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Guest post by Jennifer Mackerras

A performer with “presence” has something to say and is communicating effectively, with focus, commanding the audience’s full attention

– Mark Swartzentruber, concert pianist

Occasionally one attends a concert where the performer’s presence seems so modest and yet so powerful, commanding awed silence from the audience… I think such an ability comes from a deep love and respect for the music and a willingness to set aside one’s ego in the service of the music. Loss of ego brings powerful presence and creates an empathic relationship with the audience.

– Frances Wilson, pianist and blogger on classical music and pianism

The topic of stage presence is one that is often subject to heated debate. Who has presence? Is it the person with the biggest or loudest personality? Is it the performer who gives the most original interpretation of a work? Or is it something rather more personal and less showy – the performer whose focus and commitment to a work is so total that the audience is compelled to enter their musical world? Fran certainly came to that conclusion in her excellent post, quoted above.

So how do you learn to set aside your ego? How do you learn to put yourself in the service of the music? Here’s some practical advice on how to move towards that goal, coming from the work of FM Alexander.

The Private Universe theory

Back in 1923, FM Alexander wrote a sentence that I keep coming back to in my teaching:

We all think and act (except when forced to do otherwise) in accordance with the peculiarities of our particular psycho-physical make-up. – FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual

In other words, all of us have a psycho-physical make-up – a unique melding together of mind and body – that is composed of all the influences, individualities and quirks created by our upbringing, friends, schooling, environment, media… We create our own little private universe of ideas and beliefs about the world and how we interact with it, and we act according to its rules. We think and act according to our private universe – our psycho-physical make-up.

Now, some of the ideas in our private universe will be fantastic, but some of them will be rather less so! Sometimes our ideas of what we need to do to fit into the world really don’t help us. Just think about the kid at school who tried to hide his insecurity and lack of self esteem by bossing other kids around. Or the girl who spends her teenage years hiding behind a wall of hair so that she doesn’t have to interact with the world.

When it comes to performing, each person will approach the performance according to the rules and assumptions of their private universe. If their private universe says that people only like them if they’re loud or very extrovert in their presentation, then they’ll approach the performance of music that way. If their private universe says that people are naturally judgemental in nature, and particularly if they assume that the judgements will be negative, then they will approach performing in such a way as to protect themselves from the negativity.

These private universes then begin to manifest themselves physically. Perhaps one performer will tense muscles in order to shield themselves from the negativity they assume they’ll receive. Another performer might be so concerned to ‘get the music across’ that they add in lots of unnecessary movement and tension that ultimately detracts from the piece they’re playing.

My job as an Alexander Technique teacher is to help performers get out of their own way. I work with a lot of musicians – amateurs, students and professionals. Typically, when they reduce the physical tension they create, they report feeling more vulnerable. But they also report an improved ability to achieve what they want technically, an improved sound, and improved ability to ‘get inside’ the music.

The best performances often come from the performers who are most prepared to ‘sit with’ the audience; to be wholly and unapologetically themselves. They are not trying to hide themselves because they are nervous; they are not trying to project an image of themselves, nor are they trying to ‘present’ the music. They are simply placing themselves at the service of the music and the audience

How can you begin to achieve this state for yourself? Here are a few ideas.

  • Really know the music. If you feel unprepared, you are more likely to be nervous, and more likely to increase the mental and physical tension prior to performing.
  • Come up with a one phrase (or even one word) key to your goals for each piece that you are playing.
  • Before you play, acknowledge that being nervous is completely normal and reasonable.
  • Remember that mistakes are normal. Everybody makes them!
  • Before each piece in your programme, take a moment to settle yourself and remember your key word or phrase.
  • Really examine your attitudes towards the audience. Do you view them as adversaries, or as a group of friends?
  • When you’re an audience member, are you judgemental? Or are you there to enjoy yourself? Perhaps remembering that audience members come out of enjoyment may be a helpful thought before you perform.

If you work on changing your thinking, you can begin to change the muscular tension that is getting in your way. And if you can do this, everyone will benefit: you, the audience, and the music.

