Marian Lamoureux of Hinsdale | Recital Anxiety Does Not Start at the Recital

Marian Lamoureux Hinsdale

By the time a student is shaking backstage before a piano recital, the work to prevent that moment was supposed to happen weeks earlier. Marian Lamoureux of Hinsdale has run student recitals for decades.

She will tell anyone who asks that performance anxiety is built or defused in the lessons leading up to the date, not on the day. The day is too late.

Most teachers prepare a student technically for a recital. Fewer teachers prepare a student to be a person on a stage. The two things are not the same.

The mistake of treating the piece as ready too early

A piano student who can play a piece cleanly at home, alone, sitting at their own instrument, is not ready for a recital. They are ready for the next stage of preparation.

There is a sizable gap between playing a piece in a quiet living room and playing it under stage lights with thirty people watching. Closing that gap takes weeks of intentional work.

Lamoureux closes it on purpose. She makes students play their recital piece with the front door open, with a sibling walking in mid-piece, with the dog barking.

She makes them play it after running up and down the stairs to get their heart rate up. The recital is not the first time the body is supposed to feel alarmed.

Memory failure is not a memory problem

When a student blanks on stage, parents often assume the student did not memorize the piece well enough. Marian has seen this hundreds of times, and the truth is usually different.

The student memorized it fine in the calm of their lesson. They then encountered the version of themselves that comes out under pressure, which is a different version with different access to the same information.

The fix is not more memorization. It is rehearsing under stress so that the stressed version of the student has practiced the piece too.

Mock recitals at home, in front of relatives, in the lesson with another student watching, all do this work. The student gets used to performing while their pulse is elevated.

What to do with the panicked student in the green room

There is a moment, usually about ten minutes before a student walks on stage, when their face changes. Lamoureux watches for it.

The fix at that point is not a pep talk. The fix is to give them something concrete to do with their hands and their breath.

She has them play the first four bars of the piece silently in the air, slowly, while breathing out. She reminds them that the audience is on their side.

She tells them, plainly, that it is fine to make a mistake and keep going, because that is what every professional musician on every stage in the world does. The bar is not perfection. The bar is composure.

Recovery is the skill, not perfection

A student who plays a recital piece flawlessly has shown one kind of skill. A student who flubs a passage and finds their way back into the music without stopping has shown a different kind of skill, and Marian thinks the second one matters more.

She tells students that the audience does not remember a small slip ten minutes after the recital ends. They remember whether the student looked composed and finished the piece.

That is what the audience walks away with. That is the whole memory of the event.

Recital anxiety is real and worth taking seriously. It is not a permanent feature of the student.

It is a problem with a craft answer. Most of the answer happens in the four weeks before anyone steps on a stage.