How to Control Your Emotional State During a Piano Performance
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A few days ago, I once again realized how important it is to record yourself and how listening back to a recording can sometimes move a piece forward almost instantly, saving an enormous amount of practice time.
But now I would like to talk about another subject which, in my opinion, is one of the most important elements of good performance: the ability to control your emotional state, especially when playing in front of other people.
Of course, we all want to play as well as possible. And sometimes the music carries us away so strongly that, without even realizing it, we begin to rush slightly and stop listening carefully to our own playing.
Even a small amount of rushing matters
Interestingly, even the slightest acceleration, if it is not dictated by the musical idea, can immediately damage the overall impression.
The pulse begins to disappear — and pulse is one of the foundations of performance. It is something like the conductor within us. Everything has to remain clearly organized.
And this does not mean that the performance becomes ordinary or predictable. Quite the opposite: structure appears.
A thoughtful and carefully listened-to performance can hold your attention for hours.
How can you tell if you are rushing?
One of the simplest ways is to listen regularly to your own recordings.
While we are playing, we are inside the process. At the same time, we are thinking about the notes, sound, technical problems, musical image, and our state on stage. Because of this, we simply fail to notice many things.
But when listening to a recording, everything can suddenly become obvious: here I rushed, here I did not listen to the end of the phrase, here I lost the pulse, here I allowed the emotions to take over too much.
This is exactly why I began this article by talking about recording your own performance.
What does a good teacher do?
Of course, if you have a good teacher, they do much of this work for you:
do not rush here, use more legato here, play more lightly here, be more assertive here, more inspired here, add a little accent here, and so on.
And it is through all these seemingly small details that we can eventually reach the most important thing — the musical image itself.
But there is another extreme
Of course, you can play it safe and perform very carefully: without rushing, accurately, and with a certain emotional coolness.
But such a performance quickly becomes unbearably boring.
So we arrive at an interesting problem: on the one hand, we cannot allow emotions to control the performance completely. On the other hand, we cannot remove the life from the music simply for the sake of control.
So what should we do?
Freedom first — control afterwards
The answer is similar to what I have written before about unnecessary movements while playing.
First, you need to free yourself and fill the music with emotion and meaning. At a certain stage, there may even be slightly more emotion than necessary.
Only afterwards should you learn to control yourself within that expressive state.
The goal is not to remove emotion, but to manage it.
Not to play more coldly, but to keep a clear mind even when the music genuinely carries you away.
And apart from working with a good teacher, two very simple tools can help enormously: a recorder and a metronome.
A recording allows you to hear yourself from the outside.
A metronome helps you check how steadily you feel the pulse and whether you begin to rush in places where the musical idea does not require it.
Ideally, with time, we should reach a state in which the inner pulse remains stable even without a metronome, while emotions do not destroy the structure of the performance but, on the contrary, fill it with life.
We regularly discuss questions of performance, piano technique, musical interpretation, and artistic development in Slakva Piano Circle, my community for pianists on Skool:
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