Brighton Springboard Festival

I hardly ever play in public these days, but Brighton Springboard Festival provided an opportunity yesterday morning for me to do some collaborative playing in a (fairly!) non-pressurizing environment. As I also don’t put much pressure on myself these days in terms of playing, I rather enjoyed it. Some things came off better than others as always, but I was pleased with Manuel de Falla’s Jota (with Jan King), which I find a challenging play. (I very much appreciated the kind words of Birgit Rohowsky about this and my playing in general at the Festival.) Congratulations to Rod Edmunds, Jan King and Frances White for their impressive singing, and to Daria Robertson for her really committed and polished performances, which won her several well-deserved first prizes! All Saints Church in Hove made a good venue for this, with a real ‘concert’ feel. Thanks to Springboard for putting on such a good show, and a great job adjudicating from James Oldfield.

The kind of ‘flow state’ I always want to achieve in collaborative musicianship with singers is when my mind is on nothing other than what the singer is doing with the words of the song in the moment, and as other collaborative pianists will probably recognize, it happens less often than I would like. (Working with instrumentalists the equivalent is something like being focused on what they are doing with a melodic line or with a particular rhythm etc.) But I did feel I got into that frame of mind when I played for Rod’s lovely heartfelt performance of Vaughan Willliams’s ‘Whither Must I Wander,’ and at other moments today. When it happens, somehow the technical aspects of playing, including just getting the notes right, and even attention to the tone colours you’re producing on the piano, somehow take care of themselves. Makes me think I should get back to doing more of this…