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A friend forwarded me an emergency call for musicians, one thing led to another, and I find myself booked to play "incidental music" for an hour or so before a graduation ceremony in two days at Harvard Medical School. I'm to finish with "Pomp and Circumstance" for the procession! Talk about nervous...

I returned to the piano, like, a year ago. I've never performed piano in front of a crowd, the closest would be playing a couple of pieces during the M&H tour where 10 or so people may or may not have been paying attention. Also, I've never played P&C so I printed out the pretty easy arrangement from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomp_and_circumstance (the External Links section at the bottom) and have been trying to learn it. Any suggestions? I like taking it slow, and have worked out some ideas about rubato and voicing. But the tricky part will be repeating indefinitely until the procession is done (supposedly not much more than five minutes), and then smoothly wrapping it up as quickly as possible after everybody is seated. That will suck, because I feel like everybody will be focusing on me and waiting for me to finish.

I try not to get too nervous by recalling that these people aren't there to hear me play, and many of them won't know much other than that it sounds like nice music. There might be some informed and discriminating listeners, I hope they don't cringe too much!

I have to decide on an program order for the pieces that I am able to play. If I run out, I'll just loop through them again. I mostly have learned Chopin pieces (I wasn't expecting to perform, they're just what I love to play), so I'm thinking to try and distribute the non-Chopin evenly across the set, and also to have the minor and major pieces somewhat alternating. So I guess I wonder whether it is possible to assemble a tasteful set from my arbitrary repertoire.

I'll list my pieces below, but first, I'm interested in any opinions strongly against (or in favor?) of playing the first part of the Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 3. I can't play the middle part, but the first part is gorgeous, everyone loves it, and honestly, how offended would the hypothetical informed and discriminating listener really be to hear just a fragment of the piece? Am I not just pleasant background noise, after all?

So, these are the pieces I'm confident enough to play and for which I must choose a set order:

Chopin
------
Prelude 1 C major
Prelude 4 E minor
Prelude 6 B minor
Prelude 20 C minor

Etude Op. 10 No. 3 Introduction

Waltz A-flat Op. 69 No. 1
(sometimes I can play the Minute Waltz in D-flat, but it could too easily turn into a disaster, so I'll refrain from performing that one for now)

Mazurka A minor, Op. 17 No. 4
Mazurka A minor, Op. 67 No. 4

Nocturne E-flat Op. 9 No. 2
Nocturne F-sharp Op. 15 No. 2


Debussy
-------
Prelude G-flat "The girl with the flaxen hair"

Bach
----
Prelude C major
Prelude B-flat major
Goldberg Variations, Aria


I think I'll start with Aria for Goldberg Variations.

Seems like you have plenty of music to use. You can always recycle pieces if you need to.

I wouldn't recommend playing *Parts* of pieces. I don't think it's fair to yourself or the people listening.

In a setting/situation such as this, very few people are really listening.

Regards,

I'd agree. I've played Chopin op.10/3 in a restaurant setting and just played the first section with the final ending (the middle being a bit noisy for quiet dining ). It worked well.

Sure.

Start at the beginning. Take a phrase, drill it until its playable, then move on. Learn the whole piece like that - one short phrase at a time, learning and drilling. Resist the temptation to play through stuff you can already play.

Well overall the thing was a success. The graduates were certainly impressive. Thanks for the input guys. I ended up not playing the first part of that Etude, but mainly because I didn't have time, and not out of principle. It was a bit disorganized, and I ended up only planning the order for the last 3 pieces, which were Bach Prelude in C, Chopin Prelude in E minor, and Nocturne in E-flat. I think it worked nicely.

Some of my thoughts afterward:

* in this context, bring a small clock other than my cell phone

* wear comfortable shoes! my dress shoes rarely get used, and i now have a massive blister on my heel - I had to take a taxi home. also, i sbould lose some weight (but I already knew that)

* look into getting a portable, possibly battery-powered lamp. It was rather dark and I strained to see the music

* i spent the last year learning and memorizing a bunch of modest pieces, and regularly played through them all. in this way I've built a decent repertoire that lets me play lovely music in a situation like this for an hour. That was a nice feeling. this year I hope to add another hour! There are several more Waltzes and Mazurkas I want to tackle, nocturnes and even etudes, and of course a bunch of stuff from other composers. The size of my wishlist definitely increases faster than the size of my repertoire.

* that arrangement of Pomp and Circumstance is pretty easy to play while reading, especially since it's slow. I should learn Happy Birthday to increase my versatility

By the way, the piano was a well-worn but still pretty nice M&H, I think an A. The bench was too low relative to the keyboard, but the piano might have been raised up on some rollers or something. I forgot to check. It wasn't too bad, but it really makes it harder to play when the bench height is not what you're used to. Also, the piano had the potential to be very loud in that room, so I had to play everything quite softly (except P&C), which added to the challenge.

This is good advice, and resembles what I try to do in order to learn new pieces efficiently. Spend the most time working on the hardest parts. I also always start hands separate.