When I was in college, I got a call at the last minute to accompany the local high school's choir Christmas concert. I was a trombone major and was still having trouble feeling like a real pianist (and not just a wanna-be), even though I was studying and performing in convos and accompanying (a couple of times) for juries. But the regular accompanist had gotten sick, and gave the HS director my name, and she called me and told me I could do it, and he seemed to think I could do it, and he had NO other options besides me . . . so I tried to do it. I was called at 5:30, I got down there at 6:30, and the concert started at 7:30. And part of that time I was helping him warm the kids up. Three problems:
1. I'd had almost no experience sight-reading on piano in front of other people
2. I'd never before accompanied a choir, and I'd never played a whole concert (three different choirs).
3. This was a small-ish town, with a very intense (and ever so slightly self-important) musical community, so anonymity was impossible.
The very first selection was "Angels We Have Heard On High," with a pretty standard church-hymnalish piano part. But it was in E-flat, and, despite my best efforts, I could NOT get my hands to play a D-natural! They kept trying to play D-flat! I was lowering the leading-tone of the entire song! I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't seem to correct it. We got to the end of the song, and all I had to do was play a D chord to finish it out, and I think I maybe went through four or five chords trying to find D. At that point, my brain decided it had had enough of the whole experience, and it took off to unknown reaches of the world (Hawaii, perhaps?) and left my body to fend for itself. And it got worse.
I had no page turner, and music started falling off the piano. A parent took pity on me, and came up to the piano mid-song to try to help, but by then the damage had been done. And, even though she had great intentions, she wasn't terribly responsive to turning as per my head-nod, she was the "I'll turn it when I think it needs to be turned" type. The choir was singing the prayer from Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel," and I was nodding vigorously, and she wasn't turning, and she finally turned it, but by then I was lost, and about 4 measures after the page turn it was this lovely little piano interlude, except that when the choir stopped singing, there was complete silence, because I didn't know where the ^&#$ I was! And the director is giving me huge panicked looks, but that did NOTHING whatsoever to help me find my place and instead panicked me more, and I was kind of half-singing half-grunting something that sounded like the melody while my hands were hovering helplessly above the keyboard. After that song was over, he turned to the audience, and thanked me for coming to their aid at the last minute, and then waxed philosophically about how this was a great learning moment for his kids, because they need to realize they can't just depend on the piano, they have to be secure in their parts, etc., which sounded a lot to me like, "I'm sorry our pianist sucks so completely, we got her at the last minute, and, you know, you take what you can get . . . "
The whole concert was about 1.5 hours long. I think my level of Hell would be an eternity spent in that hour and a half. My husband immediately took me from the concert to a bar, and between his protestations of, "it really didn't sound as bad as you think it did," he bought me copious quantities of alcohol. Unfortunately, after those kinds of experiences, there isn't enough alcohol in the world to make you forget!
Topic: Worst mistakes you have done during a performance