Someone told me that pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy once had a nightmare in which he had to play Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in public on a vertical keyboard.
Such anxiety dreams are common, I have had several of them. Usually I dream that I’m about to give a concert, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to play, or that I haven’t started practising it yet.
Our first concert in New York last night, in Radio City Music Hall, was almost such a nightmare. The second song on the track list, Venus As a Boy, was accompanied by only me on the harpsichord, and on the day of the concert we had never rehearsed it. Björk likes to perform one introverted song in each concert, and Venus As a Boy in the present version is very different from the one on the Debut album. It is a recitativo-like duet between the voice and the harpsichord, a kind of dialogue. And we just hadn’t had the time to go through it! Our first rehearsal was only thirty minutes before walking on stage! Fortunately it went very well.
In fact, we had practically no rehearsal for the rest of the songs on the list that day, as it took far longer than expected to set all the gear up on stage.
And yet I think the concert was quite good. We had some spectacular guests, Anthony, Konono no. 1 and Min Xiao-Fen on the pipa, a Chinese lute. They were all brilliant.
Some guy jumped on stage in one of the songs and started dancing. The guards took him away in seconds. It was kind of funny.
We had our first public performance of Where Is the Line last night. It is one of the most difficult songs and it will get better as we go along. Of all the Björk videos I have seen, Where Is the Line, which is based on one of the Venice Biennial videos (2005) of Gabríela Friðriksdóttir (who happens to be a close friend of mine) is my favorite. It really captures the atmosphere in the song. And in the version we did last night, with a pipe organ instead of a choir, the madness got even worse!
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