Stravinsky in Aldeburgh

I played for the first time Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments last week in Aldeburgh. I have difficulty getting on with some of Stravinsky's neoclassical works - to me they can be so abstract and 'unemotional' that I can't find a way in - but this concerto I'm coming to love. It's witty, touching, exuberant, and marvellously structured. There are also veiled military references (the work was written in 1920), which provide a fascinating counterbalance to the generally upbeat character. I had the good fortune to be performing with the LPO and Vladimir Jurowski, particularly given the challenge of performing a work of such precision in the sumptuously resonant acoustic of the Snape Maltings.

I find the first performance of a concerto a challenging task because there's no way to anticipate certain imponderables in the practise room. How easy is it to hear important orchestral detail on stage? How loud do I have to be to balance the orchestra? What are the important things to discuss with the conductor? Where is the orchestra likely to be dragging (almost never the opposite!)? And, simply, what does it feel like to play the work with the orchestra present? Also, a first performance of anything is invariably little more than a sketch of what one will in time bring to a work, because it takes many performances to find one's way into the emotional depths of a piece. To take an extreme example, the first time I played Messiaen's Vingt Regards (at two and a quarter hours length), it felt like a massive test of endurance. But over the years, the work has felt shorter and shorter in concert as I become more used to the scale of it, and now starting to perform the work feels a bit like settling into a comfy sofa. Strange analogy, maybe, but not far from the truth. So, returning to the Stravinsky, Jurowski was particularly helpful for this 'first performance': he conducted with complete assurance (it's a complex score), and brought strong ideas of his own which fleshed out a couple of areas where my own ideas were not fully formed. I keep getting the idea that the conductor acts a bit like a midwife in this kind of situation, but that means I'm comparing the challenge of a first performance with getting a baby out of one's belly, and that seems to slightly overstate the case....