The Lesson After the Recital
The lesson after the recital
There is a particular kind of post-recital conversation that takes more care than most. The student was prepared, lessons had gone well, and the piece was reliable all week. Then the performance itself was only decent. Not a collapse, or a disaster, but clearly below the student's usual level. Everyone in the room knows they can do better.
The question is, what kind of conversation do we have with that student in the next lesson? Do we acknowledge the mistakes? Problem solve why it happened? Tell them they should have prepared more? Completely ignore it?
The question is what to say without turning one underwhelming performance into a bigger problem than it needs to be.
Start with the student's experience
My first instinct is not to explain the performance to the student. It is to find out what they think happened.
Some students come in embarrassed and want to avoid any discussion of it. Some think it went fine, and in that case there is very little to be gained from a forensic review. Some know exactly where things came loose and are relieved to talk about it plainly.
This is where knowing your student, and allowing them to lead the conversation, matters. A teacher who starts correcting too quickly can accidentally turn a manageable disappointment into a lasting story about failure. If the student is already hard on themselves, they do not need more pile on. And if the student was actually happy with the performance, they don't necessarily need to be told all the ways it could have been better.
Name the problem accurately
When a prepared student underperforms, the lesson is not always "you should have practised more." Although, of course, it might be. In some cases, they practised quite well. The more useful explanation is that performing is a separate skill.
Performing well is not the same as being able to play the piece in the comfort of your own home, or even during your lesson.
A student may know the piece securely and still lose control of the first few bars. They may have a memory wobble they would normally recover from in the studio but not in front of an audience. They may rush because of adrenaline. They may hear one wrong note and stop listening musically after that.
This is why the post-recital conversation should be specific. Was it a memory problem? A starting problem? A recovery problem? A nerves problem? Those are different issues. They should not all be filed under "bad performance."
Keep the performance in proportion
Students, especially conscientious teenagers, often need help with proportion. One recital can feel much larger to them than it really is.
I think it helps to say plainly that disappointing performances happen to good players. They happen to experienced players too. That is not empty reassurance. It is a factual statement about performing. A recital does not erase the solid work that came before it, and it does not cancel the level the student is capable of reaching.
This is where a teacher's own stories can be useful. Sharing your own tales of less successful performances can help students understand that it is a normal, and even expected, part of live music making. I like to tell the story of how I began an assembly I was supposed to be accompanying by playing the completely wrong hymn. Or the time I accidentally played some really loud notes randomly in the middle of the prayer in a chapel service.
And of course stories about actual performances of mine that haven't gone that well. And I tell them about other musicians who have told me similar stories. All of these tales help to normalise the fact that live performance is an unpredictable beast, and it doesn't always go the way we want it to go, even for professional musicians.
Being well-prepared is a great first-line defence, but it doesn't guarantee that a performance will always reflect your best work, and that's ok.
Give the student something useful to do next
If the student was conscious of their less than stellar performance, and it would help them to have a feeling of being able to correct it, then giving them a next step that restores agency can be helpful.
Sometimes that means asking the student to play the piece again the following week in front of a friend or two, without the pressure of the whole event around it. Sometimes it means making a recording at home so they have a version that better reflects the work they actually did. Sometimes it means building more low-stakes performance practice into the term so recital day is not carrying the full weight of the skill.
The point is not to fix their feelings. The point is to show them what to work on. If they struggled to recover after a slip, then recovery needs to be practised. If the opening fell apart, then starting under pressure needs to be practised. Students cope better when the problem becomes concrete.
Do not over-teach the moment
The day after a recital is not always the right time for a big speech. Often the best response is measured and brief. You acknowledge what happened, you keep it in scale, and you move the student toward the next piece of work.
A merely adequate performance can still teach something important. Not about talent, and not about worth. About the difference between preparation and performance, and about the kind of steadiness a student needs when the public version of their playing is not the version they wanted to show.
That is a useful lesson. It is also survivable, which is part of what students need to learn.
Some useful articles related to this one
Preparing for a Performance: How to Beat Performance Anxiety
How to Build Performers, Not Just Practisers