 

jen_working6Jennifer McKerras is a performance coach, musician and fully qualified and registered Alexander Technique teacher

activateyou.com

 

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Who or what inspired you to take up the piano and pursue a career in music?

I saw a grand piano at the house of a friend of my parents. She was a piano teacher, she explained me the mechanism of the instrument, she played a bit… I fell in love. I was 2 and a half years old! I think I saw it as a huge toy, a gigantic noisy toy. Noisy but beautiful. So I immediately asked my parents if I could play the piano, but this teacher said “not before 5” so I had to wait. It was (apparently!) tough.

Who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

My first piano teacher, Michèle Perrier, with whom I started the piano. I think she gave me a fundamental quality, curiosity, as well as an aspect that is more important every day of my life: discipline. Two qualities you absolutely need to keep “walking”!

Then of course you meet lots of different people who give you advice, who can impress you. If I had to give one other name it would be my teacher in the Paris Conservatoire, Gérard Frémy, who himself studied with Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow. His words resonate every single day in my head.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I could give you names of very difficult works I had to learn in a very short time like a Rachmaninoff third concerto at the same time as Bartok second concerto… but actually the main challenge today is to organize my personal work, when to work on what piece, how far in advance, to be sure I am ready for each concert. I play so much repertoire that I always work on several programmes at the same time, and this brings much more stress than actually performing.

Which performance/recordings are you most proud of?

Proud?…. Never really proud of a performance. Very happy, it happens. It’s more a question of repertoire. I will always remember some works, at some nights in some concert halls… Liszt sonata in Wigmore Hall in London last July, my first Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage in a friend’s Gallery, again in London… or the Ravel concerto at Carnegie Hall… it’s impossible to make a hierarchy.

For the recordings…. Impossible to say. Maybe the series of three Bartok as I was (and still am) deeply in love with his music. I think the result is a good “picture” of who I am now as a musician.

Which particular works do you think you play best?

The pieces I love the most! Works in which I really feel there is a story to tell. Actually, I don’t think there are works I play which I don’t love….

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

It’s following a mysterious logic, one programme makes me think of another. Playing the Berg sonata made me think of the Liszt sonata because of its key (B minor) and its contrast of length…. It can be suggestions from my recording company (Bartok). Or very simply musical “crushes”, works I forgot…. It always takes a long time to build a recital programme as each work in it must have its reason to be there, and must have a link with the other pieces. The way you organize a recital programme makes it alive (or not). For me, it’s a long (and sometimes painful ) process to find the perfect match or balance.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

There are many. But Wigmore Hall will always be “my” musical home. It has a special energy, a special acoustic, a special history. I must have performed more than 40 concerts there so “my” history there makes it even more special.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

Impossible to say. I’m usually very happy to be on stage and it’s very often a powerful experience. I could name too many. There are special legend places where you think “wow…. I’m playing there”. Carnegie Hall in NY, Musikverein in Vienna, Royal Albert Hall for the Proms in London, Severance Hall in Cleveland or Chicago Symphony Hall… or the Paris Philharmonie

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

The possibility to play what you want. It’s when there is only happiness to perform. It’s a well-balanced life, without the necessity to play “more” concerts. It’s when you can say “no”. It’s when you work the people you want and love (especially Alina Ibragimova!)

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

Discipline, curiosity and communication. It should drive people’s personality inside and outside music. Curiosity keeps you alive. The desire to keep discovering, maybe change your ways to see new/different things. Meeting new people….

Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?

In my house with my family.

 

Cédric Tiberghien’s flourishing international career sees him performing across five continents in some of the world’s most prestigious halls, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Royal Albert Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall and Barbican in London, the Salle Pleyel and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Berlin’s Bechstein Hall, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, the Sydney Opera and Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan and Asahi Halls.

Over the years, Cédric Tiberghien has established a strong reputation with a recital repertoire focusing on the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Szymanowski, Bartók and Berg.

