"Imagine, if you will, taking a seat at the piano before a full house of 2,000 music lovers ready to hear Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor - and, more importantly, on stage with an orchestra and conductor more than ready to play it. That would be difficult enough, but now imagine that you thought you were supposed to play the Piano Concerto No.23 in A major, another piece of music entirely. This is the stuff of nightmares, and indeed, the very situation in which pianist Maria João Pires found herself in 2013, after she'd been recruited to fill in for another player at an open rehearsal held at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw."
"It had been "perhaps 11 months" since she'd last played the piece into which she could hear the orchestra launching, "and that's the moment where you start losing the memory of the details. That's how the memory functions, you know. And when people see this panic, they perhaps don't know that the reality is, we lose our memories after just a couple of months.""
"It seems to have been the encouragement of conductor Riccardo Chailly that got her through the moment of panic and into a creditable performance. "You know it so well!" he insisted to her, and indeed, as he remembered later, "The miracle is that she has such a memory that she could, within a minute, switch to a new concerto without making one mistake.""
Pianist Maria João Pires was asked at the last minute to fill in at an Amsterdam Concertgebouw open rehearsal in 2013 and found herself seated to play while the orchestra launched a different Mozart concerto. She realized she had been preparing a different piece and experienced a sudden panic as details of the intended concerto failed to surface. She had not played the launched concerto for about eleven months, a gap that contributed to the memory lapse. Conductor Riccardo Chailly encouraged her and she recovered, switching into the launched concerto and delivering a creditable performance.
Read at Open Culture
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