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Whatever your limitations, it’s good to be aware of them so that you can adjust on the fly, instead of trying to play all the notes and failing miserably.Īs a collaborative pianist, you always have to keep the end goal in mind, that is, being able to play the piano part fluently and as easily as possible so that no matter what happens, you’ll be able to cope and keep going. In those cases, leaving out the less important notes, or taking some of the notes in the other hand is the only solution. Some pianists, like myself, have small hands so there are instances where playing big outstretched chords is just not an option. This is not to say that every piano accompanist does this but sometimes, there is just no other way. Our job is to support the other musician(s) harmonically and rhythmically and if we need to leave out notes for whatever reason, we will. When you’re given large amounts of music to learn in such a short space of time, you’re forced to cut corners whenever necessary like in this case. I did manage in the end but it was stressful. The score looked pretty messy but I couldn’t afford to recreate a new version from scratch in Finale (music notation software). It was still difficult, especially up to tempo, but more manageable than before. Then I practised this simplified version. I went through the score, bar by bar, and crossed out the notes that I thought could be left out without losing the harmony or the rhythm. This piece was clearly not meant for a pianist but an orchestra! I spent hours trying to learn the piano part but as I only had a week to learn it, I decided to use one of the tricks of the trade: arranging. I wished I had looked more closely at the score though because it turned out to be a nightmare to learn the number of accidentals, voices going from one hand to the other, a rhythmic ostinato throughout, etc. It didn’t seem so bad when I looked at the score and listened to a recording. It was a piano arrangement of an orchestral accompaniment. Amongst the pieces was a particularly tricky one. The piano part didn’t seem too hard and I liked the program so I accepted the job. I went online and found the piano parts for these pieces and listened to recordings to get a feel for them. As is customary, the musician sent me the list of pieces of the program (seven in total). I was once asked to accompany someone for their audition. N.B.: To respect the privacy of the musicians involved, I won’t mention any names or give any details concerning the instrument or pieces. In this article, I’m going to take you behind the scenes and give you a glimpse of what it’s really like to be a piano accompanist and the tricks I’ve learned along the way. It appears we’re sight-reading but is that all we’re doing?

But what people don’t often realise is that the art of piano accompaniment involves a lot more than just sight-reading. The reason being that the majority of the time, we’re given several pieces to learn in a short amount of time so the better we are at sight-reading, the faster we can learn our parts and pull it off. Having been an accompanist myself for the last decade, I know this to be true.

And the road to perfecting those skills is largely unmapped.As you might know, piano accompanists, or collaborative pianists, as they are now called, are expected to be excellent sight-readers. What makes us truly special, though, is that being a collaborative pianist requires a completely different set of skills than being a soloist or a solo piano teacher. When Renee Fleming gives a recital, her partner is a collaborative pianist. Patrick Summers, the Artistic Director of Houston Grand Opera, was first a collaborative pianist and vocal coach. The great pianists Sviatoslav Richter started his career as a ballet accompanist and continued to play with various partners throughout his life. Think of collaborative pianists as music stem cells that develop into many different tissues.

We also teach other pianists, we serve as staff accompanists, and many of us become conductors! A collaborative pianist played the celesta for the Nutcracker your whole family attended, and he or she played for all the dance rehearsals, too. We perform with orchestras, in piano trios and quartets, in recitals with singers, in four-hand or two-piano duos, and so much more! Also, that amazing Carmen production that you just saw wouldn’t have been possible without the rehearsal pianists and the vocal coaches who prepared the singers. WHAT IS A COLLABORATIVE PIANIST, YOU MAY ASK?Īny pianist who is not playing alone is a collaborative pianist.