Cédric Tiberghien studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Frédéric Aguessy and Gérard Frémy and was awarded the Premier Prix in 1992, aged just seventeen. He was then a prize winner at several major international piano competitions (Bremen, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Geneva, Milan), culminating with the First Prize at the prestigious Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris in 1998, alongside five special awards, including the Audience Award and the Orchestra Award. This propelled his international career, leading to over 150 engagements worldwide, including visits to Japan and appearances throughout Europe.

With over sixty concertos in his repertoire, Cédric Tiberghien has appeared with some of the world’s finest orchestras and conductors. He is also a dedicated chamber musician, with regular partners including violinist Alina Ibragimova, soprano Sophie Karthäuser, baritone Stéphane Degout, violist Antoine Tamestit and cellist Pieter Wispelwey. His passion for chamber music is reflected in a number of recordings for Hyperion with Alina Ibragimova, including Ravel, Schubert, Szymanowski and the complete Mozart sonatas. He has also recorded piano concertos by Dubois, solo piano music by Karol Szymanowski, including Masques, Métopes and two sets of Études, and has undertaken a survey of Bartók’s piano music encompassing three albums.

 

 

(photo: Jean-Baptiste Millot)

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Music can form a personal soundtrack to our lives, evoking memories of times past, and a few bars of a significant song or piece of music can create an instant reaction, a ‘tingle’.

Music can arouse very powerful emotions. Psychologists suggest that there is something about the way music unfolds over time, as do emotions, and that when we hear music we re-live the emotional sequence that happened the first time we heard it. This makes music so much more powerful than a smell or a painting: it draws us into a very special sequence of relived experiences. Music also raises our expectations, simply by granting or delaying a bar or beat in a piece, or by leaving a harmonic progression unresolved. We would not be moved by music that always fulfils our expectations; our emotions are at their highest when we are un-expected and when we experience the wonderful delayed gratification that music brings. An abrupt shift of harmony, the dramatic entrance of a soloist, changes in tempo – all these factors can induce a frisson in us, and it is these startling changes in music which have an amazing power to move us, to awaken emotions from ecstasy to deep sadness, or recall significant moments in our lives. Performers too can manipulate the way we experience music, and thus influence our emotional response, through the use of rubato, delayed stresses or accents, the voicing of certain chords, texture, tempo, dynamics and even the performer’s physical gestures.

Certain pieces have seeped into our collective consciousness: Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ is synonymous with space travel after it was used in Stanley Kubrick’s film ’2001: A Space Odyssey’, even for those people who are too young to remember the film or the Apollo moon landings. Then there is the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, often simply called ‘Elvira Madigan’ after the 1967 Swedish film of the same title in which the music memorably features, or the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (‘Death in Venice’). Or ‘Nimrod’, from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Hear just a few bars and one instantly thinks of poppies, the First World War and the annual, sombre ceremony at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday. And – dare I mention it? – ‘Nessun Dorma’, now forever associated with excitement of international football. We are constantly bombarded with soundtracks and jingles, musical tags and cover versions, all of which can induce an unexpected “tingle” in us, for this response is not limited to classical music.

There’s also a scientific explanation for the “tingles” which music induces in us. When the music strikes the right chords or harmonies, our bodies make a measurable physiological response: the heart rate increase, the pupils dilate, the body temperature rises, blood moves to the legs and the cerebellum, the “control centre” of body movement, becomes more active. The brain flushes with dopamine, a neurotransmitter, which causes the tingle. This is because music stimulates an ancient pathway in the brain which is activated by rewards, addiction, emotion and motivation: in short, music can affect the brain in the same way as sex, drugs or eating chocolate!

Not everyone experiences tingles when listening to music, and scientists have found that people who possess a personality trait called Openness to Experience tend to experience music more profoundly. Such people have unusually active imaginations, enjoy new experiences, are emotionally intelligent, empathetic, appreciate beauty and nature, seek out new experiences, and love variety. When listening to music, they are able to make mental predictions about the way the music is going to unfold, or engage in vivid musical imagery, and because they are likely to immerse themselves more deeply in the music they are hearing, their response – their “tingle factor” – is more intense.

