Wednesday – D-Day (I know, I skipped Tuesday – maybe I’ll come back to it later…)

Program:

Bach Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 550

Böhm Partita: Wer nur den lieben Gott

Tariverdiev Concerto No. 3

Liszt Weinen, Klagen, Zorgen, Zagen

You know they’re coming.  They come every time, and yet you still react the same way.  They lurk around the corner; they lie in wait behind the door to the green room; they skulk on the other end of the phone line.  You even know the first person who will bring them to you.  You musicians out there – you know what I’m talking about:

“So, how’d it go?”  “Did you feel good about it?”  “Are you happy with it?”

“They” are the questions that people always ask after a performance – hell, I ask them myself!  Truth is, I always have a few stock answers ready when I’m not particularly pleased with a performance – sometimes you just have to tell people what they want to hear.  It’s only polite.  But right now I’m going to do something most musicians never do – I’m going to tell you EXACLTY what it feels like after a performance you are none too pleased with.  “Don’t do it, Nicole!”  I can hear people screaming at me now.  No one needs to know the tortured little world we all live in.  Well, not all of us live there.  There are those who have their heads on much straighter than mine when it comes to performing.  I am just a wee bit loony and more than a wee bit OCDC before a performance – just ask the hubby.  

There are indeed times when the performance has ended and I say to myself, “I can’t believe that was over so quickly.  I want to live in those 75 minutes again!”  This, friends, is a minority of the time.  People always say, “Nicole, you’re too hard on yourself”.  Yes, I am.  I have to be.  It’s the only way to continue to improve.  And trust me, I’ve learned over the years to give myself a break or two.  Every once in a while.  Once in a blue moon, when a new Smurf is born.  We all know that the worse competitor you’ll ever face is the one whose reflection stares back at you in the music rack. 

Then, there are those other times…ok, people, here it is.  For the sake of brutal honesty, this post is PG-13:  Nicole’s brain says,”Oh my God, Nicole, what have you done?  You’ve just embarrassed yourself in front of all these people, all these international stars that are judging you.  Isn’t there a back door I can go out?  Did you hear that apologetic applause?  They’re just being nice because they applauded for everyone.  They thought what you just did was appalling.  I know during the Liszt the judges were just waiting for it to be over.  They turned the page of their scores and said, ‘Oh my God, there’s a whole 5 pages left!  Why is she even here?’ How could you even think you could compete with all these people who do nothing but practice?  Why do you put yourself in these situations?  You can’t play all this repertoire while working a full time job (30 hours my #%$!).  You should just stop now.  You’ve reached out too far.  Again.”  These, and many other thoughts, swarm through my head during the performance and for the first 10-15 minutes or so afterwards.  Don’t get me wrong – there are many, many moments of lucid concentration.  There are a plethora of moments of music making at its best – that organic, orgasmic part of being a musician that all performers crave that can only be found on the stage of a concert hall, or wherever you perform.  However, sometimes the strongest ones that remain are the negative ones. 

So you ask, “How’d it go, Nicole?”  

Here’s the deal:  I woke up this morning in a pretty good mental place.  I saw all those wonderful Facebook posts, an email from the hubby and another from a close friend who can relate – that was great stuff.  I was on cloud nine (or is it cloud 7?  We’ll stick with nine – it’s higher).  I was Zen, I was euphoria personified.  This was at 9:30 am.  How, you may ask, will I possibly sustain that until my rehearsal at 3:30 and the CONITNUE through the performance which starts at 6:00?  There’s the rub.  It’s incredibly difficult to sustain that kind of focus throughout the day.  It takes an incredible amount of mental discipline.  It’s one of the reasons I prefer to travel alone to perform solo – I need to be in total control of my environment without any surprise interjections from people.  I can lock myself in my hotel room all day.  I can ignore the cell phone and emails.  I can create my own little world where the only things that exist are the things I want to exist.  This has its own dangers, which I’m sure you can imagine, but at least they would be of my own making, and I only can (and will) blame myself for it in the end.  Chamber music work is a totally different story – that feels more like a big party.  Anyway, I went through most of the day feeling pretty good.  Had breakfast with PBJ, and my new friend from Kansas (she actually is a real person, unlike PBJ, or at least the PBJ that is the little plastic figurine).  Then we went shopping for new umbrellas, as mine died a terrible death earlier this week – the new one is red and very chic!  Then went back to the room for 2 hours of score study and prep.  This all went well.  Feeling great!  The world is mine!

Left for the concert hall – decided to walk, as it would work out all that extra energy we were carrying around.  Feeling alive!  Get to the concert hall and wait for my time to rehearse.  Praise Jesus!  Get to the organ.  My assistant is there – excellent!  I give her the paper to program the organ with (don’t ask).  She sets off to work while I practice the Bach – it’s all where I left it!  We get to the Boehm – feeling good, Billy Ray!  Moving on to the Liszt…Liszt…am I playing Liszt?  What Liszt?  Have I seen these notes before?  Have I played this organ before?  And the walls come tumbling down. 

Lucky for me, I’ve got 2 hours to pick all the pieces of myself up off the floor.  My heart is racing, and I’m grinding my teeth – thank God my dentist isn’t reading this.  I didn’t even get to the Tariverdiev!  Somebody kill me now…I wait in absolute AGONY for my Kansas friend to finish her warmup and we go to a coffee house around the corner to veg for a little bit.  For me, leaving the hall is risky.  Before a performance I don’t feel calm until I get to the hall safely.  There’s always that random possibility of a car accident or something, or the car not starting…whatever.  So I’ve already broken a rule.  We get to the coffee house and I decide what the hell, I need an espresso.  Breaking another rule – no food or anything that really counts as sustenance before a performance.  Never mind that I haven’t eaten since 9:30 or so, and it’s now almost 5.  However the espresso did help calm me, although here I am less than 3 hours after drinking it and my blood pressure is so high I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack.  No more espresso, Nicole!  So I spend a little time there before going back to the hall.  No one has really given me any instruction so I have no idea where I’m supposed to be.  None of the other competitors are waiting in the lobby.  Crap.  They probably had everyone go in at the start of this session.  Whatever, I’m letting that one go.  I sneak in during the person before me, silently cursing my Useless Assistant, as I am calling her now.  I wait just inside the door, freezing my little tuckus off as a draft from outside comes wafting in over me. 

