Richmond write-up

The Richmond write-up is up. I was happy I could include shout-outs to Cochran’s ski area, where I learned to ski on moving to Vermont, and to xkcd. It was the last of my 2022 performances not posted, so my backlog is now down to three concerts, all fairly recent.

Why did it take three months to wrap this one up? Partly because it came after a long string of closely spaced concerts that took a while to document, but also out of self-consciousness: it took me a while to settle on what clips I was comfortable posting. 

As I’ve noted before, recording the concerts and putting recordings online is at cross-purposes with working to stay in the moment and not focus on product. In the case of Richmond, I knew I wanted to include at least some of the Brahms F minor clarinet sonata: it was the centerpiece of the program, and we played the whole thing, a substantial investment of practice and rehearsal. It was the one collaborative piece, and I’m pretty sure the full and enthusiastic house was largely due to the presence of homegirl Ginny Churchill.

And it was fine; we put it across. It was warmly received, and people applauded after each moment. But every movement had messy moments, and all but the third had at least one real clunker. In the context of live performance, or of this project as a whole, or of the ambitious goal of doing a collaboration in every town, it was a job well done. But a published recording is different. It isn’t a matter of mere perfectionism or unrealistic standards; wrong notes simply matter more in recordings than they do live. 

Whatever I put up on YouTube kind of has to stay there, because the clips are embedded in my write-ups, and the write-ups are integral to the project. If I were curating a YouTube channel for the purpose of showcasing my pianism, I would be much more selective. Most concerts wouldn’t have anything that I would post. I feel fine about people listening to these clips as part of the concert write-ups; but if people come upon them out of context, I worry about the level of editorial selectivity they represent. I’m please that I’m putting together the Scarlatti sonatas as quickly as I do, including the thematically and numerically customized ii-V-I improvisatory preludes. Yet if I were to chance upon some of my own Scarlatti recordings—by searching for recordings of a particular sonata, for instance—I would not listen through, and I would wonder why the performer had chosen to publish them. (I’d also be pretty confused by the intros, I guess!)