Last night, my friends let me sit in on one of their rehearsals of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in D minor. Wow. Except one former professional musician, none of them are professionals, and all haven't really played in years, but they sounded great together. I couldn't just pick up my violin and play like that. The pianist was just something else. Prior to last night, I had never heard her play, but had strong suspicions that she was pretty good, b/c she has a grand piano. Her part is at least 10.3 times as hard as the other two parts. She was amazing.
I know that listening to amateur musicians rehearse and work through passages doesn't excite most of my musician friends, professional, elitist, or otherwise, but what a treat to be able to hear the process of music being created. So often, what we hear is the final product, which, as a (sortof) performer, I know is also itself a work in progress. It evolves, and even if you play/sing the same thing three times, each performance is slightly different. Still, what you present is theoretically a polished final product. Never perfect (well, at least speaking for myself), and can always improve, if you had more time, but a final product all the same. You rarely get to hear a work-in-progress, in which the performers deliberate over this and that dynamic, tempo, and other minutiae. True, I get a sufficient dose of this in my own rehearsals, but it's quite different when you're an outside observer, because you get to listen with an undistracted ear, and you're not immersed in the process.
I love live concerts put on by professional musicians in venues with perfectly engineered acoustics, and 90 percent of my live listening experience is of this sort, but sometimes I just prefer music as I heard it last night. Impromptu. Mid-rehearsal, before everything is 100 percent polished. Music as it undergoes the stages of transformation. Plus the music somehow sounds more significant, because it is being played by people you know really well. It's Mendelssohn but mediated through a familiar filter. I almost felt like I was peering into their soul somewhat, since I wasn't supposed to be there, and you don't take that sort of thing lightly.
The best part is that this all happened within a stone's throw from my apartment. Isn't it nice to have such talented friends so close by so I can get my Mendelssohn fix?
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2 comments:
No kidding. Isn't it a cool experience?
One evening, back in my east coast days, there was a bar next door, where a couple friends and I spent a few hours (6?). Afterwards, retreating to my apartment for a nightcap or 20, they decided to whip out their violin and viola. For the next hour or so they just, pardon the expression, farted out Mozart's Vn and Va duos (they're fantastic players, by the way, so "farting out" is more complimentary; it sounded easy for them). Naturally, being a bit tipsy, as it were, I sat spellbound, perhaps for the one hour of playing and the next hour in silence. It was a cool experience, too.
Cheers!
Wow. You have friends who can play Mozart coherently whilst "tipsy"? Now that is cool.
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