Help with boredom!!!

[ac12345]

I am giving a recital in four weeks.  I'm not nervous or worried at all.  I know my pieces.
However, when I try to practice them I get this terrible, bored, SICK feeling.  Especially with the Mozart c minor sonata and fantasy.  I only spent a semester on the piece (at the same time as working on many many other things), but at this point it just makes me sick and I am having a lot of trouble being creative and making it sound interesting.  Maybe it is partly the shortcomings of the piece itself, but mostly my own.  But whether or not it is a masterpiece or mediocre doesn't matter.  It makes me sick to even think about it sometimes.  But, I desperately need this piece of music to sound interesting and focused when I perform it.  Or something.
Any advice? 
Maybe general advice for all pieces of music? Don't tell me I'm the only one that gets bored playing the same damn thing over and over and over again?

[pianoplayjl]

I sometimes get that feeling of overpracticing a piece to the point of boredom. The only piece of advice I'll give you i s just don't practice too much in the last 3-4 days leading to the recital because you know that you can't improve much in that space of time so rather than waste it why not just give it a run through. My piece of advice may not help but I always get your feeling. Maybe play something different if you get bored of the piece you are practice. Play something you learnt earlier.

JL

[quantum]

Try playing some alternate material to take your mind of the piece.  Sometimes we need that mental break when we have been working at one piece for a long time.

[jpahmad]

I feel you ac12345.  Sometimes I get desencitized to a piece of music.  You can get that way just by listening to something too often.  And, the truth is, it terrifies me when I feel this way because than I'm like, that's it?  I'm over music?  And then I think, what and I going to do with my life now?  It is even worse if your studying in a conservatore or university where you sit in those practice rooms and go at it for hours. 

In my experience though, I have always found that if I don't play the piece for a few days and come back to it, it shines again. 

This is the hard part about having a looming performance; you don't have the luxury to let it sit.  You have to keep going at it day after day until it morphs completely into something a little better than a Hannon excersise.  I know, it completely kills the aesthetic, but I think what pianoplayj suggested was a good idea.  Bring it to a peaking point and then drop it entirely three of four days before the concert.

Here's food for thought.  The great pianist have such a vast repertoire and know their pieces so intamitely that they can just sit down and perform without having to beat it over the head for months prior to the perfomance date.  Yeah they do have to keep their pieces up, but I think after certain point it is just a matter of maintaining.  I don't know, maybee I'm mislead about that.

[haguiuda]

I my case, I try to hear other pianists playing the same piece, to understand deeper shades that I haven't yet understood.

Just by doing this, I "wake up" and go running to the piano to try to make it this or that way, try other phrasing, other dinamics and so on, and then I decide what sounds better to me.

This is a general advice that works for me: always listen to what other people did with the same piece.

[lostinidlewonder]

I am giving a recital in four weeks.  I'm not nervous or worried at all.  I know my pieces.
However, when I try to practice them I get this terrible, bored, SICK feeling.  Especially with the Mozart c minor sonata and fantasy.

This is not a good situation. Whatever you play in concert you should either be indifferent or charged up about it (prefferably), if you have negative emotions attached to it then this is certainly not good and a warning sign.

I have felt that if I read up about certain composers a little more it makes me interested in their music more. Also looking at art, their culture, their fashion of the day, whatever, just something that is related to that composer but does not require you to sit at the piano and play. Refresh your mind and connect with the music on another level than just playing, you might change your mind about the music then.

[enjru]

Fahlman et al did an important quantitative study in 2009 on boredom, which found the following: 1) Boredom is related to, but distinct from life-meaning, depression and anxiety. 2) Boredom is most closely related to life-meaning, being predictive of life-meaning, and vice-versa (ie, life-meaning is also predictive of boredom). This predictive relationship is not shared between boredom and either of the negative emotions/affects studied (ie, neither depression nor anxiety).

What this means for you, is that you should have a look at the big picture of what you are doing with your life, and, hopefully, find or re-find the meaning there, in order to address this boredom issue. It also means that you should address this boredom issue as a matter of importance, since the fact that you are feeling bored is predictive of what meaning you will find in your life in the future.

Hope this helps.