Over the years I've had recitals in my home, students' homes, a school auditorium,
Or rather, I shouldn't be trying to mentally pull one off wide awake when I should be sleeping, which was the situation in the wee hours of the morning before yesterday's recital, when instead of being asleep I was up at 4:30 am thinking about - what else? My students' upcoming piano recital.
Now, I generally have a case of nerves on the day of a piano recital, but it's usually only a small - to - medium case. Yesterday it was a biiiig case.
And after I'd moved in the middle of the night from my bed to the arm chair in my family room - the better to ruminate in - I spent equal amounts of time stressing and trying to figure out why I was stressing. After all, my student group having become progressively smaller over the past several years, I was down to five students - the same number I'd started out with - and so a recital of only five students, all of whom were prepared and had more or less breezed though their pieces at their last lessons, should not have been keeping me up.
But it wasn't my students that I was worrying over. And when I dug a little deeper into my psyche I realized that I was worrying about me. Worrying that I'd mess up my piece,
That's how your mind works at 4:30 am.
Also, since I was down to five students, I'd invited a couple of guest performers to the recital, an Irish fiddler and her guitar duet partner, and the daughter of one of my friends who is an accomplished pianist. None of the guest performers had heard me play before. What if I blew my piece out of the water in front of them?
Of course, none of the guest performers would have cared. They were friends. And, being themselves musicians, they all knew from hitting a wrong note. But again, that's not what your mind tells you at 4:30 am.
Finally, after I'd spent fourteen hours worrying it to death, how did the recital go?
Fine.