Pierre Liscia-Beaurenaut has one foot in violin playing and the other in music journalism. Every month, Pierre invites you to the other side of the curtain, to discover the daily life of a young professional musician doing the rounds of rehearsal rooms and auditions as well as meeting the great musicians of our time..
5th August 2020 : Disaster strikes! The news falls into my mailbox like a hand grenade: the competition for which I’ve been preparing, intended to be live in early September, has been cancelled and replaced by a video selection process. To the untrained eye, video might seem to have plenty of advantages: infinite number of takes, none of the stresses and other travails of live, the possibility of tidying up the video at the editing stage. But for me, it’s a rising tide of panic as the realisation dawns that I am now expected to produce a video worthy of the name from my meagre hardware, and – worst of all – that I will have to confront one of my worst phobias: editing software. Because let’s be honest: when we’re told, a month before the deadline, that we have to produce half an hour of video with nothing but a mobile phone and a pocket recorder, I’m going to need to be a MacGyver as much as a Menuhin.
So much for the overview: it's time to be specific. I am preparing for an assessment for entrance to a school in Germany, which changes everything. For sure, as with all video auditions, the jury is expecting a fixed camera, a clear and smooth view of the artist in front of a clear background, with the hands properly visible. But you have to understand that French and German schools have very different recruitment methods. In France, the set of works played is often prescribed and will be listened to in totality. In Germany, on the other hand, the candidate is given a great deal of freedom and must present a wide variety of repertoire. But the time in front of the jury is notoriously short: the Lübeck Hochschule, for example, requires the candidate to prepare a 60 minute recital but is only expecting to listen to 10 minutes of it. I remember a friend who had prepared the whole of the Franck sonata for entrance to the Berlin Hochschule. When I asked him, after the event, what he had played, he explained that they had cut him off after... the first eight notes of the first movement! Whence the interest, for the candidate, to be focused on the first few pages of the works to be played to the jury – the ones they’re actually likely to listen to – a short cut on which I had been deviously relying since the start of my preparation. Trouble is, trial by video reverses this paradigm: the works must be played from beginning to end; if I was to avoid a conviction for flagrant procrastination, I was going to have to rethink my whole method of working.
I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth without the following confession: video cameras scare me rigid. Nothing cools my interpretive ardour as much as the cold stare of the lens, and since mistakes are tolerated far less than in live performance, I tend to consider each one of my takes to be more horrible than the previous one. More clearly, the need to record a concerto “naked” (i.e. without a piano accompaniment) gives me the heebie-jeebies. Everything was ready for this month of holiday to turn into a nightmare.
15th August: in the space of ten days, I believe that I have worked through the panoply of errors that plague the videographic novice and which can ruin a perfectly adequate musical performance. First the video: having sorted the problems of lighting and composition, I’ve finally recorded a more or less decently performed Hindemith sonata, which I have sent to my family for their opinion. The replies were rhapsodic – until, that is, my mum pointed out the appearance, bang in the middle of the sonata, of a certain feline that I had failed to lock up, which decided to come into shot for a whole minute. Uncertain that the jury would be enthused by the animal antics, I am forced to reshoot everything.