Boston trip recap and concerto performance clips

Sharon's Weekly Head Dump

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I’m back from Boston and am awash in a cloud of happy incredulous relief—we did it! We performed it for the first time, it went even better than I’d ever dreamed, the reactions and feedback we got are so good, and…it’s over? This thing that had been looming in the eternal future for literal years is suddenly behind me?

Yes, my outfit is amazing, thank you

Before I go on to share little clips and some trip photos, I absolutely have to thank the huge village of people who were all instrumental (pun not intended) in helping to get the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto from idea to performance.

If you’ve been following this project on social media, the process from the outside has probably looked like this:

1. I tweet an idea

2. ???

3. Profit lol who are we kidding, this is the arts we’re talking about Performance!

…when in fact this one performance alone has involved a whole team of people working their butts off for literal years, sending so many emails (SO MANY EMAILS) and having constant Zoom calls.

Andrés Ballesteros steered this project through two organizations and a pandemic, hit up donors, assembled an orchestra, and got an amazing conductor on board, Britney Alcine, who gave the concerto’s first outing the love and thoughtful care it deserved. Anna Winestein with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative adopted this project and provided the institutional support (overseeing funding, sorting out venue + filming + many other logistics) and Jane Hua worked behind the scenes to help get everything together. I leaned a lot on my Spotlight mentor, Kathleen Kelly, who advised the project and also gave me a lot of support through it, as well as many members of the Spotlight Team who made the time to help the project in many ways big and small. (Mind you, each one of the people mentioned has at least one actual job, if not multiple, so it meant a lot to me that everyone worked so hard on this and gave it so much of their time.)

Funding-wise, the performance was very generously supported by the Hegardt Foundation, the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, the Rebecca Clarke Society, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Aurora Charitable Fund, and multiple individual donors.

Photo from Patricia—that’s her on the left, me on the right, both absolutely thrilled to have pulled this off.

And obviously, a crucial part of why this first outing was such a success is all thanks to Patricia Wallinga and her compositional brilliance—she took my half-baked ideas and ran with them (in some cases, wisely substituting her much better ideas) to produce an orchestral score so good that, when you play or listen to it, you cannot believe it was originally a solo piano work.

(I am most definitely leaving people out due to forgetfulness, not spite. Also, a lot of friends, social media followers, and Patreon-then-Substack supporters also helped in many ways!)

So if you’ve ever wondered how hard it is to write a work, drum up an orchestra, and get it performed…the answer is that it’s very hard, and you need a lot of people to buy in and contribute a lot of time and money, and I probably won’t be doing something like this anytime soon.

(But also, we are now assembling a consortium of orchestras to perform this in future seasons, so if you have any connection to ensembles/music directors, hi, call me. 👋)

I want very much to share the full performance, but for now, will just share little clips from each movement. (There is supposedly a professionally filmed and edited version coming, but I am unsure how much we’ll be allowed to publicly share.) All these bits were filmed on my humble iPhone, using—yes!—my new little microphone attachment.