Regardless of the neuroscience, we all have pieces of music in our personal back-catalogue which are very special to us. Tucked away in the recesses of our minds, these pieces can induce a powerful tingle of recollection, a sort of musical “Proustian Rush” if you will, which can evoke strong memories and take us back to a certain place or significant point in our lives. We should never underestimate the power of music!

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Guest article by Shirley Smith Kirsten

Facebook was abuzz with reminders of George Li’s touchdown in the Bay Area’s glittering Davies concert hall, a venue that absorbs a splash of pastel beams from the neighboring flagship government building. Glass panels reflect back montages of color that provide a rush of excitement for ticket holders slipping into seats right under the bell.

FB “friends” and faithful George “followers” were page-alerted to a ‘meet and greet’ event in the lobby following the recital. It would be a shower of support for a pianist we’d seen and heard by livestream from exotic locations including Moscow and Verbier. Frames in progress had included George’s Silver Medal triumph at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, magnified on computer screens around the world!

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The Back Story

From my humble perch in Berkeley, I’d set aside 75 conscientious minutes to get to Davies Hall. It was a conservative travel measure, given lax Sunday train schedules and my propensity to get mired in Civic Center traffic as a clueless pedestrian in foreign urban terrain. (San Francisco’s maze of complex street crossings and intersections, bundled in congestion, had always seriously confused me, impeding on-foot progress in any direction).

Yet, despite well-intended, precautionary travel efforts, I couldn’t have anticipated a vexing single platform BART crisis that launched a crescendo of complications right up to my shaky finish line arrival at Davies. There, at its entrance, my concert companion/adult piano student stood patiently, dispatching block-to-block text messages to keep me on track.

With good luck and concerted teamwork, we made it to our first tier balcony seats just as George advanced toward a shining model D Steinway grand.

It was a pure bliss erasure of prior travails:

Melted deceptive cadences rippled through a crystalline rendering of Haydn’s B minor Sonata (No. 30) as trills and ornaments immaculately decorated clear melodic lines in a liquid outpouring of phrases. The middle Minuet movement was charmingly played passing with grace to a culminating Presto in brisk, bravura tempo with unswerving attention to line, shape, and contour.

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata in F minor, op. 57, followed with tonal variation and keen structural awareness. The performance was both gripping and directional, wrapped in ethereal tonal expression.

Li’s singular sound autograph permeates his performances amidst an array of varying nuances and articulations. He has what pianist, Uchida terms “charisma” and a singular tonal personality.

Meaning and musical context are core ingredients of Li’s artistry and his wide palette of colors are at his liquid disposal through deeply felt effusions of expression. (While Li is a natural, intuitional performer, his sensitive fusion of aesthetics and intellect is always on display, exposed, as well in media interviews.)

A Presto Classical set of queries elicited thoughtful responses.

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/interview/1893/George-Li-Live-at-the-Mariinsky

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The Davies Hall recital, continued after Intermission with a rippling roll-out of works by Rachmaninoff and Liszt, all imbued with a permeating spirit of mature music-making that’s intrinsic to Li’s ongoing ripening process. And as a cap to a memorable evening of inspired artistry, George played his final encore – a pyro-technically charged Bizet/Carmen transcription that drove listeners to their feet in a chorus of BRAVOS!!!

(This snapshot was provided by a friend who had permission to publicly post it, thanks to Li’s generosity and that of his representatives)

In a culminating MEET and GREET event, post-recital, audience members had an opportunity to share IN PERSON enthusiasm and appreciation of George’s artistry, while purchasing the artist’s newly released CD.

For me, a tete a tete with George, provided an opportunity to thank him for his generosity as a teen when he delivered well-conceived responses to my reams of technically framed questions about practicing, technique, and repertoire.

https://arioso7.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/my-interview-with-george-li-a-seasoned-pianist-at-16/

Finally, here’s an encore of gratitude to George for his inspired love of music, and for his reach into our hearts with each memorable performance. Come back soon!

 

Shirley Smith Kirsten is an American pianist and teacher who blogs at arioso7.wordpress.com