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What is the biggest mistake (that you'll admit to!) you have made in public concert or masterclass? Mine has to be completely stopping in the middle of the 3rd movement of Mozart's D minor concerto during a masterclass. Thank god it was with piano accompaniment and not orchestra!

edit: Just recalled another one, but this one was on trumpet. I was first chair trumpet playing Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and there's a recurring motif which has a high range. I am not a very good trumpeter and I 'split' the whole entry and ended up playing it all a 5th lower or so. pretty awful.

I'll bite. I was at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall after winning the Cecilian Music Club's competition, and I was playing Haydn sonata in e minor. Of course I was the first one up there. I looked down at the piano and realized I didn't know what I was doing, what the instrument was, how to play. So I promptly started in D major.

After the first arpeggio I went to e minor and stayed there with no other mistakes. It was nerve-wracking.

I have no stage fright now. Really, it's all downhill from there after Carnegie Hall!

I take it you survived?

I sure would hate that to happen at a Carnegie Hall debut. You'd be dead meat as far as the critics are concerned. But as you say, you'll never again have stage fright.

I posted this back in 2002:

I don't have to admit to it because it didn't happen to me, but to a friend and sometime rival--a tenor.

The event was the 1995 College of Liberal Arts graduation ceremony at the University of Minnesota. There were more than 10,000 people crammed into the basketball arena. Hillary Clinton was to give the commencement address. So this happened in front of 10,000 people and Hillary Clinton.

My acquaintance friend and rival started out with a real lusty rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner:"

"Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?

And then, in a not so lusty voice, and with a face as red as a tomato:

"And the amber waves of grain."

And from there it completely fell apart.

Tomasino

I played the wrong piece at the Naumburg, that ruled.

I played the Prelude in C sharp minor (Rach) at a master class in Miami taught by the Israeli pianist (and later politician) David Bar-Ilan. As I walked onto the stage he announced the piece, and he commented to the effect, "well, here's something we've never heard before." That's not the nicest way to introduce a scared sixteen year old who had never done this before. Unfortunately, I lived down to his condescension.

Well, he was just being a jerk.

I heard him in a recital in 1971 or so, when I was around 17. He completely bombed the Chopin A major Polonaise and the Beethoven op. 2 no. 3 Sonata. It was so bad that I left at intermission. I ran into several members of the piano faculty from the state university who were heading out the door of the auditorium at the same time. I knew them from competitions and master classes. They complimented me on my perception. It was truly that bad.

As a favor, I played at a friend's wedding and when his bride was walking in I played the Mendelssohn Wedding March instead of Wagner's "Here Comes The Bride." No one said anything, but I was embarrassed after I realized what I had done.

Could you elaborate, please??

LOL ...

Luckily nothing to catastrophic for me.

When I was younger growing up in Belize (maybe 10 or 11,) I was playing the national anthem at a school event on an old piano. At the climax high D, the D wouldn't play, and being a young inexperienced kid, I tried again, and hit the D a few more times, trying to get it to play, but it didn't. I felt pretty stupid. Of course people were polite and pretended they didn't notice.

Next worst thing was @ 17 years, in a performance of Chopin's Op 9/2 Nocturne, as my piano teach put it, I "invented a few new chords" in the first statement of the theme, but I just played through, and in this case, I'm sure most people didn't notice.

Daniel

Luckily for me there were no critics, as I had already won my prize and it was the winners' recital. I also have good faking skills so I just went on.

I do still get stage fright, but it's never as crippling as it was that day. And I care a lot less about screwing up now that I've done it at what is arguably the most important concert stage in the world. What are a few mistakes here and there when you've opened an e minor sonata in D major? Pfeh.

My later return to Carnegie Hall had less mistakes and was better received - and that was in the large hall, not Weill. A relief!

As a kid, the very first time I played in front of an audience, I managed to catch the front of my trousers on the back of a chair as I squeezed out of the row where I was sitting in order to get to the piano and tore my flies wide open. I was so nervous and embarrassed that I went right on ahead and played my selection from the "Album for the Young" unsuitably exposed with one of my sisters in the audience trying not to explode with laughter. Nothing quite so bad has happened since then!

Is the story true(some percussionist told me)about a pianist(who??)going into a concert thinking he was supposed to play the Brahms PC #1 and then hearing the opening horn calls of the Brahms PC #2(which he luckily knew)?

I've actually had that nightmare.

That's a nightmare shared by virtually ALL teachers that I know ... the dream that you're at the blackboard trying to explain something and you have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to say.

They requested a Chopin mazurka, I believe it was Op. 56 #3, and I played 17 #2 as I recall. About halfway through, I realized I was playing the wrong one and snuck a peak at the jury to see if they had horrified looks on their faces and then I started snickering.
Told my friend about what happened later, and he tried to top my gaffe by saying he mistakenly started at the middle of the Black Mass Sonata.

And no, neither of us passed on to the 2nd round, imagine that.

In a competition once, I'm pretty sure I skipped about 16 bars in the middle of a Prokofiev sonata. There's this section in the last movement of the 8th sonata that sounds a lot like Scriabin. In the last two pages, the thought entered my mind "hey, this feels like it's coming too early, I don't remember playing that one page.."

(Not a good thought to have on the last two pages of that particular sonata.)

The other good one I had was when I was playing substitute keyboard for a broadway musical that came through town on tour. There was a tango number that ended with loud chords on beats 1 and 3. The rest of the piece used the more common tango rhythm of 1 and the off-beat of 2. i got used to it, and, you guessed it - keyboard solo, 2nd half of the second beat, fortissimo, immediately prompting laughter and a botched final chord from the rest of the pit. The greatest irony was that I actually nailed the rest of the show. My only wrong note just happened to be that one moment where I decided to play ff while the rest of the orchestra was tacet. :p

Not a mistake made by me, but the worst memory slip I've seen in a concert was this old pianist who forgot that he had already played a piece and played it again, introducing it with the same speech he had already given 20 minutes earlier...

If you played the Mazurka as well as you do on your youtube videos, I think the judges should have immediately passed you on to the next round without even asking to hear any more music.