One Down...

It has finally begun. After a long wait – and waiting is the hardest part – I have now played my first stage.  I’m not quite sure what to tell you, because I know that I don’t have a clear perspective on my own playing. I’m sure those in the audience, depending on what each individual looks for in a performance, had a different opinion of my playing and how it compares to the other contestants.

What I can say is that I enjoyed myself and feel happy with how I played. There has been so much time over the past few days to just focus on perfecting this set of repertoire that by the time I was finally up on stage, I knew my pieces backward and forward and felt entirely confident that I would not have problems with my memory.  This confidence gave me the freedom to just play music while I was up there. I was able to bring out the soul of the pieces as I had intended, which is a personal victory for me.

The sad thing was that I had a few stumbles, in which my fingers didn’t do quite what they were supposed to, and so some notes were either missed or fudged. Unfortunately, the bulk of these little slip-ups happened on the first page of my opening piece, and so I am sure it detracted from the first-impressions that the jury formed of me.  Normally I wouldn’t be concerned with a few missed notes, but there are several people here who are perfectly capable of not missing any notes. I have realized that I need to take extra precautions, if I make it on to the second stage, to avoid having this happen again. I am going to alter my approach to practicing over the next few days with the intention of solidfying my muscle memory.

The repertoire for this round included the new piece composed for the competition, by Yitzhak Yedid. During my preparation over the past year, I have corresponded with him a couple times, to ask some interpretive questions about the piece, and even to send a recording of myself for him to comment on. I particularly like to be able to interact with the composer when learning a piece. The score is only ever a collection of hints about what the composer was thinking when he conceived the piece, but being able to have an exchange with the composer directly can get you much closer to the original source of the music.  (E-mail is not the ideal way to do this, but he lives in Australia.) Mr. Yedid was there in the audience today, and I had the opportunity to meet him in person after I had played. He was friendly and let Marta take our picture together.

I can’t tell you yet whether I will pass to the second stage. The jury will cast their vote and announce their results Saturday night after everyone has finished playing this first stage, and we will report the news on this blog as soon as we hear it. In the meantime, there is no choice but to optimistically begin practicing the pieces for second stage. However, in the spirit of the Shabbat tomorrow we have planned an afternoon trip to the beach!