Boston trip recap and concerto performance clips
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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I’m back from Boston and am awash in a cloud of happy incredulous relief—we did it! We performed it for the first time, it went even better than I’d ever dreamed, the reactions and feedback we got are so good, and…it’s over? This thing that had been looming in the eternal future for literal years is suddenly behind me?
Before I go on to share little clips and some trip photos, I absolutely have to thank the huge village of people who were all instrumental (pun not intended) in helping to get the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto from idea to performance.
If you’ve been following this project on social media, the process from the outside has probably looked like this:
???
Profitlol who are we kidding, this is the arts we’re talking aboutPerformance!
…when in fact this one performance alone has involved a whole team of people working their butts off for literal years, sending so many emails (SO MANY EMAILS) and having constant Zoom calls.
Andrés Ballesteros steered this project through two organizations and a pandemic, hit up donors, assembled an orchestra, and got an amazing conductor on board, Britney Alcine, who gave the concerto’s first outing the love and thoughtful care it deserved. Anna Winestein with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative adopted this project and provided the institutional support (overseeing funding, sorting out venue + filming + many other logistics) and Jane Hua worked behind the scenes to help get everything together. I leaned a lot on my Spotlight mentor, Kathleen Kelly, who advised the project and also gave me a lot of support through it, as well as many members of the Spotlight Team who made the time to help the project in many ways big and small. (Mind you, each one of the people mentioned has at least one actual job, if not multiple, so it meant a lot to me that everyone worked so hard on this and gave it so much of their time.)
Funding-wise, the performance was very generously supported by the Hegardt Foundation, the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, the Rebecca Clarke Society, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Aurora Charitable Fund, and multiple individual donors.
And obviously, a crucial part of why this first outing was such a success is all thanks to Patricia Wallinga and her compositional brilliance—she took my half-baked ideas and ran with them (in some cases, wisely substituting her much better ideas) to produce an orchestral score so good that, when you play or listen to it, you cannot believe it was originally a solo piano work.
(I am most definitely leaving people out due to forgetfulness, not spite. Also, a lot of friends, social media followers, and Patreon-then-Substack supporters also helped in many ways!)
So if you’ve ever wondered how hard it is to write a work, drum up an orchestra, and get it performed…the answer is that it’s very hard, and you need a lot of people to buy in and contribute a lot of time and money, and I probably won’t be doing something like this anytime soon.
(But also, we are now assembling a consortium of orchestras to perform this in future seasons, so if you have any connection to ensembles/music directors, hi, call me. 👋)
I want very much to share the full performance, but for now, will just share little clips from each movement. (There is supposedly a professionally filmed and edited version coming, but I am unsure how much we’ll be allowed to publicly share.) All these bits were filmed on my humble iPhone, using—yes!—my new little microphone attachment.
(One little hack that, shhhh, I didn’t tell you: if you know an ensemble or music director you can bother about programming this work, I will have to share the full recording with them and, by extension, you, for programming reasons you understand, and it may just be incidental that as a result you get to hear the whole thing. But you didn’t find out about that little loophole from me.)
It was near impossible for me to select little clips because the whole thing is so good and the orchestration is so brilliant I honestly do just want to throw the whole thing at you and go LISTEN AND SEE HOW GREAT IT IS but I did, in the end, make myself choose just a single moment from each movement.
Substack can have little a clip, as a treat
Movement the first
I love this little bit because this was one of the first most obvious moments that screamed “I am a concerto!!!” to me; please also enjoy my vibe-filled cadenza, which is the cumulation of many improvisatory sessions in which I just smooshed the first movement themes around and took them to far off keys.
Movement the second
If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve already heard this moment from rehearsal; it’s one of my favorite favorite bits. (This theme in the second movement is actually what made me want to play the sonata to begin with; it’s just so beautiful and shimmery, and Patricia made it even more magical by stripping the orchestra down for a Chamber Music Moment and then gently dropping everyone in.)
Confession: the section starting at 0:48 in this clip was not my favorite in either the original sonata or the piano part of the concerto when I first got it, but once I heard how it sounded with a real orchestra I really really loved it and now I think it’s such a good moment!
Movement the third
The third movement of the sonata is such an overlooked middle child but I love its vibe so much. I have a Historically Informed Theory that this movement specifically was meant to capture the feeling Fanny had after an inspirational vacation in Italy shortly before she wrote the sonata (imho this movement has both Italian opera energy and has a similar vibe to Felix’s “Italian” Symphony) and as a joke Patricia started calling this “the Olive Garden movement.”
I really love the aria-like melody at the beginning of this clip and I was so glad that I got to hang onto it as a solo. (We rightfully gave a lot of other beautiful melodic moments to the orchestra.)
