We performed in a church where I had been Director of Music and Fine Arts for twenty-one years thirty-three years ago to a packed house. Andrea had been a part of that church since childhood. We had an enthusiatic audience and got a standing ovation.
These are the lovely roses I was presented with at the end of the concert.
This is what always happens to me during and after a concert. I expend great amounts of energy, both physical and emotional, during a performance; then it takes a while for the Adrenalin to subside. At 82, your overall energy level is not what it was at 35. (hah!) At 35, I performed the complete organ works of Bach at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University; fourteen recitals in fifteen weeks. Talk about energy! That was over three hundred works by the great Baroque master. It was a blast. There were one thousand people in attendance at each concert. Those were the days to be on the concert stage. I did sixty organ concerts a year back then.
I can remember performing in Carnegie Recital Hall in New York long ago several times with my long-time duo-piano partner, Eleanor Benoist. Almost at the end of one concert, I felt as if we had only been playing for twenty minutes. I thought, 'Did we leave something out???' We played an enormous program. Check the NY Times of that season or my website for our review. (www.hburtis.com )When you are totally involved in the music, time has a funny way of disappearing. You are momentarily out of yourself.
Eleanor was at my concert on Sunday!
This is when I know that I have performed as well as I possibly can. I felt this same disappearance of time at this recent concert, thirty-seven years later. The mind is an amazing thing. It can lie to you about your age when you need the strength and energy to produce something beautiful.
Perhaps continuing to perform in public at my age is the Fountain of Youth. Poncé de Leon move over!
The hardest part of concert day is waiting around for the concert to begin. Different people have the need to do different things to get themselves into concert-mode. One friend I know needs to expend energy by the quart by vacuuming, washing windows, mowing the lawn, and so on. If I did this, I wouldn't be able to play the concert. Another friend of mine used to practice full tilt until just before curtain time. Exhausting!
I feel the need to take life very easy on concert day. I loll around, reading, watching television, vegging out. I barely touch the piano. I never listen to other music. My head is full of the program I am about to play. I don't want to disturb this train of thought. It's as though I plug myself into an electric outlet to charge my batteries. Then in the concert, all hell breaks loose when I release the energy. This has been my way of coping with pre-concert hours for many years. It still works.
My first organ teacher in New York City, Claire Coci, once told me, 'Always eat a chocolate bar before you play a recital'. I always did. This time, I ate it in the intermission, just before the Grieg! Sugar rush!! Just what you need to play that block-buster.
It's a little like a pregnancy; though I have obviously never given birth. Nine months or so before the new concert you make preparations: choose your program, begin to learn it, decide musically, technically, and emotionally how you plan to present it. This is the gestation period.
When you are performing with another instrumentalist or a singer, you work together many hours to share musical ideas, decide on tempi, dynamics and so on. The program is growing within your mind and body. Your musical fetus.
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Then on performance day you deliver your baby. In this case it's name was Vivaldi Fauré Ginastera Grieg, and it was a lovely creation. It's parents, the 'cello and the piano, are very proud of it.
