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How do you prevent?

How concert pianist's never suffering from memory lapse during a performance?

What is the solution?

Practising more or being cold blooded?

Personally, It's my biggest reason to not to play for public.

They do have memory lapses, and sometimes very significant ones. But they also have excellent recovery skills.

Knowing the music inside out and outside in helps

You can approach the problem a couple of ways. Understanding the harmonic progression of the piece can be very useful for memorizing. In otherwords study the piece from a theory or harmonic persective. Fingering is also critical to help with memorization. Many times a memory lapse is due to a bad or suboptimal fingering.

One of the most famous memory lapses occured to Richter who never gave another proformance without the sheet music thereafter.

I would say you have to be able to practice the piece in your mind....also good recovery would be a must.

raada

some time back i had copied a quote from a concert pianist, who said (specifically around contrapuntal music but i suspect it could be applied to all) that he always memorized hands separately and then put them together.

My teacher used to force me to start playing a piece from a random bar, to make sure I could recover, as if starting cold in the middle of the performance. I have a tendency to basically day dream myself out of the performance, a handicap that I have never really addressed.

Like Piano Dad, I have heard quite a few professional pianists have memory lapses. And I agree that developing excellent recovery skills is key. For myself, knowing that I can recover quickly from a lapse certainly helps reduce my anxiety level.

In a long enough career, it is impossible not to have memory lapses. The most critical skill you can acquire here is the ability to recover from those lapses. If you focus solely on preventing memory lapses from occurring, you will inevitably fail. If, however, you focus on recovering from those memory lapses, you will invariably be successful to at least some degree.

If you are not a professional pianist, I would strongly consider just playing with the music to avoid the anxiety of having a memory lapse. I haven't played without the music for almost 50 years. Beside allowing you to perform with less anxiety, the time not used up in trying memorize a piece well enough to avoid a memory lapse can be used for anything else you like including learning more repertoire.

For me I stsrted performing so much better when I started to use all sorts of different kinds of memory and as well with time an experience. A few years ago I was unable to play 10 minutes in public without having loads of mistakes. Now I can manage 30-45 minutes...

it's a question of time: how much time do you have to practise, how many times can you play/perform, the more the better, in doing it one discovers how to do it, memory-lapses are human, not very artistic..

When I was learning Beethoven 10/3, my teacher told me that he saw a famous pianist (I think it was Murray Perahia) crash on the first page, and that he had to start again. I guess it happens to everyone.

As for memorizing, it helps a lot to be able to play through the piece in your head. It can be a brutal exercise, but well worth it. I've heard stories of pianists who write out pieces from memory just to see how well they know it. I've never tried that, but I'm sure it would be helpful.

If even world-class pianists with reputations of 'never' playing wrong notes like Pollini and Zimerman can have memory lapses (the former in a Beethoven concerto, the latter in Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, both playing in London when I heard them), I'd say that it's safe for non-professional pianists to have memory lapses occasionally. But it's an art to cover them up successfully, though sometimes you just have to go back to the beginning and start again. A good ability to improvise helps a lot. The worst thing to do is to stop dead, scratch your head and apologize to the audience - the audience wants you to get on with it, not publicly humiliate yourself.

I used to believe that as an amateur, I never needed to play anything from memory even in front of an (adoring ) audience; until I started learning music that was so complex in figuration and had so many fast leaps everywhere that I found I had to memorize whole passages at a time just to be able to play them properly. From there, it was no great leap to memorize the whole piece, and I found playing from memory so liberating that I decided from then on to memorize music that I wanted to keep in my repertoire indefinitely. It also meant that I could play several pieces from memory any time and anywhere I came across a piano. I still learn pieces that don't interest me enough to want to memorize them, of course, as well as keep up my sight-reading skills.

This is the great thing about memorizing for me. I've had a couple of really great experiences just happening upon an instrument and being able to play.

One of the most fun was in Colonial Williamsburg last year at the musical instrument maker's shop. Since I knew the first movement of Mozart K545 (more or less), I was able to play the little harpsichord they had there. Another visitor was so excited to hear the instrument being played that he asked me to play more so he could videotape it.

Of course, in this kind of situation memory lapses really don't matter, since no one is expecting a performance. As an amateur, I wouldn't want the pressure of trying to perform from memory. If I know in advance that I'm going to play, I take the score.

There's no way to entirely get rid of memory slips, but you can smooth out your comeback so that people don't know that you've had a slip.

Finding certain spots to start again in case you have a lapse helps.

Focus is a big part though-- when you focus entirely on the music, you have no room to worry and think about other things, and there's a lower chance of having a memory slip, or worse, a blank out.

There are also lots of psychology techniques that help a lot, backed up by scientific research, e.g. centering, focus techniques, etc.

Maybe people around here take this as a given and I'm just making a fool out of myself, but these excercises are crucial to avoid developing a pure "finger-based" memory (sorry, I don't know the exact expression). If you practice a piece and perfect it more and more, the piece burns itself into your fingers. You can play without even thinking about it. This kind of "perfection" is treacherous because you slowly forget how the piece really looks like. You can play it, but once you make a mistake it's over. To me, this isn't really a memory lapse at all because you don't play from "real" memory - only your fingers remember how to play from constant repetition.

What I like to do to avoid this is not only start playing from a random bar but also playing from a random bar with only the right or the left hand. This will somewhat "confuse" your finger-memory.

It's still your brain that is doing the remembering when it comes to 'finger memory'. This type of memory is no less valid than any other, it's just wise to develop all the different facets of your memory.

more grist for the mill...

richter stopped performing from memory after a bad lapse.

a former head of the U of I piano department says that playing from memory was a relatively recent phenomenon(liszt perhaps?), one that he thinks is quite unnecessary. he says, and i quote, "there's no shame in playing from the sheet music."

lastly, memorization helps me to feel i've fully learned the piece, but i've also noticed that performing publicly by memory puts more emotional pressure and i'm much more relaxed performing with the music than without.

+1. I saw my college teacher, an accomplished and experienced concert artist, lose his way in the Liszt sonata so completely that he stopped the performance, apologized to the audience and said he hoped to do better on the second half of the program. He came back after intermission and played a rousing, note-perfect rendition of Pictures at an Exhibition. Since that time, I've never played in public without a score.

Not worrying about memorization certainly does free up practice time for other things -- intensive technique work, learning more music, etc. The point made by jdw -- that some music is so physically complex that you have to memorize in order to keep your eyes on the keyboard -- is also true, but most pieces (even at the advanced level) have relatively few passages that require total visual concentration on the keyboard. For the rest of the time, being freed from anxiety about memory lapses contributes more to the musicality of a performance than it takes away.