"Play it, Sam"

not "Play it again, Sam" as the saying goes. When Ilsa asks Sam to play "As Time Goes By" in Casablanca, she's asking because he once played it for someone else, and now she wants him to play it for her.

When I play for people in advance of an audition, I usually don't need to do it in the strictest sense: I've played these excerpts for people before, I know in a general sense how I'm going to play them under pressure, etc. But I need to play for people I trust because I need their musical ears, which are different from mine.

If I were to define the perfect practice session, it would go like this:

1. Imagine the way the music sounds
2. Play the music
3. Using all your awareness, compare (2) to (1)
4. Using all your experience, change (2) to (1)

Since no person is perfect, and thus no session is perfect, we rely on help for any of these 4 points. (1) draws inspiration from any of the recordings and especially live performances we hear. (2) gets help from (4). (3) is developed through hundreds of hours of practice, combined with listening to recorded performance. (4) gets help from your teacher, if you have one, plus your own experience honing your playing.

So where does "playing for someone else" fit in? All of the above. When you play for a great musician, she helps you (1) visualize the best performance, (2) gain experience performing for an audience, (3) compare what you thought you played with what you actually played and (4) bridge the gap from present to future.

That's why I'm lucky to be married to a wonderful violinist and musician. And that's why it's vital to go into any playing session with an open mind. For after all, if you only get the comments that you expected going in, the session won't have been of much value. In other words, if the person you play for only amplifies (3), then you might as well have saved them the effort.

When I played for Akiko before my Minnesota audition in April 2009 (if only I had played for her before!), I expected to hear about nuances of phrasing, lapses of intonation, etc. What I got instead was a whole different way of shifting! I was taken aback at the time. This was something I hadn't examined in at least 10 years, but it has changed my playing permanently. When I returned to Minnesota in November 2009 for trial weeks and a recital, I was practicing scales and repertoire in a new way.

Likewise, when I played for Akiko before the LA audition this past weekend, I assumed that I had changed for good my tendency to give a loud but narrow impression when under pressure. I found out that this wasn't the case! But she encouraged me to work with the range I had, rather than pushing (pressing?) for an ever larger range, which might be elusive in any case. Playing for my old friend Margo later in the week confirmed this impression, and I made it my mission during the audition rounds to show my range of dynamics and sounds. This made for an enjoyable long weekend, at least once the preliminary round was done!

What remains from all this is that playing for people remains important no matter how much experience you have performing. The more sure I was that I would be able to duplicate my practice in performance, the greater the chance that I would do so to the detriment of my artistry. My sessions with Akiko over the years helped me to go beyond the practice room, and allowed me to benefit from her experience. My thanks goes out to her for being willing to criticize while knowing that she has to live with me all the time! I hope that I can help her as much as she has helped me.