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You've probably never given a second thought to the page-turner sitting or standing unobtrusively behind the pianist at a concert - and that's the way it should be. Page-turners, and their opera counterparts, the prompters, are like offensive linemen in football: you only notice them when they do something wrong. Their job is to be invisible, and to enable the star to do his/her job, whether that's negotiating a long and difficult sonata, or surviving the murderous charge of a 300-pound linebacker clad in hard plastic armor.

I personally find page-turning to be the most nerve-wracking job in all of music, and I know many musicians who have on occasion been pressed into service for a friend or colleague who will agree. You feel a responsibility to the performer that is surprisingly heavy; all you have to do is turn the page - how hard could that be? But any mistake could have a dramatic impact on someone else's performance. That's a heavy burden. Especially when you're confronted with the actual challenges of page-turning.

My sight-reading skills are not very good. So when the formidable pianist David Holtzman asked me to turn pages so he could play a thorny piece by Donald Martino live on the radio, I was dismayed to find myself facing not a neatly published score, but the composer's own completely illegible scrawl. I mean, squiggles at seemingly random points all over the page - on the staff, off the staff, everywhere. But then Holtzman started playing, and I still don't know how he did it, but he made the scrawl before me make sense. Of course that's how this passage goes, I remember thinking; how could it be otherwise? I had no problem following along; and everything was fine.

Less fine was the time I turned pages for pianist Margaret Leng-Tan, who was doing an early John Adams piece called Phrygian Gates. Here the score was neatly published - but the piece consists of short bits that are repeated a certain number of times before you either move on to the next bit, or occasionally, cycle back to early material and then work forward again. A 2-bar phrase might be blocked off by repeat signs have the number 12 on top, meaning this phrase is repeated 12 times before going on. That's hard to do without losing track - wait, was that #10 or 11? And then the next two bars might only repeat 6 times... I'm afraid I spent a fair amount of this score waiting for the pianist to nod when she wanted the page turned because I was having trouble negotiation just where on the page she was at any time.

"Wait for my nod" is the pianist's classic instruction to the page turner, and the turner's best friend. At least in theory. In practice, I've seen pianists who begin nodding as soon as they start playing - just naturally moving their heads in time with the music. Was that the nod? Was it the nod? Or is he just gonna do this all evening? And then there are pianists who get so into the music they forget you're there - and forget to nod.

Fortunately, for all its potential pitfalls, page-turning does not produce too many train wrecks. Ah, but those that do occur are really memorable. I was once turning pages for Erika Nickrenz, the pianist of the acclaimed Eroica Trio, at a private concert the trio did for an exclusive audience in Westchester. Everything was going well; I was silent and unobtrusive, just a shadow behind the pianist. And then, disaster. I turned another page - not realizing that it was two pages stuck together. Of course the pianist realized it, and in a single motion raised her hand from the keys and slashed the offending page back into place. The sound of her hand hitting the music stand and the paper turning was quite possibly the loudest thing I've ever heard. If she'd grabbed a megaphone and announced "my page turner is an idiot," it would've had the same effect.

As I said, this was a private event - maybe 50 or 60 people watching. But I felt like the eyes of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Met Opera were all glaring at me in disapproval. I was playing left tackle, and I'd just been penalized for holding, cancelling out my quarterback's 60-yard touchdown pass. In reality, it was a minor thing, some people chuckled afterwards, and Erika said I'd done a pretty good job overall. But to this day, I won't turn pages for anyone without a helmet and pads on.

Tell us: Do you have any war stories from the concert stage? Page turners gone bad or opera prompters asleep at the switch?
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