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Professional instructor and internationally celebrated pianist Matthew Xiong teaches musicians how to battle through performance anxiety

Guest article by Alexander Ross

Australian concert pianist and educator Matthew Xiong is bringing his talents to the United States, teaching musicians of all levels, as a specialist in the skill of helping pupils work through performance anxiety issues. Matthew began learning the piano at age five and went on to an internationally celebrated career. An instructor at multiple schools, including his school, Talent! Music Academy, and the well-known Merry Melody Music Academy in Boston that produces piano students who have won multiple awards at national piano competitions and performed at the renowned Carnegie Hall in Manhattan New York, Matthew began embracing the techniques and psychology behind defeating performance anxiety after battling through his own stage fright issues as a performer.

“My students’ fears are very real, and I completely empathize with their situation,” said Matthew. “Performance anxiety holds so many back from realizing their true potential. It’s a common problem, but very important that it be addressed methodically and carefully. Musicians can learn to work through these issues, but it takes slow, patient instruction from a seasoned performer who’s been through it.”

Matthew received his B.M in piano performance at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music and holds a Master of Music degree from Boston University. He has worked with some of the most prominent piano pedagogues of this century, including John Perry, Margaret Hair, Robert McDonald, Gabriel Chodos, and Boaz Sharon. He has concertized at an international level as an artist, working at celebrated festivals such as the Kawai International Piano Masterclass Festival; the Sydney International Piano Masterclass Festival; the International Klaviersommer in Cochem, Germany; the Ian Hobson Steinway Society Festival in Puerto Rico; as well as the Beethoven Institute at Mannes, where he played works in dedication to the late composer, George Walker – the first African-American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for music composition.

Matthew was a prize-winner at several prestigious piano competitions, including the Sydney Classical Concerto Competition at the national Sydney Eisteddfod, where he won 2nd place, and he took runner-up in the Carnegie Concerto Competition at Boston University. Currently the Piano Director at Talent! Music Academy, Matthew now draws on his extensive experience in performance psychology to help scores of students overcome their fears, having first developed his teaching style while studying at the New England Conservatory. His innovative approach involves prolonged exposure to performance under pressure, by gentle, incremental intensity. By doing this, musicians slowly develop confidence on stage, without becoming overwhelmed by their fears.

“Many musicians come to me suffering from what looks like, a mild kind of PTSD. They are brilliant musicians that have been shell-shocked by the pressures of performing on stage,” said Matthew. Indeed, even the most renowned musicians have tasted the bitter fruit of anxiety that often goes hand in hand with performance. From mainstream artists such as Adele and Katy Perry to classical superstars such as soprano Renée Flemming and the legendary pianist, Vladimir Horowitz, they have all attested to feeling the claws of performance anxiety on their ankles, holding them back from their full potential. Many musicians claim that it only took one poor performance for their anxiety to spiral out of control as they become fully aware of just how vulnerable they are on stage.

Matthew holds classes with his piano studio where the students can choose just how much pressure they are willing to shoulder as to not become overwhelmed or tense. This may mean, they only play a few pages of music in front of 2 people; the student is in control of their environment. Matthew monitors the student carefully as they perform and stops them if he notices any indication of anxiety. It may be tension in the body, rushed and anxious playing, or hyperventilation, which he says is a physical embodiment of anxiety that generally doesn’t arise if the performer is calm and confident on stage. He points out what he notices to the student, and asks the student to draw their attention to the area which is showing the signs of anxiety (perhaps it’s tension in the arms, or shoulders shrugged up to their ears). The student will resume playing, and as their awareness of the part of themselves that generates the anxious response grows, the calmer they become on stage. After each performance, Matthew gives the student positive reinforcement so that they feel triumphant over their anxiety. He then keeps a log of the pressure level that each student willingly submitted to and encourages them to add a little bit more pressure in each subsequent session.

In conclusion, Matthew says, “We are often told that the act of performing is a muscle that needs to be trained to get better. Yet what happens if that metaphorical muscle is torn? – are athletes asked to push through a torn muscle? No. They go through rehabilitation to learn how to use that muscle again. Musician’s need to think the same way, performance anxiety is a trauma that is developed from psychic injury, and should be approached with the same care as a physical injury; gently and without overexertion.”

