Pandemic-Solo-Recital-With-No-Audience Debrief

NOVEMBER 30, 2020 Here’s a snapshot of a strange moment in the history of musical performance.

The Church of the Epiphany Tuesday Concert Series, where I’ve performed may times both as a soloist and in ensembles, is virtual right now because of the pandemic. It’s recorded on Monday with no audience and premiered on YouTube on Tuesday at the regular time, then the link will stay up for a while.

So here’s how it feels to prepare a 50-minute solo recital, rehearse two times with your piano collaborator, perform it with all the energy of a live performance but with no audience, and go home.

It stinks. Well, allow me to elaborate.

I don’t feel like I need applause, and I think I did quite well communicating with the invisible audience, imagining people in the pews. I felt great about the performance. It wasn’t perfect, but only because it was recorded will anyone notice a few word flubs and places that we got out of coordination. Overall I felt extremely good about it, especially given that
– I’m working with some old repertoire and new technique, and I felt like I navigated that successfully
– We couldn’t rehearse much
– It was pouring down rain and was quite dark, factors that affect energy
– It was impossible to regulate my energy level optimally because I was ready to record at noon but our recording setup took a while
– This is by far the most singing I’ve done since March (and it’s the end of November now), though I did start rehearsing it a while ago and practiced nearly every day
– I did it from memory, something I haven’t done for that much music in quite a while
– Did I mention there was no audience, and it’s supposed to be “live” but there’s a recording setup, which IN THEORY means that if I fell completely off the rails on something, I could edit it out or redo it, but that’s not possible because the broadcast is tomorrow and there isn’t time, and I wouldn’t have the extra voice to redo anything anyway. So it really felt like an enormous mind game. Which I feel like I mastered pretty well, actually.

Doing studio recordings is always really different from doing live performances, but this was kind of neither or both. It’s live without an audience but studio without any do-overs or breaks. The worst of both worlds. I had to summon the energy and the aura of a live performance – which involves psyching myself out and doing mind tricks to keep up the performance while also thinking about what’s coming next and whether there’s a technical thing to concentrate on. While acting. And I’d say that’s actually what I do best and what makes up the majority of What I Do – being in the midst of one thing while thinking about the next thing, and keeping in mind my red flags, where I need to concentrate on counting or words or something. And I think that’s a skillset that we don’t talk about that much because our job is to make it look easy. So there’s all that, but your only audience is microphones and invisible people, and you don’t get any energy back from the room.

I definitely acted a lot, to compensate for the lack of audience and the rain and the weirdness. I’m used to hearing little snickers or at least seeing smiles when I sing something funny, and since I didn’t have that, I probably overcompensated. (When I see the video, I’m sure I’ll discover new things I was doing that I don’t like.) But overall I felt really good about it.

And then it was over, and we congratulated ourselves, and then I went home and ate sardines and butternut squash. (I like sardines, but it was hardly a celebratory meal.) And that’s where it gets so weird. I did something hard. I practiced a LOT and made a lot of sacrifices to do it well. I dressed up. I did all the administrative work, putting the program together, writing program notes, scheduling, advertising. I sang one of the best recitals I’ve ever done, from memory even with all those caveats, and there was no “let’s go out to lunch” or “let’s get a beer to celebrate.” No receiving line, no chatting with audience members afterwards to find out what people liked or didn’t like, no hearing stories about their experience with any of the music, just . . . go home. All that preparation, all the mind games, all that energy, and then just stop. It’s over. Have some sardines.

I hope some people watch the online performance at the premiere, in real time, so I can correspond with people and get some of that energy, even though it isn’t in the moment. Talking with people about my performances isn’t just congratulatory, it’s instructive. What worked, what didn’t, what do people get out of it – audience feedback is vital. As I’ve noted before, we need to get this pandemic over with.