The Rehearsal Pianist

The rehearsal pianist plays the orchestra.

That is the job in one sentence and it takes people a while. In a ballet rehearsal room, or an opera coaching, or a chorus call, there is no orchestra — there is a piano, and the person at it is producing, on ten fingers, a reduction of eighty players, and they are doing it while watching a room and adjusting for a dancer's tempo and stopping in the middle of a bar and going back four bars without being asked twice.

Mirela Vasilescu has done it for thirty-one years.

What she is not

She is not a soloist and never wanted to be, which nobody believes.

She is not an accompanist in the recital sense. That is a different and equally difficult job and involves performances.

She has played, in thirty-one years, four performances, all of them emergencies, all of them in the pit covering a celesta part, and she disliked all four.

What the room is

Twelve to eighteen hours a week in a room with no windows, a piano that is never quite right, and between one and sixty other people.

She has played the same twenty-two ballets somewhere north of four thousand times.

She can play the second act of one of them while holding a conversation. She has demonstrated this, once, in 2011, to settle an argument, and has regretted it since because it is now a thing people ask her to do at parties.

What she actually does

Three things, in ascending order of difficulty.

One: play the notes. Trivial after the first decade.

Two: play the tempo the room needs, which is not the tempo in the score and is not the tempo the conductor will take on the night. A dancer learning a phrase needs it slower; a dancer polishing it needs it exactly right; a dancer who is tired needs it very slightly forward, and if you give a tired dancer a slow tempo you will get an injury.

Nobody tells you which. You look.

Three: know when to stop.

On stopping

If something goes wrong in a rehearsal, somebody stops it. Usually the ballet master. Sometimes the dancer.

Sometimes — and this is the whole craft — the pianist.

Mirela stops perhaps four times a week. She does it by simply lifting her hands, which produces silence, which produces a room turning round.

She has been wrong twice in thirty-one years.

The rest of the time she has stopped because she has seen, from a piano stool at the side of a room, that a dancer is about to do something on a leg that is not going to hold, or that two people are counting differently and are eleven bars from a collision.

The ballet master sees the shape. The pianist hears the counting.

On the twenty-two ballets

She has views. She has never expressed one.

There is a passage in one of the standards — everyone in the room knows the one — that she thinks is badly written, and she has thought so since 1997, and she has played it about eleven hundred times and has never once altered it or mentioned it.

The room does not need her opinion. The room needs a floor to stand on.

She has said this at masterclasses, twice, to postgraduates who wanted to know how she stays interested.

She said: "I'm not interested. I'm useful."

Both times it landed badly and she has stopped saying it, and she still thinks it is the truest thing she knows about the job.

The dancers

She has watched about four hundred careers.

She has watched dancers arrive at nineteen, and be extraordinary at twenty-four, and be finished at thirty-three, and she has played for a great many of the conversations in between.

There is a thing that happens in a rehearsal room when a dancer is being told something difficult. The room clears, or half clears, and there are three people left, and the pianist is one of them, because the pianist is furniture.

She has heard everything.

She has never repeated any of it, in thirty-one years, and this is the thing that has made her — and she is aware of the word and dislikes it — trusted.

Ilinca

There is a girl in the company now, twenty-two, who Mirela has played for since she was eleven, at the school.

She is going to be very good. Everyone knows it and the knowing is doing to her exactly what it does.

In February she came to the room at eight in the morning, an hour before the call, and asked Mirela to play the third act variation.

Mirela played it. Ilinca marked it, badly, and stopped, and said, "Again."

They did it eleven times.

At the eleventh, Ilinca stopped in the middle and stood in the centre of an empty room and said, to the floor: "I can't do it."

Mirela did not say anything encouraging. She did not say anything at all for about four seconds.

Then she started the variation again from the top, at the correct tempo, without comment.

Ilinca stood there for two bars. Then she danced it.

Afterwards

Ilinca said, later, to somebody else, that Mirela had said exactly the right thing.

Mirela had said nothing.

She had made a decision — in about four seconds, at a piano, at eight in the morning — that this dancer did not need a sentence, and she had been right, and there is no way to teach that and no way to put it on a CV and no line in any programme for it.

The programme

She is not in the programme.

Rehearsal pianists are not, as a rule. There is a page of company staff and she is on it, in six-point, under Music Staff, seventh of nine.

In March the company did a thirtieth anniversary gala and there was a moment near the end where the artistic director brought people on.

He brought Mirela on.

She was extremely annoyed about it, and said so, backstage, and came on anyway because the alternative was a scene.

Two thousand people. Thirty-one years.

She was on the stage for about eleven seconds, which is nine seconds longer than she wanted, and she did the only thing she could think of, which was to point at the orchestra pit, where the real orchestra was, and shrug.

The house laughed.

Four dancers in the wings did not.