Preparing for Perugia

More about Italy!

I was in Italy for two weeks, from the 2nd to the 15th of August.  The reason?  To participate in a classical music festival for piano, voice, and strings called MusicFest Perugia.  The Director of Programs there is a piano teacher I know, and he invited me to attend after he heard me play in a competition.  I was so honored and excited!  He explained what it was all about, and one thing stuck out for me.  At this festival, anybody who wants to can play a concerto with a full orchestra.  There are not very many chances for young musicians to perform with an orchestra, and usually one has to audition in order to get that opportunity.  With MusicFest Perugia, if you were accepted or invited to go, you could play with the orchestra.


I learned about MusicFest at the end of March, and it did not take me very long to decide to go.  However, this meant a big change in the plans my teacher and I had for the summer.  Instead of learning lots of new repertoire for the fall, I would be keeping up my old pieces and learning one new piece: the concerto.

Those of you who do not play classical music may be thinking, Oh, that doesn't sound too bad.  A bunch of pieces she already knows, one new piece, three months... piece of cake!  Let me tell you, it's not as easy as it sounds.  Firstly, keeping pieces that you've known for months (in the case of my Chopin Nocturne, a year) is hard to do.  The danger lies in becoming complacent and not making it interesting; the piece starts sounding flat and dull.  It is also easy to create bad habits.  What I needed to do was find new ways of making the music interesting to me.  I also had to re-learn some parts that I had forgotten.

At the same time, I was learning an entirely new piece: the third movement of the Bach d minor Piano Concerto.  (As an aside, the first movement of this concerto happened to be one played in the music school's concerto competition a few years previously.  I was in the student chamber orchestra that accompanied the pianist.  So I knew the violin part of the first movement already, which amused me greatly.)  My teacher and I were given a few concertos to pick a movement from, and we decided to choose what I was best at.  Not the easiest one, and not the one that I would learn the most from, but the one that I could really excel at.  I enjoy playing Bach very much, so it was a happy moment when we heard that I was the first to choose the third movement.  There was only one problem; I had to memorize it, and it was twenty pages long.  The score that I have has a piano duet part as well, so I guess it was really "only" ten pages long.  That's still a lot of music.  Played up to tempo, it takes about seven minutes to play, and it zips right along with no breaks. Some concertos have the piano and orchestra taking turns playing, sometimes together and sometimes separately, so that the pianist and the orchestra get breaks.  Not Bach.  Oh, he gives the orchestra some places to drop out, but not the pianist.  The benefit to this is that I did not have to learn my entrances; I only had one.  The beginning.

To make a long story a bit shorter, I learned the concerto and revived the two of my old pieces that I was to perform in Perugia: Chopin's Nocturne Op. 62 No. 1 and Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G Major, WTC I.  As the date of my flight loomed nearer and nearer, I became more and more nervous.  Was I really prepared enough?  Did I have everything as solidly memorized as I should?  My last lesson before I left did nothing to ease my anxiety; I had a few memory slips in my concerto and my solo pieces were definitely rusty.  Eek.

To be continued...