mazzrick

Just to add a bit to what was previously said about endurance, I had a lot of success with playing etudes leading up to the recital. I figured on my recital being about an hour and a half, so I took all the etudes I'd ever played, and just ran through them for an hour and a half. Even if I flubbed something, the objective was just to play everything running it top to bottom. Of course, like Andre said, running the whole program twice is great. a tip with that, if you start to tire, take things down the octave, or play more comfortable dynamics... you're trying to build endurance, not strength and for this maintaining ease is the key.

I started with the easier ones, Bordogni, Conconne, Getchell, etc... then once the whole time was easy enough, moved on to Charlier, Brandt, Arban Characteristics, Longinotti, stuff like that... and then because the recital program was more difficult than those, the last phase was an hour and a half of Smith top tones, Bitsch, and some of the longer Charlier's. The idea with the etudes, is that there is very little rest so you have to get used to playing for a long time. Chris Gekker has a lot to say about recital prep and I think this idea is mostly based off of his teachings. Basically, if you can walk a marathon easily, then you can jog it, then you can run it... but the marathon is always 26 miles, no matter how fast you go.

for nerves, I would suggest starting with something that you're extremely confident with to get things going well. Also, bananas and turkey (if it doesn't put you to sleep) are good for relaxing the nerves.

Good luck and I hope that helped.