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. You can watch it unfold, assuming you can bear it, in the clip above.
As Pires says in the Classic FM interview below, 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.”
The eleventh-hour call Pires received asking her to take the gig was part of the problem, but 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, whereas the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major is 488. Whether Pires misheard the K‑number or the caller misspoke, she soon found herself faced with a musical challenge for which she felt completely unprepared. In fact, she wasn’t: as Chailly knew, or at least banked on, her career as a classical pianist up to that point had given her all the experience she needed to draw upon to overcome the crisis. As her recovery reminds us, professionalism isn’t so much about making sure that things always go right as being able to handle it when they go wrong. It happens that Pires has gone through this particular kind of mix-up three times, which makes her a consummate professional indeed.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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