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This is December 23rd in my Dance Inpirations advent calendar |
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24 |
What works on a piano in the studio very often doesn’t work on stage with an orchestra, so that the first day a conductor comes to rehearsals in the lead-up to a show is a bit like your parents coming home early to find you getting drunk with your teenage schoolmates on their duty-free Campari. It’s only a baton, but you can almost hear the dismay:
“Look at this rubato all over the place! You should be ashamed of yourself!”
“I told you that Boris was a bad influence. I don’t care how many pirouettes he can do, you keep in tempo like you’ve been taught!”
“How dare you help yourself to my presto?! I was saving that for the coda!”
“Now your mother and I are going to try and sort this ballet out. From now on, you’ll do as your told and play when I tell you to”
What I learnt from Graham Bond, however, was that it can sometimes the other way around. I have a tendency sometimes to play through music somewhat peremptorily, forgetting how healthy it is to let it breathe. In my early days at ENB, where Graham was my boss, I was also pretty clueless about how to make a pas de deux work between the music and the dancers, and as a result was quite heartless, without meaning to be, about tempo.