Applause.  It’s my turn.  I walk up the console and give my assistant the paper to program the organ again (really, don’t ask).  She begins this process while I put my shoes on, adjust the bench, and get myself settled.  This feels like an eternity, but is only a minute or so.  I start to program the swell/choir side of the organ, finish, and check her side.  She’s only finished half of it. &^%&#^%~!!!!  I tell her we’ll finish it later – the judges are waiting.  At this point, my fingers have begun to shake a little, and I’ve lost that Zen feeling.  Let’s see if this fun little Bach can get it back (that’s a joke, by the way.  Beginning a program with Bach is only fun when someone else is playing it).  Performing is a tricky thing – sometimes getting into the groove of a piece calms you, and sometimes all that motor activity just makes the jitters worse.  I had a little of both today.  It always takes me a little while to calm down, and today was not different.  The Bach was not as clean as I wanted it to be, and I have no idea if my tempo was anywhere near where I wanted it.  And how is it that only today I noticed the loud ticking of that clock on the console?  This would be a bad thing later on…

So, I finish the Bach.  Thank God that’s over.  Can I get off the bench now?  Of course not.  On to Böhm.  Feeling better about this.  Less mechanism to worry about, can focus more on the music.  I think this one went ok…hard to tell.  But it wasn’t a disaster.  Some nice musical moments.  I avoided the Great for the most part (the bottom manual on this particular organ, whose action feels like crap), so this at least felt better.  On to Tariverdiev, which hasn’t seen a keyboard in days.  These pieces are very minimalist, with lots of space and emptiness to punctuate the actual music.  This is where that clock comes in.  I’m counting one tempo in my head, and the clock is ticking something else in the background.  That’s a battle I did not always win.  No idea how those pieces came off. 

And now, the Liszt…at this point, I’m in “work” mode.  This is when I concentrate less on the emotional, spiritual part of making music and focus more on the “I’ve got this paper to write by 12 noon, so let’s get this done, Nicole” side of things.  This, I know how to do.  I can batten down the hatches and discipline myself through almost any situation.  It’s just not fun, and defeats the whole point of the music.  I tried to be as musical as possible.  Usually when you’re “trying” to be musical you are doing everything but.  This was not pretty, and my Useless Assistant was turning the pages like she was under water.  There was one she didn’t even bother to turn.  I swear she forgot to add a stop or two here and there, so I’m glad I barely gave her anything to do.  I’m screaming at her in my head, and then screaming at myself for almost missing that piston.  The Liszt is is about 12-13 excruciating minutes of pure, unadulterated hell.   Polite applause, get off the bench, slink out of the room.

Truth is, these things are almost never as bad as you think there were.  Almost.  There are those times when it was as bad as you thought and much worse; times when you really should just crawl inside the organ chamber and impale yourself on those tiny mixture pipes, and the cry out in horror, disappointment and self-loathing when you realize those tiny pipes have bent under the weight of your body and yes, you must go on living anyway.  We don’t need to discuss those times – they are what they are and what they will be.  But hey – most of the time, it really wasn’t all that bad. 

But those feelings are for tomorrow.  What did I really want to do after playing?  Break out into tears.  Yes, there it is.  Sorry to disappoint all you people who thing I’m rock solid.  I’m not weak, or a cry baby – it’s that emotions are peaked at frenzy, and it’s the most out of control response the body can give next to screaming.  It’s the body releasing all that “stuff” that you can’t even put into words, that you can’t even understand yourself, let alone explain to someone else.  It’s the release of all that pent up energy you did not get a chance to release during the performance.  It’s the ONLY response.  I wanted to go to the mall, get on wifi, skype the hubby and let it all out.  But I didn’t.  And I’m sure he’s grateful for not having to pick me up off the floor, yet again.  But he’d do it if he had to, cause that’s just Ben.  He’s the real rock.  He’s the bestest.  You should all buy him a drink for having to live with his crazy wife.  Instead, I walked the ½ hour or so back to the hotel – good therapy, thinking about what I would really tell you people when you asked, “So how’d it go, Nicole?”

It’s not that I don’t want you to ask.  It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it.  It’s not even that I don’t want to tell you.  But those first 15-20 minutes after a performance are perhaps the most vulnerable minutes of a musician’s life next to the hour or so before the performance (I don’t know if there’s enough space on the internet to contain an explanation of THAT period of time).    You’ve been stripped bare in front of the world, naked and raw, for everyone to see.  You’ve said everything you believe to be true, not caring who likes it or what the response will be.  You’ve projected your soul out in front of a group of mostly strangers, some friends, and even worse – your colleagues.  You can suspend the horror of it all while the performance is going on, but all of a sudden, it’s over.  The last note is played.  The sound dissipates from the room.  You slowly get off the bench and say to yourself, “What the hell was that?”

So for tonight, I’ve got nothing left, people.  I gave it all at the office.  And this is the way it should be.  If you haven’t given everything you have in the performance, you haven’t done your job.  And I know, deep down, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.  But the question is, as I sit with my arms wrapped in towels to soothe my pox, dying for the first large cocktail of the evening: was it good enough?