83: Yet Five More Questions For Benjamin Beilman
with Benjamin Beilman
11. How do you decide what pieces to play?
When I'm selecting pieces, obviously there are many considerations. Sometimes it's the orchestras decide or whatever, but if I have complete carte blanche over my own programing, it's really a feeling thing for me.
It's sort of, What am I listening to obsessively? What composer? What period, What's really striking me? So hopefully anyone who has the program is sort of honing in on that relationship of what's, what's resonating and why is it resonating?
And then you can start to investigate and then you can try writing about it, to try and consolidate your thoughts, or you can try incorporating other elements, other dramatic elements or lighting elements just to see what happens. So yeah, for me, it's a, it's a feeling thing. Hopefully you can develop your own relationship to it as well.
12. How do you fully prepare and research the music that you're performing?
My personal process is not necessarily one that's appropriate for everybody, but I find that I need at least about a year and a half to really become familiar with, with a piece before I feel like I can really, honestly perform it at my best. There's a period where you learn it and you bring it up to roughly a performance level in the first month, maybe six weeks or something. And then you put it away, let it kind of germinates or whatever, and then you come back to it a couple of months or a couple of weeks before your actual official performance. I do think there has to be, you know, long term memory built up with the piece before you can really say something special with it. Of course we can all cram, we can all site read, we can all do these things and deliver a fine product. But to not waste someone's time and to say something that makes you feel proud, I think that takes-- anything of value, takes time.
13. What does it mean to be fully prepared?
To be fully prepared for an engagement, I don't, I don't even know if that's possible. I mean, the idea of being perfectly prepared or fully prepared, perfection is a myth in performance. So I think there's-- the best thing you can do is just equip yourself with the right routines, the right preparation, the right mindset, the right emotional state to be ready for a performance. But maybe, I guess the answer of “What's the right preparation?” is just to accept - and be ready - that there might be issues, there might be mistakes, and it's more about, “Do I feel prepared to roll with these new features that come into my life?”
14. How do you balance your extensive performing career with your teaching career?
I've actually really loved starting to teach at Curtis and working with my students because even though it seems like I'm adding something that to an already very, very busy schedule, traveling 200 plus days a year,
I actually find that thinking about my students, planning what's going to happen in their lessons, and how their development is going to happen helps ground me in my performing career. So of course, if we look at just like a schedule, it's, it's more busy, but the sort of emotional lift of it actually becomes a lot easier because when I go on stage, I'm remembering all the things that I've told my students all the times that they've inspired me, and that makes it a little bit easier for me.
And similarly, when I'm teaching them, I bring the same excitement and passion that I have in performance to the lesson, and it just makes it easier for everybody. So I don't find it to be conflicting or more of a challenge. I actually find it to be easier.
15. What career lesson do you wish you had understood when you were just beginning to perform professionally?
It's so hard. I'm not someone who believes in regrets, but if I could have cautioned myself just a little bit every once in a while, not to take on quite as much repertoire in so short a span of time, that might have been a little bit helpful to me. Again, I don't regret anything. I don't think that there were any mistakes that I would have tried to avoid. But, you know, be gentle on yourself. Take a vacation and take a vacation without your instruments. Don't bring your instrument or don't think about practicing every day. It's important to like, get your time away so that you can come back refreshed and renewed.