Each year, I hold 2 recitals for my students. One is in December and it’s a play-a-thon hosted by my local MTA. Its always held in a public space and each teacher in our group signs up for a time slot where I students can take turns performing. Our second recital is always in the spring. I make a point to change up the venue, theme and format of our spring recital from year to year.
I’ve come to really enjoy the week leading up to a recital. It used to stress me out, but in the past several years, I’ve really mastered the timeline of how long it takes to prepare students for a performance. When students are well-prepared, recital week becomes a really fun time to sit back and enjoy the students’ progress rather than fretting about last minute music cramming.
It took me a really long time to figure out a good recital prep timeline, but here’s how we approach it in my studio.
We have 2 official performance preparation formats. One is a piano party that I always schedule about 1 month before a recital.
The piano party is a student-only event where we play some music games and each student has a chance to perform for the group. It’s a really informal performance opportunity and we sprinkle in some fun aspects of it like using unique ways to decide performance order (ABC order by favorite ice cream is one of my favorites!) or having a bowing competition to see who had the most perfect bow after their performance.
My goal with a piano party is to put the kids in the spotlight like in a recital, but to keep it very comfortable so that they don’t panic about performing.
The other way that we prepare for recitals is by having a mini recital class within our normal lesson times. All of our students come in 1-hour groups, so for a recital class, we carve out about 20 minutes of the hour to practice performing.
During these recital classes, we talk through every detail of a recital like adjusting the bench, how to recover from mistakes, how to take a bow, how to be a good audience member and more. We give second chances and go back and fix things that didn’t go quite right.
I always have 3-4 recital classes before a recital. We’ll do 1 the week before a piano party to prepare for the piano party, then we’ll do them again for 2-3 weeks leading up to a recital. In the fall leading up to our December recital, here’s and example of how our timeline works out:
- October 28 – Recital class during lessons
- November 3 Piano Party
- November 10 Regular lessons (last chance to “fix” things!)
- November 17 Recital class during lessons
- November 24 No lessons for thanksgiving break
- December 2 Recital class during lessons
- December 7 Recital Day!
When I first started teaching, I had no idea we’d need to spend 6 solid weeks prepping for a recital. But, now that I’ve nailed down this timeline, it makes things so much easier to know that if we follow this timeline, everyone will feel prepared and our recital will run really smoothly. And, I’ve learned that you can never be too prepared when it comes to performing. The more practice, the better!