155451881_456029508784091_9056883481354279496_nMatthew Xiong is an Australian classical pianist based in Boston, Massachusetts. Born into a family with no musical roots, Matthew fell in love with classical music when he had a close encounter with Brahms’s 1st Symphony at a young age. Soon after, Matthew began his studies in piano. He has studied under many of the leading musicians of this time, among them are Margaret Hair, John Perry, Ian Hobson, Robert Mcdonald, and Ignat Solzhenitsyn. An avid chamber musician, Matthew has also worked with members of the Borromeo and Brentano quartets. Matthew received his Bachelor of Music at the New England Conservatory under the tutelage of Gabriel Chodos and Bruce Brubaker, and his Masters of Music at Boston University under Boaz Sharon.

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Piano Day was founded in 2015 by composer and pianist Nils Frahm, and a group of like-minded others, and it celebrates all things piano – the instrument and those who play it, its extensive repertoire, and other piano-related projects. It takes places each year on 29th March, the 88th day of the year, chosen because the piano has 88 keys.

“Why does the world need a Piano Day? For many reasons. But mostly, because it doesn’t hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.” – Nils Frahm

In a year when pianos in concert halls have largely fallen silent, Piano Day seems even more significant to me. I have to admit a certain estrangement from my own piano – I have not felt much motivation to play over the past year, despite having more time to devote to an instrument which I love, but in spite of this, I have made some new musical discoveries which I would like to share here.

Woven Silver from Seven Traceries – William Grant Still

A chance hearing of this piece on BBC Radio 3 one morning led me to listen to the entire suite and order the sheet music direct from William Grant Still’s estate in the US.

Chaconne – Jean-Henri d’Anglebert

Another piece which I discovered via BBC Radio 3, listening late one evening to the Night Tracks programme which is broadcast after 11pm

Every Morning, Birds from The Book of Leaves – Rachel Grimes

I discovered Rachel Grimes’ piano music when I was invited to suggest music for the new London College of Music piano syllabus. This atmospheric miniature is from her Book of Leaves album.

Blue Air from Colour Suite – Madeleine Dring

In 2020 I was asked to contribute teaching and performance notes for Trinity College of London’s new piano syllabus, and this was one the pieces for which I wrote notes. I like its lazy swinging rhythms and piquant, jazz harmonies.

Quiet Rhythms: Prologue & Action No. 9 – William Susman

This piece appeared in one of those “if you liked that, you’ll like this” playlists which the Spotify algorithm creates based on one’s listening.

Some Other Time – by Leonard Bernstein, played by Bill Evans

This is very similar to Evans’ Peace Piece, which I play quite frequently, and it shares its tranquillity and ostinato bass.

Allegro Moderato from Gargoyles – Lowell Liebermann

Another chance discovery, the sheet music for this piece by American composer and pianist Lowell Liebermann was included in an issue of International Piano magazine. It’s been on my piano for awhile, but I haven’t yet got round to learning it properly, beyond a brief sight-read. (Read my review of Lowell Lierbermann’s Personal Demons here)

Film en miniature, H. 148: III. Berceuse – Martinu

Track 14 https://www.naxosmusiclibrary.com/catalogue/item.asp?cid=190295242428

I don’t know very much of Martinu’s piano music and I discovered this piece through French pianist Bertrand Chamayou’s wonderful ‘Good Night!’ album (one of my favourite recordings of 2020 – review here).

Elf Dance – Moondog

American composer Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin, May 26, 1916 – September 8, 1999) was blind from the age of 16 and wrote most of his music in Braille. I like the Baroque/folksy flavours of this miniature, which appears on Vanessa Wagner’s disc Inland.

Listening back through these selections, I notice that most have a rather meditative or ambient quality, perhaps reflecting my taste for quieter, more reflective music during the past year.

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Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in music and who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

For me, my earliest memories of listening to various great works for the first time was the biggest catalyst for me wanting to learn the piano. There was never really an exact point in which I decided this would be my career, but I guess I always pretty much had a one-track mind in wanting music to be my life. Partly a reason for this is that I don’t think I was good at anything else! My first piano teacher Dorothy she, who recently just passed away, was certainly an extremely instrumental figure in my life. She was the one who taught me everything from the beginning. All of my teachers each played a very important role in my development, from my professors in my early teenage years, A. Ramon Rivera and Alexander Korsantia, to the teachers that really molded my development from the age of 15 onwards up until today: Robert McDonald, Dang Thai Son, and Jonathan Biss. Aesthetically, I would say that the pianists whose musical language and careers have inspired me the most are Radu Lupu, Grigory Sokolov, and Mitsuko Uchida.

What do you do off stage that provides inspiration on stage?

