When I say inappropriate, I don’t mean in 4/4 rather than 3/4, or a barcarole instead of a mazurka. I mean inappropriate in the sense of “Oh no. Let the earth swallow me up. Get me out of this tune now.” By the time you’ve realised your mistake, it’s too late.
Accidentally playing Edelweiss for company class in Germany comes somewhere near the top of my red-faced moments, though years later I discovered that nobody in Germany knows The Sound of Music (I guess that figures, really), and that playing Zarah Leander songs – which I did – is probably in more questionable taste. You have a whole 64 counts to endure before you can get out of the tune and into something else, and if you try to snake out of it by turning it into an improvisation that just happens to have the first three notes of Edelweiss, it sounds like you don’t know the tune, or are trying (which is the case) to cover your tracks.
Worse than playing showbiz reminders of a country’s political past, is playing anything from The Nutcracker, Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty in company class. Ballet repertoire’s a strange one, though. A lot of people say they don’t like it for class, but in practice, it often goes down quite well, as long as it isn’t one of those three. I have a league table in my head of things you can just about get away with if you pick your moment. Etudes is somewhere near the top of it, together with stuff from the Imperial repertoire that you might only see on Russian Youtube. It’s a gamble that works both ways, though. Sometimes you play stuff that you think people will have a fond nostalgia for, and it’s like they never heard it before. Another time, you gingerly play something you think is too well known, and they just look at you and go “What is that?” Other times, you play something you think is just a tune, and it happens to be part of someone’s ballet, so they start doing the steps at the back.
Maybe failed humour is the worst thing. To pick something you think is going to be amusing, only to find that no-one’s in a the mood for humour, or they don’t get it, or the music doesn’t work for the exercise anyway is a form of embarrassment you can’t hide from. You realise it in the first 8 bars, and you’ve got at least another 24 to go. It’s like having to lick the egg off your own face.
