Just finished dress rehearsal with the orchestra last night for Haydn's Mass in Time of War (aside: first time I've ever had to tell a tympanist to play louder, but it is a prominent part).
I always find dress rehearsal to be much more stressful than performances. That's the real deadline for knowing your score cold, and there are many more choices to make. That's when the string players will ask why there's a slur in the violin I part and not in the violin II part, and whether we should make them conform. If there's a minor mistake (such as a ragged cutoff), I have to do triage: is this worth stopping for? If not, do I need to remember it until the next stopping place? I always find that every time we stop I've accumulated a half dozen things to say, and having to keep track of that list consumes bandwidth.
Of course, this applies to regular rehearsals, too. But you get more chances in regular rehearsals; the time factor isn't as pressing, and having the orchestra increases the number of items to juggle. And with only one orchestra rehearsal, you've got to get through everything, so you can't stop and fix every little thing.
In performance, the only question when you hear a mistake is: can I fix this via gesture? If one part or instrument is playing too loud or too soft, or the tempo is getting apart, I can do something to fix it; otherwise, I can forget it. Performance is being in the zone, in the moment. Things go well or they don't, and I like being free to think about the music and less about how it's being performed. Singers always ask me after a performance how I thought it went, and I never know, because I forget mistakes immediately, unless they're really egregious.
I also find that the singers are much more focused in performance, which makes them more responsive to my conducting as well as less likely to make mistakes. And if I have a memory glitch and forget some cue in performance, it's much more likely they (either singers or players) will come in anyway, or do the sforzando, or whatever.
Anyway, my typical stress pattern is an increasing amount of stress up to the orchestra rehearsal, then a much more peaceful time between that and the performance. I still might review the music, continue memory work (if I'm going to conduct without a score), prepare notes for the chorus, and so on, but it seems like much less pressure.
Do you all have the same experience? I'm not really subject to performance anxiety, so maybe others get stressed just because of the performance itself (although not actually looking at the audience must help).
P.S. I've stopped calling them "dress rehearsals" when addressing singers since newbies always seem to be confused about whether they have to wear their concert outfits to the "dress" rehearsal. Now I call them "orchestra rehearsals" or "final rehearsals."
P.P.S. I have a grumble about the Bärenreiter score for this work. The conductor's score doesn't have the clarinet parts included in the orchestra layout (except in one movement), but has them as an appendix, implying that they double the oboes the rest of the time. Yet they have a number of independent parts which took me by surprise at the rehearsal. I expect it's because it's an "urtext" edition and maybe Haydn's manuscript score didn't have the clarinets, but they could have included them on small staves. Some editor at Bärenreiter needs to talk to performers more often.
Liz Garnett says
Marie Grass Amenta says
Brigid Coult says
Allen H Simon says
John Howell says
Marie Grass Amenta says
Bryan Greer says
Jerome Hoberman says