Saturday I played the accompaniment to "My Man's Gone Now" from Porgy and Bess. I was calm when we walked out and started and then I got nervous. Strange pattern. I settled down though, and was actually having fun until I noticed my soprano was having memory trouble. She sang one phrase three times. Two of them she was supposed to do, the third is for a chorus, which we didn't have, so the piano does it alone. She kept on though, and then I got so wrapped up in her utterly glorious and enormous sound that I forgot what I was doing and had a memory fart of my own. This was in a particularly loud part where the Steinway and I were making as much noise as possible. I banged away until I found my place again, happily without losing or gaining time, so she could finish properly. I managed to get through both sets of glissando runs without screwing up.

Anyway, I've done it.

I had almost forgotten about piano except to figure out my own parts for singing. Back when I was a high school teacher in Cromwell, MN, the music teacher was such a lousy pianist that he drafted me to do the accompaniments for his students competing in music contests. I played so much that I got pretty good. My biggest was the Haydn Trumpet Concerto, which is much more demanding of the piano than it is the trumpet.

The trumpet or the soprano gets the applause. That's the consolation when the accompanist screws up.