A Second Job in Trichotomy

In the Cemetery

I auditioned three weeks ago with the Ukrainian soprano for next year’s Carnegie Hall concert; I found out we’d been picked two weeks ago, so that is nice. But the audition results hadn’t been announced publicly yet, so I couldn’t tell her. She only found out today, and I have a hard time acting like I’m excited because I have already known for two weeks.

Two weekends ago I played at the cemetery for the old Treasurer’s community group, a fundraiser on World Piano Day for their piano maintenance. When she asked a couple of months ago, she only asked about 8 pianists, so I pitched a 17 minute long piece (Rhapsody in Blue, which ended up taking 16 and a half minutes, but I was playing faster than I should). It turned out she has a roster of 16 or so pianists, and no one else played longer than 8 minutes. But apparently I made an impression… the treasurer sent me the screenshot of a facebook of an audience member singling me out, and some other blog post about the event also singled me out. The sad thing is it was probably one of my worst performances - performing at my amateur musicians group has trained me to perform for at most 10 minutes at a time, so I could feel as I was on stage that my focus was slowly slipping. And there were several big brainfarts - they occur in passages where I never screw up when practicing, so I didn’t pay enough attention to them. Oh well.

After the fundraiser, we went into the city, ate a pizza slice, and went to the rehearsal for the Carnegie Hall concert next week. I’m very happy with Lucia, her breathing and phrasing is very easy to follow, but she follows me well too, when I had a brainfart (see above). She’s singing Juliette’s arias; the waltz is very famous and the poison aria is familiar to me, so it wasn’t difficult to put together.

The rehearsal is a very different standard - anyone else from the rehearsal would have been the best at the cemetery.

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At Carnegie Hall

And the actual concert was yesterday. The ENT pianist was rather worried about the sales of the tickets; normally we would be two thirds of the way sold out by the time our pre-sale ended, but this time we were only one third of the way. So we had a promotion push, asking the performers to advertise it to their friends and acquaintances and asked the general membership to come to the concert. I think because we are catering to more professionals now, for whom performing at Carnegie Hall isn’t that big a deal, it should be natural to see ticket sales drop.

But after the promotional push it worked and ticket sales came back to normal. My soprano Lucia invited her work friends (who are sculptors) to the concert, which is the first time she has done it.

Ironically La Professeure is upstate with her parents, so I wasn’t planning to even get a ticket for myself. But Wise Young Friend ended up wanting to come at the last minute, so I got a ticket for her and myself too, which turned out to be helpful because I spent most of the concert in the audience. We performed at the start of the second half, so I stayed in the audience the whole first half, sneak backstage, change, perform, and sneak back out to watch the rest of the show from the audience (there were a few empty seats). That was great - the only thing better is if we performed first.

I did not feel particular pressure since I was just accompanying Lucia, but since La Professeure wasn’t here, I spent the morning watching Supermario’s Galaxy. I hadn’t been to the movies for a long time, so it’s a nice experience. As I walked to Carnegie Hall, I saw lots of men in kilts - turns out there was apparently a Scottish parade on 6th avenue, and it just wrapped up. We then had to stand outside the stage door for 30 minutes before being let in because there was a choir (I think) that had to be loaded to the Stern auditorium. But we got in, did the sound check. I could see how nervous Lucia was, and I was reminded why I would not want to perform there as a soloist again. It was nice to see the camaraderie between the performers - we have waves of people coming in and out of the group, but the friendliness never changed. I had a light dinner at a deli nearby with a Jazz pianist who is making the debut here, and showed him what I usually do before a Carnegie Hall show. Then I got back to Carnegie Hall and met up with Wise Young Friend to be an audience member until the intermission. But because I spent so little time backstage, I didn’t get to chat up with very many people. In fact, while I was in the audience in the second half, they decided to have a group bow at the end of the concert, so all the performers came out to the stage except me. Then I tried to sneak backstage to pick my things up, the usher recognised me as a performer and felt bad for me that I wasn’t on stage to take the bow. Not a problem; I’ll be back in 7 months.

Wise Young Friend said afterwards that she could notice a change in the quality of musicians - a chunk of them are professional musicians now. But I think even the amateurs are a lot better skilled now too, especially with the younger generation. So that is nice to see. I think I could have done better with Lucia - I forgot to start a crescendo at the second part of the poison aria and only recognized that when I realized she was forcing her sound. But I think I recovered.

I still have a concert to play with La Professeure’s college friend’s son, which I’m just picking back up. I had learned it last year, but the kid was sick on the day we were supposed to perform.

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Money and the flow of time

We now owe tax more than my entire income from grad school years. Mostly from capital gains (I sold a chunk of stock when the price was high), but still, it’s a different world.

We have a lead on a financial advisor who would do estate planning and retirement planning, and we are going to meet with him to talk about our financial help. We did talk to financial planners before to get general advice (are we saving enough?), but not white glove service (are we parking our money in the right places?), so this feels different.

It is weird that retirement planning is a real prospect.

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