Working with my teacher this week (it was our last lesson before the concert, gulp)… We were discussing tempos (tempi if you prefer), since he’s been trying to get me to play all of my pieces a little more slowly. He pointed out that I’m getting a better at starting with a good tempo, but I sometimes speed up. And we realized that one of the things I do when I make a mistake is to speed up, whether it’s playing a wrong note, doing a transition wrong, whatever.
And what we concluded was that I may be sort of rushing to cover up the mistake, or replace it with correct notes, or rush to the next passage. Which he thought was an interesting strategy. I don’t know that I’d call it a strategy 😛
So now that I know about it, I’m hoping I can tamp it down a bit.
The other tempo thing we talked about is how to control the tempo in the context of applying rubato. It feels to me that I am better about slowing down and then returning to the main tempo, as compared to speeding up and then returning to the main tempo, like when there’s a little run in the RH or there’s a spot where the RH notes are like falling water and I want to speed up through that, like a little cascade. He said what I’m doing in this one particular spot is quite nice, but then I don’t always successfully slow back down.
I don’t think I’m going to be able to make much improvement on these issues before the concert, but it feels like a big jump forward just to have them articulated. I also wonder if paying attention to this might help me in the context of having the shaky hands, because I wonder if, when I played at the recital two weeks ago, speeding up after a mistake was part of what contributed to the escalation of the stage-fright feeling I had of falling down a hill and being unable to stop, or standing on quick sand and being unable to get my footing.
Either way, I’m glad I know about this now. Even though I almost always polish my pieces before moving on, I think I would have put these three pieces aside many weeks ago if I weren’t prepping them for the concert. Not because I wouldn’t have worked to polish them, but because they reached what we considered polished stage a while ago, but the timing of the concert meant I’ve continued to work on them. And I think that’s what led to this realization about tempo and rushing.