My typical day will start at 9:00am and won’t end until 9:30pm.Ī lot of it’s rehearsing, a lot of it’s taking calls from the car, being super, super, super organized, and making sure to write everything down. There are days where I started my day in Manhattan, I worked my way to Philly, then over to Jersey, and then down to Delaware, where I finish my day. So there’s also that extra element of needing to understand that the soloist is always going to get that extra little benefit of the doubt.Īs an example, my car is four years old. If something goes wrong and the audience doesn’t know the piece backward and forwards, it’s going to fall on me. The better the person you’re working with, the more benefit of the doubt they get, and the less benefit of the doubt you get. When you do it enough, and you’ve dealt with enough chaos on stage, it becomes a thing you can almost sense before it’s going to happen. We have to be prepared, we have to know the music better than they do so we can make the jump. I also oftentimes describe a Pianist-an Accompanist-as another musician’s secret service detail, meaning that if they make a mistake, or jump the beat, or miscount, we have to take that bullet. If it’s chamber music, it’s to create the best texture and to let the musicians that we’re accompanying play with whatever kind of sound, texture, and dynamic they want, giving them as much leeway, within reason, to do whatever they need. Whenever I’m coaching or teaching a young Pianist about this, the way I describe it is that it is our job to frame the person we’re accompanying. Ray Wong (The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Harvard University)
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