I listen to a lot of recordings of various works frequently. Whether it be a Bach Cantata, Schubert Lieder, or Mozart Piano Concerto, etc. I always want to have music in my ears, and somewhat subconsciously and consciously get deeper into the musical and emotional worlds of these great composers. Further, when I’m listening to a great piece of music whilst enjoying a beautiful part of nature, this inspires me the most.

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

This process varies all the time, but I would say first and foremost I would choose pieces I really want to play. The burning desire must be there for me to have to play this work at this time. Then, the decisions come where a programme must make sense musically, and also I have to imagine how it would work and sound to an audience. I don’t like programmes that are random, and are more of a showcase of all the different types of pieces a musician can play. I much prefer a programme that has cohesion and relation in its aesthetic, and the musical worlds of certain composers. This would apply mostly to the music within one half of a recital programme. After an intermission it can either be completely different, or continue on a common thread.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

There really have been so many very memorable concert experiences, and in a way, all of them have been, because of how unique each experience is, and you never know what will happen on stage. However, one that has stood out very much so far was my BBC Proms debut. This was a concert that I had prepared a lot of time for, and there was nothing quite like that experience of walking out on stage to this ocean of people at the Albert Hall. I really did feel this unique and electric energy, and general warmth coming from the public that day.

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

I would hope that I can continue to have the chance to play music for people in all corners of the globe. I think despite all its unique challenges, and immense stress, our profession as a performing musician is a very lucky one. What an opportunity it is to be able to travel the world, see so many different countries and cultures, whilst doing what you love. Music is a very active and living thing. So much of this music left to us by these transcendent geniuses is so unbelievably great. However, without it being brought to life and played, it’s simply notes on a page. I just feel very lucky to be able to have a part in this wonderful process of bringing these works to more people.

Eric Lu won First Prize at The Leeds International Piano Competition in 2018, the first American to win the prestigious prize since Murray Perahia. He made his BBC Proms debut the following summer, and is currently a member of the BBC New Generation Artist scheme. Eric is a recipient of the 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and is an exclusive Warner Classics recording artist.

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Opera in Recital

Guest post by Joanna Harries

One of the many inexplicable snobberies I picked up from music college was that a recital should only ever include song and Lieder. Perhaps one aria – a party piece, or an audience favourite – was permissible as an encore, but otherwise opera was written for an orchestra. Performing it with piano was somehow second-rate.

It wasn’t until I’d left college that I realised how ridiculous this idea that “it’s not opera unless there’s an orchestra” is. After all, every singer spends far more of their life working with a pianist than an orchestra. Coachings, auditions, opera scenes – even the majority of rehearsals for full scale orchestral productions take place with piano. And full blown theatrical productions are expensive to put on. It’s simply not always feasible. Add to that all the amazing operatic repertoire that never gets an outing in the theatre for one reason or another and there’s quite simply no compelling reason not to perform opera in recital.

Don’t get me wrong – I love artsong and Lieder. I’m a massive Brahms fan, I love both the Schumanns, and I’ve spent the lockdowns pouring over collections of Rebecca Clarke and Wilhelm Stenhammar. I’ll never be short on material – but I wondered why I was so assiduously segregating opera and artsong in my programming. Were my college mentors right? Is opera in recital pointless?

Pianist Ashley Beauchamp certainly doesn’t think so. “Performing opera in recital is an amazing opportunity to strip the story-telling and music back to its most simple form,” he tells me. “It allows us to present opera in such an intimate way, and I find that audiences respond positively to that.”

We’re rehearsing for our upcoming recital for Opera Live @ Home on 30th March and, as the name suggests, it’s a full programme of opera. The series began in 2020 during the pandemic to bring opera live into people’s homes via Zoom. Each month a singer/pianist duo perform a carefully chosen selection of arias, followed by a Q&A, where the audience can ask any questions they like. In these most distanced of times, it’s a very intimate way to share music.

In fact, Ash and I have performed opera to all sorts of different audiences over the years. We first met performing opera in a recital at Pushkin House – repertoire from Russian operas that never get staged in the UK. And our last gig before the pandemic (on the very day the theatres closed) was to young children at the Royal Opera House’s “Opera Dots”. There is nothing like singing Hansel and Gretel to a room of five-year-olds to remind you what’s important in opera. You don’t need the set, costumes or indeed orchestra to tell a musical story.

The idea that performing opera in recital could reach a wider audience isn’t new. In 1884 a letter in the Musical Times called for a “Music for the People”:

“At present we cannot with the best intentions expect the working classes to attend opera or expensive Concerts far away from their homes…let operas in recital and chamber music be given, with piano and American organ as ground work; for I maintain that it is in recital that you can best appreciate opera works, from a purely musical point of view.”

