THE GADABOUT'S NIGHTMARE
posted by James Reel
Last night I had one of those performance-anxiety dreams. For students and ex-students, it’s the one in which you’ve gotten several weeks into the semester without bothering to attend a particular class, and now you’re hopelessly behind with an exam coming up, and you can’t even find the classroom. For radio announcers, it involves dead air. I have both dreams from time to time. Last night, though, was something that sneaks through my subconscious far less frequency: a dream about actual performance.
It seems I’d been engaged as a piano soloist with the Tucson Symphony. But I hadn’t bothered to prepare, and didn’t even know what piece I was supposed to play. Backstage, I looked at some music, and it turned out to be Janácek’s Capriccio for piano left-hand. Well, not using the right hand would make the job much easier, I thought. I looked at the printed music, and it didn’t seem too hard, but I found myself figuring out the first note on the treble staff by using the old mnenomic “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor,” and I realized that there’s no way I’d be able to pull this off by sight-reading. (I did take a few weeks of group piano lessons many years ago, and got pretty good at playing scales, but my later instrument was the cello, so I’m more comfortable on the bass clef.)
This is pretty mundane as such dreams go; if you’d like to read a much more sophisticated account along the same lines, try the novel The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, or, for the linguist’s version of the dream, Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy. The reason I had my own version, I’m sure, is that my brain was telling me I have too many non-KUAT projects coming to fruition, and I’m not quite ready. Let’s take a look at my schedule over the next couple of weeks.
This afternoon, I have to drop off with a director a recording I made of about 60 seconds worth of lines from the play Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, which is being produced by the new group of which I’m the board president, the Winding Road Theater Ensemble. From there, I’m heading out to Academy Village for a meeting about a course I’ll be teaching in late April and May for the Arizona Senior Academy; the topic will be 19th-century French theater, and aside from having decided which playwrights to cover (Musset, Hugo, Rostand) I’ve put no thought into the project yet. That’s because I have other thigns to worry about before April.
Things like wading through about 350 reviews and features that I have to proofread for the May-June issue of Fanfare magazine (I recently, against my better judgement, agreed to be the magazine’s classical music editor). This coming Monday night I have a Winding Road board meeting, at which, among other things, we’ll be planning a fundraising event for late April. Wednesday night, I need to attend a concert presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, of which I’m the vice-president and dictator-in-waiting. Next Thursday, I have to help run the box office at the preview performance of Frankie and Johnny, duties I’ll repeat later in the run.
On Feb. 15 I have to give a presentation on the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival for a gated community way north of the city. The festival itself will take place March 7–14, during which I’ll be giving the five pre-concert talks and emceeing a special kiddie concert. In conjunction with the festival, I’m co-teaching a chamber-music course for Exploritas (formerly Elderhostel). I’ve done this before, but for this year I really need to revamp my main presentation. Which I haven’t done yet.
Meanwhile, I’ve got gigs scheduled with Chamber Music Plus—not the Chopin program originally announced, but a new version of something I did a few months ago for the Arizona Cultural Forum, in which I play Claude Debussy and Charles Baudelaire, Steve McKee portrays Edgar Alan Poe, and Rex Woods plays some Debussy preludes, in a music/theater piec by Harry Clark exploring the influence of Poe on Debussy and certain French poets. The first performance will be Feb. 19 in Scottsdale, then we’ll do it again two days later in Tucson, possibly with a fundraiser performance in between. At some point in the days leading up to that weekend, we’ll need to rehearse a little. Steve and I will be reading from the script, but there are some complicated segments in which we have to talk over the music.
Let’s see … anything else? Aside from my regular duties at KUAT, that pretty much covers it into the middle of March. Believe me, it’s more than enough.