Movement the fourth
It’s very hard to pick a single clip from this movement because this is both my belief and the actual truth: in the solo sonata version this movement threatens to be tiresome and annoying because it is so repetitive (I hate rondo form, sorry!!!) and it’s just perpetual motion with no breathing room and as a performer you have to grit your teeth and do what you can to make it a good experience for the audience.
Patricia’s orchestrated version, however…is a delight. Every time a theme comes back the texture is new and the sound is different and it’s a wonderful little surprise every time, and the movement flies by so quickly you kind of wish it was longer, which is something no one has ever thought about the original. This is the movement that is undoubtedly massively improved through orchestration and you really hear it when you experience the whole thing.
MT Anderson (the author!) came to the performance and we talked afterwards and he said the exact same thing:
Anyway. Here’s one such example; at 0:28 the main theme returns in a temporary minor key, which is a moment I’ve always loved because it’s a welcome bit of dramatic darkness. In the concerto, Patricia wrote it so the winds have an almost militaristic take on the otherwise happy-go-lucky melody while the strings add a touch of ominous menace (a very “what have we done” chapter of the narrative) that very quickly melts into whirling, frenetic joy.
It’s so good. IT’S SO GOOD.
Honestly, my challenge now is that when I record the solo sonata later this year, I’m going to have to take the beautiful knowledge of what this sounds like orchestrated and somehow, somehow, attempt to convey that on the piano alone. It is going to be so hard to go back.
Anyway, I am thrilled by last week’s performance. First of all, playing with orchestra is one of my favorite things to do in the world because it’s SO DAMN FUN and this concerto is a joy to play, especially when so many of these ideas only existed in my head previously—hearing a real trumpet or real horn choir or real strings when before you could only imagine what they’d sound like…it’s magical.
Second of all, it was so, so validating that this orchestration got the validation it deserved—I had no doubts about Patricia’s orchestration skills, but there was always a part of me that thought, “Am I crazy for thinking this sonata should be orchestrated?” After all, just because you can orchestrate a work doesn’t mean you should—I have heard so many questionable orchestrations of piano works to know that sometimes composers really knew what they were doing when they opted to write for piano alone. Having so many people agree that this genuinely sounds right as a concerto just affirmed that I am, as always, correct about all things.
Third of all…this is going to sound very silly and self-centered, but a very small part of me does love the in-the-moment adulation you get in a good performance. I was thrilled by the turnout (admittedly my threshold is that if more people are in the audience than on stage, it’s a success, so that is a very easy bar to clear), I loved getting a standing ovation, I loved getting tons of compliments and cheers and people telling me how great I played. It sounds kind of terrible to say you like these things, but I also feel like you can’t be a performer and not like these things. I spend most of my life not wanting to be perceived but dammit, when it’s time for me to get on stage and get attention, I WANT THAT ATTENTION.
Also I just really love getting to wear a big dramatic gown that flares out dramatically when I walk.
Postcard update
Those of you who are $20+/month supporters are supposed to get a postcard/letter from me every month, and I appreciate your patience as I have gotten behind on my snail mail this year, and owed you two (I think) months of mail.
Well guess what: I’M ALL CAUGHT UP NOW, MOFOS. (Also, thank you for your support, and I love you.)
I collected postcards while I explored Boston and wrote multiple cards to each of you through the week. So depending on where you are in the world, you’ll either have already gotten three postcards from Boston from me, or you’ll get them some time in the next few weeks.
Miscellaneous adventures
I had such a good time in Boston—it helped that it was generally sunny and warm and beautiful (although there were random thunderstorms??? Massachusetts, plz explain) and the city is extremely charming and walkable.
In between making an orchestra concert happen Andrés graciously took me and Patricia on a mini walking tour of the city, and when we stumbled into a lovely used bookstore and found a book called “How to Read Music in 30 Days,” we were all extremely amused when I randomly opened it to the chapter titled “Giving life to your notes with musical expression.”
I also walked past the New England Conservatory one day and was tickled because NEC rejected me years ago, killing my fantasy of being a music student in Boston, but now I don’t care! Unbothered, in my lane, thriving, etc. (Being in the city to perform a concerto you dreamed into existence, that you are getting paid for and that people bought tickets to see, kind of has a way of making long-past rejections just not matter anymore.)
Everyone told me to check out the MFA, and everyone was right, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself for genuine artistic and intellectual reasons, but also I had to share with you this Roman vase with a design that is just begging to be a meme:
Substack is telling me this post is getting very long, and now that I look at it I have crammed rather a lot into here, so I think I’ll wrap it up now. Last week was a dream and I am so excited that this long-awaited project is finally out there in the world, and I can’t wait to see where it takes me next. 🎹