What is your practice and preparation routine a few days before and the day of the performance?
I have a performance coming up in 4 days in a competition where I am playing Beethoven Sonata Op.27 and Gershwin three preludes. I already know the music very well and inside out and I practice all the challenging sections at a slower tempo everyday.
I always feel a mountain of stress climbing as the performance day comes up. Even though I know I practiced the program and played through it like a thousand times but I have this fear that something might go wrong while on stage.
Just asking fellow pianists here, do you have any specific advice or rituals that you do a few days before and on the day of the performance for practice? Do you have long practice sessions, short and multiple ones throughout the day? Do you play the whole program or just play through the challenging parts?
I try to record myself to simulate the feeling of the performance but I appreciate any ideas here!
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Just some general advice for memorising, and preparing for competitions/performances:
when memorising pieces, I know of two methods that work very well, one being Richter‘s method of taking the piece page by page, working on the technical aspects will simultaneously working on memorisation. The other being breaking up the piece even further into one-eight bar sections and then doing a very similar thing of working on technical aspects while memorising at the same time.
My advice on performances in general is to consciously think about playing your pieces a lot slower, as your adrenaline in the moment of the performance will make you speed up. Even if you think you are going too slow, you usually won’t be.
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Jack Just a correction on the second method:
You repeat each one-to-eight bar section several times at a tempo that you can play it within your control (gradually speeding up as you become more comfortable with it) and that is supposed to ingrain the passage.
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I recently recorded the first movement of the Chopin concerto op. 11 (2 Pianos), and I found my self playing a lot slower than I usually would, and in doing so significantly improving my sound and accuracy. In the days leading up to the recording, I found myself listening to the piece a lot (Argerich/Dutoit is my favourite) and slowing practicing and consciously thinking about all of my fingerings, as well as thinking about all of my musical choices in the second theme, etc.
If you are interested the performance is here: https://youtu.be/73LstlVwRJc
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Khaled - Did you have your performance yet? How did it go?
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Harriet Kaplan Thanks for asking! I thought it went well, better than how I expected or how I feared. It was my first performance like that in such a setting (competition) in more than 15 years so it was quite stressful for me to say the least. Apart from 2-3 memory slips that I was able to recover from and apart from the distractions in my mind that I had to keep trying to kick away, I thought I did well.
I read all comments here and listened to Dominic's video about preparation for performance and I have to say it was very helpful. I didn't win but I got a mark of 80%. I wasn't looking at getting any of the top places in this competition but it was more of an experience for me to get back to the performance stage and to feel comfy about it, which I did and I look forward to my next competition performance of the same program in 10 days!
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Khaled Kudos! For those of us in the “older” age bracket, winning is difficult if not impossible. Competitions tend to focus on weeding out the most promising young musicians for a possible future career. And it is as it should be. So, I agree with you: they serve as an awesome opportunity to perform and to help push us beyond our comfort zone. All good stuff!
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