me some advice that I realised that I was already taking.
“My teacher used to tell me be angry and perform but I try to think of the audience naked.” My teacher said “You’re not here for them, you’re doing this for Beethoven.”
“Yes! I’m only doing it for Beethoven and Rachmaninov, not for the audience!”
Rachmaninov of course, was rolling in his grave somewhere as I began to overthink his prelude and try to fix something that was passable but chunky, into that inbetween state of relearning where it’s notes not music that are all jumbled together in a tonal stew.
This tonal stew led to the panic that carried over into afternoon performances and then the evening performance. I also felt like I was focusing too much on the repertoire for the evening performance and not giving Beethoven a fair shake which would be performed the very next morning.
That evening I went to the recital hall only to see it locked, and the staff couldn’t find the lights, all that was in the hall, completely unprepared for the evening performances was the piano on a large stage and portraits staring down from every wall.
The chairs were organised quickly and another staff member came to assist and to watch, going into the stairwell that was “definitely haunted” to turn on the stage lights, and after some finangling of my small audience of both ghosts, portraits, and the faculty, I began to play.
Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong in a performance. I’ve heard a lot of advice about dealing with performance anxiety, from my teacher, from the faculty at the school, from friends, but when it’s you on the stage, it ends up just being a river that you get caught up in and the flow of the performance is either swim or drown.
So Rachmaninov came and went, my worst rendition, and the first piece where all the nerves are in every finger tip, and the reworking I had hurriedly done over the last twenty four hours came out in a climactic atonal mess, and Chopin, who I had no issues with, suffered similarly.
Grieg, that I had performed before was the turn around point in my performance, went well, and I breathed easily, somehow pulling myself out from under the river of music and swimming along with it instead of drowning, and, fearful, I dropped my second Chopin piece in favor of moving directly to Radiohead which both went well.
Each piece was met with applause, polite, or otherwise, I’d rather not think about it. The portraits did not clap, but watched from the walls.
Finally, the performance was over, and I turned to the group, the two other students that were slated after me didn’t show up so I turned to the faculty member. “It is a shame to be in such a wonderful hall and not play something dramatic, can I play something else now that we’re done with all this performance stuff?”
“The hall is yours, go ahead.”
Beethoven’s Pathetique is the drama that I love Beethoven for, the changes in tempo, the desperation that almost seems violent in the first movement, followed by some of the most famous themes in classical music.
And somehow, everything changed, no longer performing, but just playing Beethoven because I thought the hall suited him, I played a near perfect rendition of the first movement, and the faculty that had stayed late to keep the hall open was surprised at the change in atmosphere.
“It was well deserving of him.” I said finally as we walked up to the pub afterwards “Even if I did not do Chopin and Rachmaninov well, I didn’t want to let Beethoven down.”
I would do this of course the next day.
My next recital was in the main concert hall and recorded by a friendly audio technician who introduced himself and announced each movement in turn, and as things went from bad to worse, the second movement being the only Salvagable thing in my Pathetique I left the second recital angry at myself for not spending more time perfecting Beethoven.
I ran into the Americans on my way up from backstage which empties out in a back hallway on the first floor. “Where is your recording? Send it to me!” The leader of the Americans, the cooing woman that was always complimentary held out her phone “Air Drop it.”
“I don’t have it.” I said, stunned that someone I spoke to maybe three or four times was so invested “It will be in my inbox next week.”
“None of us have performed, you’re the only one who has.” She said. “I want to see what Americans can do.”
Not well, I thought internally, cringing at my own recording that I knew had not been my best work.
“Not even in the group classes?” I asked instead.
“Maybe next year.” She said and then tapped her phone to contact share. “What’s your email?”
After a long, last talk with the Americans, I went to my next class with my first teacher who was the director of the school and the program, it was in the other recital hall in the building, where I had been yesterday. I sat in the concert hall and listened to the other student finish up his class and the Director told him to start thinking about the FSM (a master’s level exam).
When our class started he asked me what I thought of the program.