The author of this letter – a mysterious O.L. – proposed they should “write to the mayor of every town throughout the United Kingdom” to initiate these regional opera recitals. (One to suggest to Oliver Dowden, perhaps…?) I wonder what O.L. would have thought of the Zoom recital – a phenomenon that can reach more audiences than ever before, all over the world?

Joanna Harries

Opera, but not as you know it

So how does performing opera in recital compare to the stage?

Well, from a singer’s point of view, working with the right pianist is key. Some pianists instinctively click with the drama – and that’s important, because they’re telling that character’s story as much as you are. In fact, you’re no longer a singer performing “over” an orchestra – you’re in duet with the pianist. The hierarchy is completely different from performing on stage – you are both the conductor; it’s a collaboration.

Unlike with song, pianists have the added responsibility of embodying an entire orchestra. “The challenge of playing opera in a recital is that the audience is completely reliant on the pianist to create the sound-world of the piece,” says Ash. “You’re the only other thing that the singer has with them in the room to help set the scene.”

I asked Ash how performing opera compares to Lieder: “The most obvious similarity is that, ultimately, we are trying to tell a story through music, and it can feel like you’ve travelled as far through a three minute song as through a three hour opera! The crucial difference with opera is that the piano part I’m playing from is a reduction of the orchestral full score. These reductions are very often a complete minefield – they can be full of mistakes, crammed with too many notes or even missing entire chunks of important material. My job is to be as faithful as possible to the full score – recreating the music in the same way that an orchestra would in performance.”

There are challenges for the singer too. In some ways, it’s more tiring – on stage, even the largest roles don’t sing all their big arias back to back! So you have to programme strategically. You’re also in charge of the audience’s emotional journey through the evening, instead of the composer or librettist – so you have to think about the pace of the drama too. In an opera you’re usually playing one character all night, but in recital, you’re an entirely new character in an entirely new scene every five minutes.

“An aria that appears at the very climax of a three hour opera can be difficult to present in middle of a recital, sandwiched between very different repertoire,” adds Ash. “We have to learn how to present these arias in isolation, without the benefit of all the contextual information that we enjoy in a staged performance.”

Colour and character

But for all the challenges, there is so much to be gained.

For one thing, it makes me a better singer – I’m sure of it. Not relying on set, costumes, staging means that you really focus on delivering the drama and finding out who that character really is. You’re unencumbered by a particular director’s vision or an exact staging you have to fulfil. You’re also able to play with vocal colour and dynamics in a way that isn’t always possible onstage. In many ways it’s the purest form of musical storytelling.

Ash finds he learns from performing opera too: “Playing opera has definitely informed how I approach solo music. I enjoy trying to imagine what instrument might be playing at any given time. Is that gorgeous left-hand melody a cello, or a bassoon? Are those chord in the right-hand a full string section, or perhaps brass? It definitely helps me to find colours in my playing.”

Ashley Beauchamp, pianist

With our recital fast approaching, I ask Ash what his favourite and least favourite opera repertoire is from the pianist’s perspective. “I have a love/hate relationship with Handel, because I love the music but I hate how hard his fiendish string writing can be for the piano!” he admits. (We are performing Handel’s sublime ‘As with rosy steps’ from Theodora, but luckily I think I’ve been fairly kind with this one, and Ash captures the caressing parallel thirds in the upper strings beautifully.) “French opera scores seem to always be full of mistakes, so I have to spend so much extra time preparing them,” he continues. “My favourite opera to play is anything by Britten – I absolutely adore his operas, and would happily play them forever.”

For myself, it’s not so much any particular composer or aria I love, but the joy and challenge of the kaleidoscope of characters, emotions and stories I get to tell, all in one night.

We’ll also be including Mozart, Bellini, Massenet and Walton arias and – just to buck the trend, we might even throw in an actual song as an encore…

Joanna Harries and Ashley Beauchamp perform for Opera Live @ Home on Tuesday 30th March 2021 at 7:30pm; also available on-demand for 30 days for ticket holders. Tickets: operaliveathome.co.uk

Joanna Harries is a mezzo-soprano from South Wales who studied Cambridge University and went on to train at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (Alexander Gibson Opera Studio). She has performed with Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera, Grange Park Opera, Opera Holland Park and Longborough Festival Opera, and her roles stretch from the seventeenth to twenty-first century.

www.joannaharries.com

www.ashleybeauchamp.com

Opera Live @ Home