Reply To: Practicing an audition concerto for years?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Dorothee,

It’s easy for rep to get “stale” if we’ve been playing it for a long time. Here are a few ideas:

1. Time off
Time off can help, but only to a point. What may be more important, is to come back to the piece in the right way. As in…

2. Fresh copy of music
I had a teacher, who had a whole closet full of scores, and binders with photocopies of the music. Every time he’d come back to a piece, he’d make a fresh photocopy, date it, and put in new bowings/fingerings and other markings based on his new ideas about how to approach the piece. Over time, it made for an interesting timeline of how his thinking evolved over the years too.

3. Study the score
Leon Fleisher once remarked that if you really look at the score (the full score, with orchestral parts for concertos, or instrument/piano part for sonatas, etc.), and forget about all the recordings you’ve heard over the years, you may discover that the piece you see in the score is not the one you thought you knew. I think this is really the key – to look at the score with no preconceived notions or assumptions about how things should be played, but to really go from the score and see what this suggests the piece ought to sound like.

Try avoiding listening to recordings for the time being perhaps, and see how this goes!

Noa