Pianist Arsha Kaviani reveals his strategies for coping with nervousness and performance anxiety...
The performance is not about you... it's about the music
If ever I get nervous, I have a set of thought processes that I go through. But ultimately, I feel that nervousness is quite a self-absorbed emotion.
If you are feeling nervous about a performance, you’re making that performance very much about yourself – ‘What if I get this wrong, or don’t remember to do that?’ – and you’re not being totally at the service of the music. If we can detach ourselves from thoughts like, ‘What if this performance goes badly?’, ‘What will happen to my career?’ and so on, the emotions feel much easier to manage.
Don't let your inner monologue get in the way
My mentor, the pianist Krystian Zimerman, has a great approach to this. He reminds me to imagine all the audience members who have had to book in advance, find a babysitter, put on a nice jacket, park their car… They have been to a lot of effort to come and hear a transcendent musical experience. You shouldn’t let your inner monologue get in the way of that.
Just focus on delivering the most faithful transmission between composer and listener. If nervousness occurs, that’s fine – you can observe them from a more objective perspective, as opposed to internalising them (‘I’m nervous, therefore I’m going to mess up’).
Why performing is like pottery
Performance, for me, is like being a potter. The pottery wheel that’s spinning away is the years of preparation you’ve put in – to this piece, to your technique. As a performer, this is running in the background constantly. All you have to do is fine-tune: give this moment a bit of extra expression, or spoonfeed a melody if you feel the audience is hearing it for the first time. These are the things that make a performance magical.
Arsha Kaviani’s debut album ‘Accents & Echoes’ is out now on SRSLY