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(diaryland) August 05, 2009 - 9:52 a.m.

I'm one of those very few grown adults who wants to turn pro at classical piano when doing such a thing is actually quite futile, especially when they have crippling stage fright when it comes to playing solo. It's a lot like deciding you want to play tennis at Wimbledon one day when you're 45 and your strongest talent is sitting in a comfy chair. But, hey, I'm still getting better. The stage fright is slowly going away, and I'm still improving. That's nice.

There was this guy Padarewski from the late 1800s who had learned piano as a kid and then decided he wanted to be a concert pianist when he was 21. That's kind of what happened to me, except I didn't end up becoming the Prime Minister of Poland afterward.

Last night, I was forced to watch three incredible foetuses play extremely hard music on a big piano, and then I was supposed to have a bit of a go. They played as well as the kids that Ellen gets on her TV show to blow the audience away with their excellentness. I don't think Ellen realises that that level of pianism is actually kind of normal. For a kid. Who gets forced to practice every day.

Anyway, I'm off track. This is about ME.

So, you know how someone does stuff better than you, and they're way younger than you, and you've been trying really hard for years, and then you have to do the thing in front of them after they did it, and you feel like a stupid idiot, and you really need to go to the toilet because you're scared?

Well, that didn't happen. I actually held my shit together for once. I played an entire half an hour of music from four different time periods off by heart with aplomb. I may not have actually swallowed for that whole entire time but that did not really have any bearing on my performance. So, basically, I rocked it.

I think I have to remind myself that I have a degree in playing piano and that I'm actually not that bad.

Good work, Clare. Good work.




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