“It is a bit intimidating, but it is a good thing.” I said honestly, sitting on the piano bench on the stage, my fingers resting on the Steinway that had a sticker with the price of it to remind me what a gift it was to play on something that cost almost $100,000.
“It’s not intimidating.” He shot back sitting in his seat, the third seat from the right in the audience “But I am sorry you feel this way.”
My eyes cut to the logo on the piano where I could see my reflection. This lesson already had taken an odd turn, and would only get progressively worse from there.
I played through a relatively passable third movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique, we got halfway through when he stopped me.
“You know, your problem is that you’re not patient enough with music.” He said waspishly after checking his email on his phone. “You’re not giving it enough time, you need to memorize it and truly understand it. You’re doing things too fast.”
We began an immensely slow exercise of trying to play each bar from memory which lasted the entire lesson.
“Thank you for your patience.” He said at the end and I felt frustration rise up and I swallowed it again. “Try to move slower and take your time.”
“Thank you for your time this week.” I replied.
I thought a lot about what he had said the rest of the day, turning over this sacred wisdom in my head multiple times to extract some deep meaning out of it. It preyed on all my insecurities. Was I trying to play above my skill level? Was he insinuating that I only wanted to play hard pieces quickly and not put in the time to have solid foundations? It was an existential crisis.
I decided that if we had only met a handful of times, he couldn’t really know my motivations for piano well, and as one of my friends says often “Advice is a buffet, only take what you want to eat.”
My teacher was not a fan of the director, he had done a lot of strange things over the course of the week, mostly revolving around changing fingerings of already memorized performance pieces. I still think that everyone has something to teach you and this parting shot about patience, something I try to practice more than others, was on my mind for the entirety of my stay in England.
I thought a lot over the next week after this about what my goal with piano was, and why I had even come to do piano in the first place, and I thought about that evening in the hall, after the “performance” was over and I was performing Beethoven because the Baronial Hall was deserving of him.
We were all sitting in a tapas restaurant in Edinburgh before the topic came up again, my sister had come to join us for a few days while we were in Scotland. “Would you do it again?”
This is a difficult question for me. I came to this school with honest intentions to learn, and I made every opportunity to learn from the various workshops and performances.
This is not what the school was for. This was almost a fashion week of sorts, where you are here to be seen by others who understand what you’re doing on a deeper level. An enclave of artists who speak the same language and understand why Ravel’s Miroirs is so difficult and why it is such an accomplishment to play it. This was another planet of people who had the same types of relationships with the music as me, and didn’t scoff at the ivory tower of classical music.
It was only in the final few classes that people came with “real” issues that needed to be fixed in their music and not show pieces in order to get praise, after they had established their standing amongst the in group as a pianist.
If you were not prepared, or not confident, or not spiteful, you would be stuck with the rest of the Americans, passive observers who had flown 9 hours only to get caught in the bright light of the savants that come to this school that are glittering in every practice room.
It reminded me, especially the last lesson, of shopping at Louis Vuitton. You so desperately want to be liked by the sales associate that you will spend the money to show them that you belong in their clientele, and this school too was like this, and I caught myself thinking “If I only learn a Ballade before next year, then I’ll be one of those glittering people in group classes.”
I want to say something noble here about how I decided I didn’t want to be liked or accepted by this group of people, or how I took the Director’s advice to be patient with music and understand it deeply, but I am not noble, I am competitive to a fault. I want to do what’s best by my favorite dead guys, and I want so desperately to be the type of person that the Louis Vuitton sales associates think is one of their clientele.
In one of Beethoven’s letters he mentions about playing tricks on the piano virtuosi up in Vienna by writing difficult music just to satisfy their egos, and I came away from Chetham’s realising I had been amongst them for a week.
I learned a lot, I suppose, from my week, where I had gone wrong, tricks and techniques, but more importantly, I learned where I was.
Did I overcome my performance anxiety? No.
But I found a motivator.
“I should start learning a Ballade now, if I want to be prepared for next year.” I said over my martini.
Next year, I will glitter.
Patience, Patience, Patience.
Persistence, Persistence, Persistence.