For some, performance anxiety is a paralysis, either of the very ability to play or at least of the ability to ‘play’ – a carefree verb suggesting freedom, joy, exuberance, euphoria. But being onstage is, after all, an exposure to judgement, and one that we have initiated. In superficial terms, to have a career is to be better than others, or at least to be chosen over others on that particular occasion, a form of survival. Concert artists are always in a state of audition or examination. ‘You’re only as good as your last concert’ is a malevolent taunt lurking at the back of our anxious minds, and no career is so firmly in place that the public’s eye cannot tire and glance elsewhere. For an orchestral player the possibility of that split note is a daily ‘interview’ on which continued employment hinges. Is it any wonder that the name Richard Strauss strikes fear into the hardiest horn player’s soul?
The pianist Egon Petri said that we would never be nervous if we were humble. One alternative to such Franciscan (or perhaps Puritan) self-awareness might be to have such utter self-confidence that the thought of failing does not even arise. A student I knew, when I was a student, apparently stood in front of a mirror before his concerto debut and repeated, mantra-like, ‘You are the greatest pianist in the world; you are the greatest pianist in the world.’ On occasion I have been so nervous that my doubts were raised more by the word ‘pianist’ than by the word ‘greatest’, although my experience of nerves on stage is generally found somewhere in between – a constant oscillation between sitting confidently on top of the horse, and the fear that the saddle is about to become dislodged.
Vladimir Horowitz used to say to himself, ‘I know my pieces.’ A good start to a rational assessment of the risks at hand. Unless we are incompetent at what we are meant to be doing onstage (and know it) the presence of anxiety is, strictly speaking, illogical. Another strategy, which was found effective by another pianist, was to imagine the entire audience naked. Perhaps a philosophical thought will help: five hundred years ago none of this existed, none of the music, the instruments, the concert halls … the critics. And five hundred years hence what is here now will probably have disappeared too. That speck of dust, me, on a planet that is itself a speck of dust. These are all ways to ‘trick’ the mind into relaxing and undermine the need to seek the approval of an audience.
Back to humility, and to a curious character with much power and influence in the Catholic Church at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cardinal Merry Del Val or, for the sake of completeness, Rafael María José Pedro Francisco Borja Domingo Gerardo de la Santísma Trinidad Merry del Val y Zulueta. Despite the aristocratic string of Latinate names (he was actually born in London) and despite a public career notorious for pulling puppet strings of powerful political reaction behind the scenes, he was by most accounts (when behind the scenes) a simple, humble man. A musician too. He wrote a prayer that someone sent me years ago, and which he was accustomed to recite every day after Holy Communion. Here are some extracts:
From the desire of being praised, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, deliver me, O Jesus.
That others may be chosen and I set aside, O Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I unnoticed, O Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
And, the final sting for a man who almost became pope in 1914:
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should,
O Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
I once showed this prayer to a fellow pianist, and his response was: ‘Well, if I could say that with conviction, I’d never care about anything, certainly not playing in front of an audience.’ Another musician’s response, half (but only half) in jest was: ‘But if I really desired such humility, what would be the reason for going onto the stage in the first place?’
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But what if we could actually embrace our nervousness? There are risks to being on stage of course, but dropped notes are not broken bones, a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground. Most performers actually need a whiff of danger to be at their best, and the unpredictability of a live concert is part of its allure for the audience. Knowing that, if we’re properly prepared, performance anxiety is a phantom of our imagination could actually serve as an injection of bravura, a challenge to the demons within, resulting in greater energy and concentration. I don’t think any musician, unlike a trapeze artist, strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin’s strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix but if ‘ecstasy’ means to stand outside ourselves, then what better ambition can there be as we stand in the wings of a concert hall than to leave self-obsession behind and take the audience on a journey across the high wire of Beethoven or the flying trapeze of Liszt.
Take a deep breath
So much for being nervous on stage – its psychological background and some psychological tricks to cure it. I discovered something extremely important recently: there can be a physical aspect to nervousness too. On those occasions when my nerves in performance have been greater than usual I had actually stopped breathing.
It seems very obvious but I hadn’t really been conscious of it. Sometimes the passages in the pieces that had caused the nerves were physically demanding, setting up a vicious cycle: I would stop breathing, then I would start to get light-headed, making me a little panicky, which would make me more nervous, and so on. I can look back over years of concerts and remember specific instances when I have not played my best for this precise reason.
It’s not just a matter of taking in a deep breath. It’s exhaling that matters even more. The body will usually inhale as a reflex if we can concentrate on breathing out, which in turn is a metaphor for letting go – of anxiety, of nerves. Who would have thought that playing the piano involved not just the hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, back (and brain) … but the lungs too.
