My piano recital is today at 7:30PM, and as my teacher’s senior student, I have the unstated responsibility to play something really, really good. So this year, I’m playing Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 Op. 23 in G Minor (Midi). It’s a pretty tough piece. When I started working on it last year, I lost some confidence during the really difficult sections, and I thought that I would never be able to get through the piece. Technically, the piece was a big jump for me. I decided to work on it the day after I heard internationally recognized pianst Andre Watts play it at my high school. The combined forces of a new Steinway, Watts, and the Chopin Ballade just blew me away. The piece sounded amazing. So naturally, I had to try my hand at playing it.
Although I started the piece months ago, I haven’t been really working on it that much until recently. During the school year, there were periods when I did not practice the piano for weeks–I was too caught up with schoolwork. Then, there were periods when I found fun music to play like broadway pieces or more modern songs and pushed the Ballade off to the side. But during this month, I began to really work on the last two pages and now, I have the whole 8-9 minute piece down fairly well and memorized.
So backtrack two days to Saturday night, it was around 10:30PM, and I was in the state between reality and sleep. It was then that I started daydreaming about life and I had this pecuilar dream comprised of bits and pieces of conversation between people. However, they didn’t speak in words. Instead, they spoke in music and it just so happened that the music was, naturally, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 Op. 23 in G Minor. It was very interesting: I understood everything that the people said very clearly. There was this one conversation where one person started to get mad and yelled at someone else. At that same time, the really fast and loud scale run on the last page of the ballade started to play. After the person finished yelling, the music continued to the two soft chords. And in another conversation, people started getting excited, so the music that represented the conversation was the fast parts in the ballade. It was really cool but also very difficult to describe unless you’ve encountered this before. I had never envisioned music like this and maybe I’ll use this method to be more expressive when playing.
Anyway, that little ancedote could also be interpreted as me practicing too much these past days to memorize the music and to get the ending right.
Let’s hope I don’t mess up that bad at the recital today ^^;.