Page turning!
I' prefer to play the notes most of the time.
Anyway, that most unpleasant of tasks passed off OK tonight. One of the pieces by Granados was in an unfamiliar Russian (what else?) edition, printed on paper that I'm not prepared to describe here, as I can only be crude about it and after the first turn I had to remain standing holding the pages so that the they did not fall back. None of the pieces had impossible, let's repeat the exposition turn backs or the immortal words, 'To Coda,' which happens in one of me orchestral pieces infact a DS and a 'to coda,' always a laugh. You don't really want to be looking down fumbling pages over with your left hand whilst supposedly preventing the cellos rushing and the wind spread across the width of the platform going in all directions.
Not as bad as a Lieder recital we went to a while back where the pianist was playing off A3 photocopied spreads, one of which slipped off the stand landing audience side and the turner had to walk round the back of him to pick it up. He just carried on playing, as it goes.
2 comments:
My nightmare mistake - turning pages and pulling stops for an organ recital. But it was on one of those big instruments with a computer for setting one's own combinations, and these were arranged in levels (1.1., 1.2, 1.3, etc, then 2.1, 2.2, ..) - the lighting was very dim, we'd rehearsed all afternoon, evening recital, straining my eyes, last piece, looooong with huge great fistfuls of notes everywhere on three or four manuals, and horrible registration changes involving me plunging my hand in among the flying fingers to hit a tiny combination button under this or that manual.
I missed a change - that is, I hit the button for the next change. And this was one that I could not get without getting in the way, and I did get in the way.
Oh man. nightmare.
A nightmare indeed. Far worse than page turning. Were you hidden in a loft or on view to the audience?
Any instrument that requires post it notes to be stuck on the music is a bit suspect....
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