Routine on a concert day
A friend asked me recently what my routine is for eating and sleeping on the day of a concert. I remember reading Alfred Cortot’s remark that, on tour, a good digestion and the ability to sleep were far more important than practising. How right he was. Once the suitcase is packed and the taxi is at the door, there’s not much that can be done about the pieces due for imminent performance; if they are not packed in the brain and fingers by that point they never will be. But what is really important, and what must be attended to, is the mental and physical health necessary to hit the road.
Every concert day is slightly different. First of all, there are solo recitals, concerts when the responsibility lies on one pair of shoulders. If I’ve been in the city since the previous day, my ideal scenario is to work from around ten o’clock to one on the concert instrument. Gentle, unemotional practice, but not necessarily of the pieces I will be playing that evening. Then a substantial lunch (sushi is a favourite); then a walk where the spirit can soar, a park or a museum or a cityscape. After that a nap as if at nighttime – curtains fully closed, phones off, pillows fluffed – from about four. Around six, or two hours before the start of the concert, I get up and put on the kettle (I travel with one) and make a cup of good, strong tea. Then into the shower, dress and over to the hall to warm up backstage if there’s a piano, or a drumming of cold, stiff fingers on a table top if there isn’t. The lack of a dressing-room piano is the curse of a pianist. Then into concert clothes about ten minutes before I’m due onstage.
Orchestral concert days are quite different. Unless it’s a tour – a different city every night with the same orchestra and repertoire – one fairly typical pattern is: arrive in the city on a Tuesday evening; main rehearsal either morning or afternoon on the Wednesday; dress rehearsal on the Thursday morning; concerts Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings; leave town on the Sunday morning. The Fridays and Saturdays in th
is pattern are similar to a recital day. Of course, all sorts of things can change this arrangement: the matinee performance (anywhere between 10.30 a.m. and 4 p.m.); radio or press interviews; a sponsors’ lunch; post-concert receptions; a masterclass at the local (or not so local) university … the list is long. And these are the ideal days, without the delayed flights, the fire alarms in the middle of the night, the unavailable (or unplayable) pianos, the nightclubs in the throbbing basement of the hotel at two in the morning, the malfunctioning bathrooms, the non-appearance of taxis. But just one anecdote for now: the broken zip on my concert trousers, which I discovered too late to mend. Yes, I played Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto at the BBC Proms with only a safety pin preventing the audience from seeing the colour of my underpants.
Flying glasses
I now wear contact lenses most of my waking hours. It all started at the Juilliard School with a student recital I gave there at Paul Hall in 1982. I was wearing my usual nerdy glasses and working up a sweat in the last movement of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata. The last furious page tore along to the concluding, hammering chords: da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-DA! I flung my head back on the last ‘DA’ and my glasses flew off my head, landing on the floor about ten feet behind me. It was a gesture that could never have been planned, a perfect moment of extra- musical drama … except that, after a few blind bows, I had to get down on my hands and knees, and crawl along the stage in search of them. I quickly located them, shakily threaded them into place behind ears and on nose, and got up to walk off the stage to a mixture of applause and roars of laughter. Then I realised that there was only one lens in the frame, the other had popped out with the impact. So my first curtain call began with me bending down yet again to reclaim the missing but thankfully intact glass.
There was no repeating that humiliation. I had to get myself some contact lenses, and what a tremendous liberation they have been while playing the piano. No more steaming up or slipping down … or shooting back.
Page-turning: part of the performance
I made a journalist laugh once when I said that page-turning was a part of the performance. My point was that every physical act done on stage has dramatic significance. Playing a concert is theatre. It’s one of the reasons we usually wear different clothes when performing. It’s part of an attempt to emphasise that a concert should never be routine. Music lifts us out of our regular state of mind; it takes us to an ecstatic state.
Consider, say, the slow movement of Schubert’s B flat Sonata. If you raise your hands to the keyboard in a swift, jerky movement, you’ve ruined the music before it begins. The few seconds before the first hammer touches the first string are the moments of silence out of which music is born, the breath before the word is spoken. I dislike artificial movements at the piano but the body language required in this instance is a physical manifestation of an internal collection of thought and intention, a concentration that should cast a spell. And a hurried lunge at the score on the music desk by a thoughtless page-turner during a moment of musical repose and contemplation is a shattering discord, almost as painful as a fistful of wrong notes from the pianist.
As the page turns … or not
At the time of writing, for some strange reason of custom and historical precedent, it is still as expected for a pianist to use the score for chamber music as it is expected for him or her not to use the score for solo repertoire. So when we play an ensemble piece, unless we are adept with iPad and foot pedal, we need to use page-turners because a hasty, unaccompanied, tearing across of the page while faking the last left-hand arpeggio in a blur of pedal is not ideal. Although sometimes, with a photocopier and a skilful use of Sellotape, a compromise can be made: a score can be patched together with enough space for stealthy, silent turns during the rests.
