There is a comedian I like who has a new twist on the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall. “One day I want to move next door to Carnegie Hall. When people ask how to find my apartment, I’ll just tell them to ‘practice, practice, practice, and then take a left.'”
I was very fortunate to recently perform my second solo recital at Carnegie Hall at Zankel Hall. The concert was a big success. I felt that I generally performed my best but I also had a great time being on stage. Sometimes there are concerts where one feels simply in survival mode (which is not a good thing), and other times one feels confident but slightly disassociated from the experience. This, though, was a great concert. It was full of expression in some repertoire that was deeply personal and unique to me.
I’d like to share what it was like to prepare for this experience. As the old joke goes, it involves a lot of practice. Not just the practice that has consumed much my of life since I was 6 years old, but the practice that has taken nearly all of my free time for the last year. This year I played multiple concerts with different programs of chamber music, two new concerti, and two very difficult solo programs (including all of the Rachmaninov Opus 39 Etudes). The majority of this repertoire was brand new to me. There were often a lot of notes per square inch. The program I just played in Carnegie was also so new or obscure that the vast majority of it had never been recorded. (Now it is, as I just made a CD of all of it with Tantara Records.) It is a different experience forging ahead into a score that you have never heard before, a vast wilderness that holds promise but also potential perils of which you may not be fully aware.
What does this kind of adventure take? Well, there were many mornings where I was up at 5:15 am, getting ready for work. It meant being the first one in my building, many times entering before the building was officially open. It meant being the last person to leave my building, staying for that extra hour or two after an evening student recital. Or skipping dinner with my family (which I highly value) to stay at work for another three to four hours of practice. It meant that there were days where I did not have an extra ten minutes because I needed every second to work at the piano. It meant that there were nights that at 4:15 am I was wide awake, thinking and worrying about that June 29th recital, an immovable deadline looming in the distance. It meant wondering why my eyelid kept twitching uncontrollably and finding online that the main culprits are usually “stress, lack of sleep, and over-consumption of caffeine.” (Too much Diet Coke!). It also meant juggling repertoire, such as the solo recital I did in early May in Anchorage, Alaska which included repertoire that was almost completely different than the Carnegie concert for which I was preparing just a month later and for which I was recording the CD. It meant that the morning after I played in Alaska, I got up early to work on that other music I knew was waiting for me. It meant that sometimes while practicing I would set my alarm to go off every eight minutes to review the same difficult 3 passages…for five or six hours straight. Each time the alarm went off, I was startled – could it be so soon? Has it only been 8 minutes? It meant meticulously starting at the very beginning of this process by writing in fingering for anything remotely difficult and accumulating a half dozen pencils in my office pummeled with teeth marks to prove it. (I often have a pencil in my mouth when I do this….) Sometimes in especially difficult passages, it meant changing that fingering when the first one was not working dependably enough. And then changing it again three weeks later. Or being worried that a fingering would not work when laying in bed at 4 am, and then getting up and starting the day in the search to find a new one.
It meant coming home to my family and trying to shut all of that out for a while while enjoying dinner together but under the surface never for a second forgetting the urgent task at hand. When not at the piano, somewhere there was always some of this music churning in the recesses of my consciousness. I was practicing as much as possible, often seven hours a day, sometimes as much as twelve. There were also days when the duties of my job as a university professor were especially demanding. A few extra meetings, teaching classes and students, and returning home knowing that I had only practiced for 90 minutes that day – a painful deficit that I knew would have to be made up. When I recorded this music from start to finish in just a few weeks, it meant that I was practicing at 6 am, then doing editing of the previous session for three to four hours, then practicing, then a recording session for three hours, and then three more hours of practicing to get ready for the next day’s session. Day after day. And trying to teach at the same time. It meant trying to make sure I had a goal in mind for every time I was playing something–in phrasing, in technique, in color, in the realization of some marking in the score. It meant a complete servitude to the project until the concert was over. A sweet slavery. It meant not giving up, and hoping that these efforts would pay off with success.
Ultimately, it meant that when I was backstage at Carnegie Hall about to perform, I felt really excited to go out and play. I felt fortunate, lucky, grateful, and ready to give my best effort to share some great music that no one knows. It felt magical. And then the stage manager looked at me, puts his hand on the door knob and asked “are you ready?” And I gave my standard answer: “Well, I’m not getting any readier!” Then the warm applause and long walk to the piano.
The concert finished, I know I will do it all again on another program, another stage, another place, another experience. I look forward to it.