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Hi Augustas,
Regarding #1, I’m not sure if this totally addresses your question, but I wonder if some of the psychological tension is around the contrast between slow deliberate practice and the demands of having to play that passage at tempo? As in, wanting or hoping that the work and time you put in, really does transfer to at-tempo performance so that it won’t have been in vain? If there is anything to that, I wonder if it might help to experiment a bit with at-tempo learning. Have you played around with this at all? Where you learn new tricky passages not by constraining time and playing a certain number of notes at a slower tempo, but by constraining the notes, where you play fewer notes at a faster tempo, and chain them together, one by one. Trombonist Jason Sulliman explains more about the rationale and method behind this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9X4h-cY1uw
Regarding #2, I think it might depend on what the timeline is. If you’re preparing for a performance, and don’t have a ton of time, then yes, I think definitely recording a run-through (doesn’t necessarily have to be a true mock performance for other people, etc.) sooner than later will give you a clearer idea of what to spend your time working on. It doesn’t have to be first thing if you haven’t touched it recently – you could give yourself a day to review some passages, for instance, but I don’t think you need too much time to review unless you know which spots are going to cause problems for you even without recording a run-through. I suppose the “danger” in waiting too long is that you get too narrowly focused on tricky spots, and neglect how they fit into the larger whole, or spend too little time on other spots that might be just as important but the challenges are not as technical or obvious.