Most piano quintet performances, for instance, involve six people walking out on to the stage: five with or towards their instruments, and one carrying the score, trying to look as invisible as possible, making a beeline for the chair on the left of the keyboard, anxious not to be seen to be acknowledging the applause, adjusting the position of the seat far enough away from the keyboard to avoid a collision, but close enough to be able to see the score and to stand up to turn the page in time. To stand up to turn the page in time …
I remember a concert in St Wilfred’s Church in Grappenhall, Cheshire, with the cellist Steven Isserlis – with whom I have used more page-turners than anyone else. We were opening with Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folkstyle op. 102 and a composer friend of mine, Stephen Reynolds, was sitting on my left, ready to turn the pages. Or at least, that’s what I thought he was going to do. At the bottom of the first page of the first piece in the first minute of this full-length recital it seemed that something was wrong. I didn’t sense his anticipation – that flexing of right arm, forefinger and thumb pinched and ready, buttocks inching to the edge of the seat, all poised for a calm elevation in the direction of the music desk. Out of the corner of my left eye I could see that he seemed to be enjoying one of the splendid stained-glass windows glowing serenely in the evening light. Four bars to go, three bars to go, two bars to go, one bar … Panicking, I was just about to turn my own page when I felt a flash of energy. He leapt up and ripped the page over, sending the music (and almost himself) flying – off the desk – back onto the desk – cockeyed – straightened out – flattened down – pushed to the right … and then he sat down again, in a terrible fluster. The thought popped into my mind that every page of the concert might be like this (there were about a hundred more to go) and the slapstick burlesque of that possibility made me burst into silent giggles. Two minutes into the concert and I was shaking with laughter, my arms weak, my eyes blurring over. Steven was playing away but, noticing that my robust forte had fizzled out to a wimpy piano, he turned around to see what was going on. His lips twitched as he was about to lose it too but we were both nervous enough at that early stage of the recital to pull ourselves together, and Stephen (with a ‘ph’, but not the pianist) got the hang of it by page 2.
There was another occasion with another composer friend turning pages. One of my first recordings, released in the US as My Favorite Things and in the rest of the world as The Piano Album I, was recorded at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Lowell Liebermann agreed to come along and listen, as well as to turn pages for a couple of pieces where I had decided to use the score. One in particular was the Mélodie in E minor by Ossip Gabrilowitsch. It’s a tender and rather serious piece, but for some reason Lowell and I had been on the edge of a giggling fit for at least half an hour before we came to record that track. I hope it won’t spoil it for any potential listeners to know that during that entire piece (I think there were three or four takes) we were both in stitches of laughter with Lowell ending up rolling on the stage of the Y after he’d turned and as I played the last page. If the final bar’s rest seems slightly shorter than it might be, it is because, although both of us burst out into snorting fits of laughter as the melancholy E minor tonality shed its last tear of regret, the producer was just able to save the take by fading out a little early.
There was another memorable occasion when Lowell was turning pages for me, but this time it was more bemusing than amusing. I was going to record the two Brahms clarinet sonatas with Benny Goodman. It was the last year of his life and, sadly, he died before the recording sessions could take place. In fact, he had seemed quite ill when we were rehearsing, and at the try-out concert in New York’s Century Club things did not improve. We started the E flat Sonata and it was extremely shaky. Then Benny stopped mid-flow and asked for a window to be opened as he felt breathless. After a minute or so we started again, but neither Lowell nor I knew quite where he was in the score. He would play his bit and then, instead of waiting for my solo bars, just skip to the next clarinet passage. It was a bit like chasing after a hat that the wind was blowing down the street. I’d have to jump ahead, guessing where he was, and my page-turner would have to try to find the place too. It was a
hair-raising performance and, at the end, Benny made a little speech: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you want to join me in thanking my pianist for this evening – Mr Stanley Gruff.’
The musical page-turner
The relationship with a (human) page-turner for the two-hour length of a concert is something quite intimate. Not only is one’s musical life in their hands, but their physical proximity is quite close, and the chances of direct and indirect interference are plentiful. After all, the armpit of a page-turner and the nostrils of a pianist are never more than six inches apart at those crucial moments when the latter’s musical attention needs to continue seamlessly overleaf. Slightly less unseemly than such an olfactory assault are the billowing, dizzying wafts of, say, Guerlain’s Shalimar which can cause a momentary trance as they emanate from a diaphanous frock on the loose. I have had a turner who appeared to look on her role as an opportunity for open flirtation, as dress, necklace, bracelets and breasts all hung in an ensemble of (attempted but unsuccessful) seduction.
But during one recording session, when George Tsontakis’s masterpiece Ghost Variations was on the bill, a body part of the page-turner was crucial and welcomed … her ears! In the control room we had a great engineer, a great producer, and the great composer himself. And, at the piano, someone who had studied the piece for over a year with love and total dedication. At one point when I stopped playing there was a moment of silence. The young student who was turning pages said to me, quietly, modestly, tentatively, ‘Excuse me … shouldn’t that note be an F natural not an F sharp?’ She was right, and no one else had noticed.
Rough Ideas Page 9