Joanna García - Piano

Kintsugi (金継ぎ) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

I was talking about this with one of my adult students who’s been learning with me, since a beginner, for a little less than two years. She’s so diligent, and her progress is wonderful, so I was surprised when she said that sometimes, in her own mind, she felt that her playing of individual pieces was never good enough.

We drilled down into the notion of perfection, noting that most modern recordings are actually spliced together creating an effect that is rather sanitised and unnatural at times.

We also discussed the fact that she was actually referring to both fluency and accuracy in her judgment of “perfection”, but that so much of any performance was to do with the use of characterisation and expression, and aspects such as articulation and dynamics as much as technique and tone colour.

And then we ended up discussing Japanese kintsugi, with the beautiful gold lacquer that takes the imperfections of a pot and renders it infinitely more beautiful, celebrating the imperfect with joy.

Just like we are ourselves the products of laughter, sadness, happiness and emotional breakages, so too must our performances reflect that touching humanity…with all its flaws, imbalances and glorious, glorious soulfulness.

You have no idea how amazing Mahler 2 was last night.

So many decades waiting to see it…it was the most wonderful end to the wait.

The BBC Phil and the CBSO chorus were absolutely stunning. I sat with tears running down my face on so many occasions.

It was as if a strange link wound its way through time and connected with teenage me. So very special.

https://youtu.be/nNvIPhTdneU?is=nfLWxQ3ULJ7XmKw-

A 34-Year Love Affair: My First Time Hearing Mahler 2 Live At 17 years old, I fell in love with Mahler’s Second Symphony, the ...

This evening, a dream comes true.

I fell in love with Mahler 2 as a seventeen-year-old. I didn’t even know what it was; I just recorded it on TV when I saw it, with Rattle conducting, and I just knew that I was in love.

It’s been my dream to see it live ever since then.

I have already filled up, just sitting here waiting for it to begin, and so am likely to be an absolute mess following the last trump and the “Aufersteh’n.”

“The symphony is the world; the symphony should embrace everything,” Mahler said. But this goes beyond the world. It reaches the immortal. The “Resurrection” Symphony is one on its own.

Just why?

It’s hard to grasp, this notion of not knowing.

There are so many things in life that we can’t control and we have no say in. This is one of the principal reasons we lie awake at night: this painfully human sense of being buffeted like a cork on the ocean as life hits us in waves.

Yet there’s something so CERTAIN about music. It’s perhaps one of the only times that we have a say in just that: time.

When we engage in that little slice of organised time as we listen to, or play, a piece of music, it’s a little bit like we finally have a say in the passage of time. We have CHOSEN to be there, in that given moment, and the way that time is divided in the music in question - whether in the regularity of a pop song, or the lilt of a Ländler, or the seeming timelessness of the intricate rhythms of Messiaen - gives us the sense that we’re not just being carried along by an indefatigable torrent.

For a moment, we control time; we feel the regularity of the passage of time in every single beat that we perceive in our musical mind.

Ironically, it seems that this moment, that we share with the composer, and perhaps with an audience, seems to transcend time.

Time is finite, and yet the overwhelming sense that we perceive when fully immersed in the experience of music is the concept of infinite time stretching out in front of us.

Or maybe, at least, just in that fleeting moment of all-encompassing sound.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

In contrast to yesterday’s frustration, let me tell you about something that’s made me disproportionately happy recently.

You may or may not have picked up that I was very pleased last week to have been asked to teach a piano lesson but in Spanish - not because said student doesn’t speak English (on the contrary; she speaks fluent English, unlike my Spanish!), but because she wanted to connect with her lessons in Spanish when she was younger.

And I did it.

And I was buzzing all day on a level you perhaps don’t realise.

You see, back in October, I was struggling to put a sentence together in Spanish (fact; I hadn’t studied it since my mother in law died seventeen years ago, and even back then I was self-taught) and so even being able to talk for an hour was an achievement in itself. So I’ve blooming worked hard (not just for this; for very many reasons).

But largely because in a parallel universe, Mrs García studied languages… and it’s always been my dream to be able to use languages in a professional capacity.

I did that last week.

And I was also buzzing, after sending lesson notes (in Spanish; I’m a good girl!) to receive a lovely message back from said student, saying what approximates to “A truly inspiring and insightful lesson. I loved it. And your explanations were so clear and well-spoken. You've passed! I give you top marks in piano lessons in Spanish!”

I know it was peppered with mistakes, but, because I was so keen to communicate what I wanted to say, I didn’t care. It’s fab to release that self-consciousness.

May this be the beginnings of a new era for me professionally.

Sooooo proud of this amazing human being - heart of gold and playing to match.

Congratulations, Alana, on getting “excellent” across the board in your first Music Medal!

You make me smile.