When Pianist Maria João Pires Ready to Carry out the Improper Mozart Concerto, Then Recovered Miraculously

Imag­ine, if you’ll, tak­ing a seat on the piano earlier than a full home of two,000 music lovers prepared to listen to Mozart’s Piano Con­cer­to No. 20 in D minor — and, extra impor­tant­ly, on stage with an orches­tra and con­duc­tor greater than able to play it. That might be dif­fi­cult sufficient, however now imag­ine that you simply thought you had been sup­posed to play the Piano Con­cer­to No.23 in A serious, anoth­er piece of music whole­ly. That is the stuff of evening­mares, and certainly, the very sit­u­a­tion wherein pianist Maria João Pires discovered her­self in 2013, after she’d been recruit­ed to fill in for anoth­er play­er at an open rehearsal held at Ams­ter­dam’s Con­cert­ge­bouw. You possibly can watch it unfold, assum­ing you may bear it, in the clip above.

As Pires says in the Clas­sic FM inter­view beneath, it had been “per­haps 11 months” since she’d final performed the piece into which she may hear the orches­tra launch­ing, “and that’s the second the place you begin los­ing the mem­o­ry of the main points. That’s how the mem­o­ry func­tions, you realize. And when peo­ple see this pan­ic, they per­haps don’t know that the actual­i­ty is, we lose our mem­o­ries after only a cou­ple of months.”

It appears to have been the encour­age­ment of con­duc­tor Ric­automobile­do Chail­ly that bought her by the second of pan­ic and right into a cred­itable per­for­mance. “You realize it so properly!” he insist­ed to her, and certainly, as he remem­bered lat­er, “The mir­a­cle is that she has such a mem­o­ry that she may, with­in a minute, change to a brand new con­cer­to with­out mak­ing one mis­take.”

The eleventh-hour name Pires obtained ask­ing her to take the gig was a part of the prob­lem, however so was a mis­heard num­ber. Accord­ing to the Köchel cat­a­logue, which orga­nizes all of Mozart’s work, the Piano Con­cer­to No. 20 in D minor is 466, the place­because the Piano Con­cer­to No. 23 in A serious is 488. Whether or not Pires mis­heard the Okay‑quantity or the caller mis­spoke, she quickly discovered her­self confronted with a musi­cal chal­lenge for which she felt com­plete­ly unpre­pared. The truth is, she was­n’t: as Chail­ly knew, or at the very least banked on, her profession as a clas­si­cal pianist as much as that time had giv­en her all of the expe­ri­ence she want­ed to attract upon to over­come the cri­sis. As her recov­ery reminds us, professional­fes­sion­al­ism isn’t a lot about mak­ing positive that issues all the time go proper as having the ability to han­dle it once they go improper. It hap­pens that Pires has gone by this par­tic­u­lar sort of mix-up thrice, which makes her a con­sum­mate professional­fes­sion­al certainly.

by way of MyMod­ern­Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Kei­th Jar­rett Performed on a Bro­ken Piano & Turned a Poten­tial­ly Dis­as­trous Con­cert Into the Finest-Promote­ing Piano Album of All Time (1975)

Watch the First Per­for­mance of a Mozart Com­po­si­tion That Had Been Misplaced for Cen­turies

Hear the Exper­i­males­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

The Piano Performed with 16 Increas­ing Lev­els of Com­plex­i­ty: From Straightforward to Very Com­plex

The Mis­take Waltz: Watch the Hilar­i­ous Bal­let by Leg­endary Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Jerome Rob­bins

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the creator of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.