My Second Piano Recital

I played three pieces for my second recital during the spring of my junior year in college. The first two are the classical pieces Ave Maria composed by Charles Gounod and Für Elise composed by Ludwig von Beethoven. The last piece is a video game piece called World 3 from Super Mario Galaxy 2 composed by Koji Kondo. There's a lot of new things that happened with my second recital. I played the first piece as an accompaniment to a violinist. I also had my first instance of freezing while performing.

Despite being nervous for this one, I was looking forward to performing again, if for nothing else than because the last one went well enough and I figured this one would as well.

Ave Maria is a different version of one of my favorite pieces to play: Prelude in C Major composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. I wasn't aware it exited, but when my instructor suggested performing it, I decided to go with it. He found someone who could play the main melody on the violin and brought them to some of our instruction sessions so I could rehearse with them. It was my first time playing together with someone, but I did pretty well. When the day of the recital finally came, it felt really cool to actually play the piece. It helped that it went really well too.

The same can't be said for Für Elise unfortunately. Learning and practicing it seemed fine at first, but as the recital got closer and closer, I started to make some really uncharacteristic mistakes on parts I thought I had down. It got to the point where I had to ask my instructor for advice on how to calm down my nerves. His advice worked to the point where practicing would go well, but when the time came to perform it, I froze twice during the middle of the piece.

As it was happening, I remember feeling like my mind legitimately going blank. Thankfully, I remembered sections I could always go to in case this happened so I didn't stop the piece altogether. While I feel like the last part of it went well enough, the fact that I messed up twice on a piece everyone definitely knew was still weighing down on me afterwards for the rest of the day. My friends and instructor tried to console me, but I was still shaken up about. I feel like if I played it at a slightly slower tempo, everything would've have been fine, but I've slowly learned to let go of the shame in not being perfect.

The last piece was just what I needed after what happened. The original composition has a faster tempo than what I performed, but my instructor recommended a slower pace to highlight the calm, peaceful, magical nature of it. I was just glad to play something that I liked and that was, more importantly, slow enough to play comfortably.

I eventually got over messing up afterwards. I can kind of look at the recording and feel good that I at least recovered from freezing, especially considering the other two pieces went smoothly. I was still able to look forward to performing in more recitals.