What is it like to be a soloist for an orchestra?
It is not a solo recital. The stage is filled out, suddenly having other instrumental voices to mentally handle. How does this affect one’s perception of their musicianship?
A rare performance opportunity marked Monica Shi’s 18th birthday. Unlike most birthday presents into adulthood to celebrate one’s passive entrance into a new life phase, she had to pour work, exert effort and sweat, for this present. It certainly was a gift she had to pay for herself.
It was 2013. She won the Concerto Prize at the Portsmouth Music Festival and the guiding figure leading her into musical maturity was the Solent Symphony Orchestra.
On the night of the performance, a force rush of adrenaline pumped through her; the pre-stage nerves obliterated any sense of appetite that would in another case maintain her energy. Rather, the adrenaline acted as a hormonal substitue, turning every moment, every sensation that went through her body, into a stretch of numbness.
“I felt like I wanted to puke. That’s how nervous I was,” she said. “And I had been preparing for this day for a few months.”
The normal start time for performances in the UK are seven and seven-thirty. She arrived at the hall at six-thirty. She thought becoming acquainted with the instrumental vehicle that will transcend her into harmonic euphoria with the orchestral riding alongside would be rational. She sat at the piano, wanting to feel it out, like a race-driver would sit in the chair and grip his steering wheel: she wanted to connect with the weight of the keys, the resistance of the foot pedals, the transmission of notes across the hall and its acoustics. The lack of human presence in the hall at that time helped ease her a bit, so she divulged in trying out the piano concerto further. It was Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto in C minor.
As she began to open the second movement — the Largo , with long pensive notes and the serenity of the pauses in between — she couldn’t play it. She forgot how it started.
Her mind, erratically fuelled up by the adrenaline of the morning gone, corrupted and bogged her memory, both abstract and muscle. The simple opening E major chord of the second movement did not manifest into sound, let alone the first few bars. The hall at that time was quiet. But her mind was a panic racket with her inner voice interrogating her to find at least the first chord.
“What’s the first note? What’s the first note in the right hand? What’s the first note in the left hand? What does the chord sound like? How can I not know this?”
At three or four o’clock on the same day she did a full run through of the concerto and with no sign of any egregious faults, she got to the end. She even commented on herself that her mind and body were in sync. The feeling was nothing but security.
Audience members, some of the ones arriving early to nab their seats and relax, came in into the hall. She wanted to grab the score from her bag and practise openly but opted not to. Warm-up had ended on a bad note. As more people filtered in, she left the stage and went straight to her dressing room. A chance to redeem herself privately was prohibited now after the first blankness of the second movement. But the second run through alone in that hall with the odd audience member, that earlier sense of security and confidence evaporated.
“I went backstage and I was just about to die in my own world.”
Her teacher Valentina Sferinova, a stern Bulgarian classical pianist, stood by her side to console her, giving her concise and soothing instructions to breathe. There was no piano backstage, nothing to console herself but the music score that she had opened. The best remedy she could muster was to imagine her fingers dance in her head.
She left the dressing room, pretending that everything was fine, concealing the chaos of stress and anxiety unfolding in her head. She prepared herself on the wing of the stage, hidden in the darkness. The orchestra tuned to the warm A on stage. The hall recedes into the darkness and like most terrifying darknesses, there is the eery silence. She breathed and walked over the front of the piano and bowed. The applause died. She began the concerto.
“I was in full control in that experiences” she laughed in hindsight. “I never really had a moment where I felt like I was about to die or I don’t know what was the next thing.”
As expected from her musical maturity, at 25 years old and an MA Guildhall School graduate, that moment raised the alarm that she did not know the harmony intimately, the key changes were still abstract ghosts flittering in and out of the halls of memory. No aspect of the music was concrete. No seemingly tangible mental railing to guide her in the potential darkness of muscle memory loss.
As an experienced performer Monica knew how to fix it. The other technique to become the master of a piece of collaborative music is to not just be able to play your part in a concerto, but to also know the parts you don’t play just as well.
“In general you have to know how exactly the whole thing will sound together which you don’t get in the practise room because you don’t have the whole orchestra with you.”
Listening to yourself play in private and in performance is such an ironically arduous skill to develop. We all listen passively but the active mode narrows the focus on the balance of an array of dynamics between the fingers (your right hand fifth finger has to ring out and soar high above the lower four…), shaping the melody to imitate the natural human singing voice. In a piano concerto, a sudden music matchmaking with other instruments can startle some because of the untrained ear to recieve interruptions of different melodies jostling for position with your part. With this in mind, listening is vital for performance fluency.
“Adjusting more quickly than solo recitals [is another skill] because things could go wrong and you have to have the ability to instantly be able to adjust to it, to avoid disaster,” she said.
“When you are a soloist with an orchestra, you’re responsible for yourself and for the orchestra and they are responsible for you too as well. It’s a collaboration and you just have to be very open with adjusting to things that happen in the moment.”
Some methods can help to simulate the orchestral performance without actually having the orchestra there with you.
“In my own practise sessions I do play the orchestral part when I don’t play the solo part. I play the main tune of the orchestra sometimes if I can fit it in,” she says. “If not, I even just play only the main tune just to get used to the sound being there. Sometimes it can be really disturbing with the cross-rhythms [with the orchestra].
“If you are by yourself then it’s okay but if you suddenly have an off-beat rhythm clicking in then you want to match it together.”
Elimination of distraction and interruptions is the ultimate aim in the practise room when preparing for a concerto performance. Unlike the solo recital, the orchestra has a battalion of instruments playing a differentiated melody than you, often with their own personal twist. It is a self-control game: your mind and fingers must not unconsciously follow their rhythmic path.
Reminiscing about the Beethoven Concerto passages where the orchestra assisted her in filling out the sound sphere of the hall lifted the corners of her mouth. It radiated a familiar nostalgic aura. The music of that night was almost, again, playing on her facial expressions.
“You feel it’s completed. When I practise a lot by myself and then I suddenly go to my lesson with my professor, they would play the whole orchestra piano reduction, you will think ‘So, this is what it is supposed to be like!”
The feeling of communication and the huge support of sound enveloping you is a euphoric and liberating sensation. The dialogue that was often absent in the practise room is now heard engaging by the interplay and twists of instruments.
These formative experiences, for Monica, of training the ear and mind served her well in her early music career studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her knowledge in harmony, melody, and key transformation, will surely keep those panic thoughts settled at bay, never to arise at any given moment.
At each rehearsal running through a concerto, she will remember the day she forgot.
Only from now on, she will remember to never forget.
