Performance Report #2 (plus recording)
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One of the amazing skills I've witnessed a few times from professional pianists is the ability to adapt to the piano in front of them...
It makes sense you would be more comfortable with the touch, tuning and tone of your own instrument. When you think about the feedback loop between your ears an hands, it can be quite a challenge to get comfortable enough on a different piano to do your best!
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Your story reminds me of how Olympic athletes can practice the same movements for years only to have something not go right when it’s their turn in competition. They might stick the landing perfectly in practice the day before only to stumble in front of the judges.
Congratulations on sticking the landing when you played for your guests! Now that you’ve done it once I suspect it will happen more often in the future.
@Steve-Miller said in Performance Report #2 (plus recording):
Congratulations on sticking the landing when you played for your guests!
Thank you Steve! I like the thought being like an Olympic athlete and sticking the landing!
Now that you’ve done it once I suspect it will happen more often in the future.
Hopefully!
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@Rontuner exactly! I was thinking I’d be ok because I play different pianos all the time at my lesson. But I realized that at my lesson, I have different goals mind and I’m listening in a different way, so a sub-par piano doesn’t throw me. In a performance , things are different!
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Well done @ShiroKuro. Well done on getting through the less-than-ideal performance and on "acing" the next one.
It's good that you'd like to play at the retirement centre again. I think the experience on Tuesday would have made you a better performer.
I'm in no position to be giving you or anyone advice, but if I was going to perform at a place like that, I might ask them if I could spend a bit of time practising on their piano, depending on whether I thought practising there would be awkward. And I'd do some of my practice at home with the TV or radio on, or a recording that's mostly quiet with some occasional noises for distraction.
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Thank you @AndyD !
Yes, I probably need to do some kind of practicing with background noise, that would definitely help.
I have my next lesson on Wednesday. I’m going to take the recordings in, I don’t want to listen to all of them in their entirety because that would use up too much of the lesson time (and I already have new music I’ve started on, yay!)
But I do want to play parts of the recordings where you can hear a few of the trouble spots, I’d like to see what he thinks… or maybe we should listen to one recording at each lesson, then we could listen to each recording in full. I’ll ask him what he recommends of course.Anyway, I’m curious about whether the spots where I messed up the most noticeably have something in the music that triggered it, for example, are those places (passages) that were weak already, or were they truly “random” mistakes brought on by nothing more than nerves? Actually, I can do some of that “post-mortem” myself. Now that I’m past the initial disappointment, I think I should do that.
Speaking of lessons, next semester I want to see if I can switch to 60-minute lessons (right now I have 45-minute lessons). I’m pretty sure I won’t run out of things to work on!
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SK, the recording is beautiful and there's so much there to be happy with. I suspect the same can be said of the other two pieces you played. We do tend to inflate glitches to unworldly proportions, when to any sane person the playing probably delivered a lot of pleasure.
I got the feeling you were being a bit unfair by comparing yourself to two music students. I'm assuming they're majoring in music, correct? If so, they've had opportunities that you haven't. Specifically: Playing for others... a lot.
Which brings me to my final point. I never felt more comfortable playing in front of people than when I was taking lessons, and a weekly group class. In the first weeks of class I'd be a nervous wreck when it was my time to solo something I had worked on and was "ready" to perform. It was awful. But, the advantage of being able to go through the process repeatedly took the edge off "mistakes" and I slowly gained confidence. It is quite true that performing needs practice just as much as technique of the instruments.
Thanks for posting the recording. I really enjoyed it.
