Robert and I have talked a lot about getting the most out of everything we do this year. This often means capturing or creating some form of media from each performance. Yes, it’s more work to set up the recording equipment, edit it, and share it. But if we don’t, it’s a lot of time and energy invested in a single live performance, whose audience is limited to a geographic location (and many other factors).

I had wanted to capture some kind of recording of my recital program, but the idea of releasing the entire thing as a live album was an idea that came after the recital. It was also a practical solution. An additional recording session was more effort than I was willing to invest, and ask from my collaborators- plus we don’t have a piano in our studio. On top of that, our rehearsal recordings on the Zoom handy recorder sounded pretty great, and were incredibly simple to capture.

I ended up using a combination of recordings from the dress rehearsal and the recital. Besides trimming the tracks, I only made a single edit… of an unforgivable (in my mind) mistake! But you might not be able to tell what I did if you weren’t there 😉 It’s less than 3 seconds of splicing a moment from the dress rehearsal into the recital recording. Since we were in the same space and the recorder was in a similar location, the two recordings sound pretty close.

Everything else is recorded straight through. There are some technical imperfections, for sure. But from the beginning, I was mentally preparing myself for accepting imperfection. When I listen past the little “errors,” I hear a lot of really beautiful and sensitive moments of music-making.

I find it frustrating that there is this unrealistic standard of perfection in music recordings (especially classical), and how many recordings are probably never made due to fear of human error. There is so much to appreciate everywhere when you quit counting mistakes, and embrace the humanity of music and art.

This concludes my Recital Diaries series! Thank you for following along with my journey.

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Recital Diaries: Behind the scenes

Through the funk
Moving from concept to reality

Dialogues with Steven and Robert
On performance, classical/jazz crossover, composition

Theory homework
D’Rivera flute duet, Debussy chord chart

Recital day
So many little acts of love