Playing conditions
From Times
July 8, 2005
There are more similarities than you would think between top sportsmen and musicians, says Ed Smith, the England cricketer
IT CANNOT be often that Glyndebourne is linked to Twenty20, cricket’s brashest form of entertainment. But between playing this week’s Twenty20 games for Middlesex I have been following the rave reviews that the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly has been getting for her performance in Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne.
She was one of the four classical musicians I interviewed for my new Radio 3 series, Peak Performance. The series grew out of a simple question: how similar is the experience of being a performer on a sports field to being a performer in a classical music concert? Was the stage universal, no matter what the play? When talking to Connolly I was interested in the concept of good and bad “form”. Form is the word that defines the life of a professional sportsman more than any other. We cherish being in good form, dread losing it, and desperately chase after ways of mastering it.
Singers, perhaps more than other musicians, have similar fluctuations in form. Connolly described how she had once been singing poorly in practice but felt in good form technically. It took the “adrenalin rush of an audience, the jolt of being on the stage” to pull the best out of her.
According to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth, his job is that of a coach and captain combined. He defines the rehearsals, determines the agenda, assesses his players. And yet he also steps out into the performing realm himself — in fact, he has the most dramatic and isolated of all roles to perform. He must watch over everyone else while also looking after his own game.
Nearly always, Wigglesworth explained, he could predict when an orchestra would lack conviction or togetherness, because “it was in me that the doubt began”. As a fellow performer — he was first a pianist — he has a natural understanding of their lives.
Although the cellist Natalie Clein has performed within chamber groups and alongside orchestras, our conversation focused more on the inner journey of the solo perfectionist. As a girl she confided to her diary: “(When I’m playing) I can express everything I can’t when I’m in my shell as a normal schoolgirl.”
That is the prompt that often pushes great performers to take to the stage. A sense of frustration, the feeling that normal living is inadequate, leads them to seek self-expression in a different sphere. That, according to Freud, is also why creative temperaments are compelled to produce works of art in the first place.
“As a child I was always being accused of being a show-off,” the classical guitarist Craig Ogden said of his lifelong aptitude for performance. His enjoyment of the limelight initially found natural expression on the sports field (not untypically for an Australian) but the guitar soon took over.
His pre-performance rituals and habits — the ways of getting into “the zone” — are almost exactly like mine before I bat. Blocking out distractions, pushing aside self-imposed pressures, thinking of ways to get around potential impediments to performance: we are both engaged in the same battle with our private, nagging negative voice. A blank slate, an absence of irrelevant thought, is what concentration feels like. Getting there isn ’t always easy.
In all the conversations, I often felt that only the technical terms of our different professions separated our experiences. That is not to say all perfo