“Are you ready?” he asked, looking me square in the eye, but clearly not budging until I had taken a moment to be sure that I was in fact ready. I mustered every ounce of confidence I had in me to fight the overwhelming rush of adrenaline that had seized my body, and nodded quickly.
“I’m ready.”
The doors parted one more time, and my feet carried me forward somehow, past the applauding crowd, past the orchestra, to the platform where the glossy black Yamaha crouched, waiting for me.
Keep walking. Walk tall. Don’t walk too fast. Pause. Smile. Bow. Breathe.
The orchestra shifted to prepare. I pressed my fingers gently against A minor, and every fibre of my body readied itself for the hair-trigger impulse to explode into action. A moment of connection as the timpanist and I made eye contact. Dozens of muscles in my hands preparing for the task before them. The beginning arcs of Dan’s preparatory pattern. And then there were no thoughts in words, only action and my entire being surging with A minor. Descent. Octaves. A full-armed impulse connecting with the bottom note, then a stretto race to the opposite end of the keyboard once again. Electricity from the keys through each cell of my hands and arms as my fingers fused themselves to the final few chords of the opening, before I tore them away and allowed the orchestra to sweep in and take over.
The rich textures of a full orchestra wrapped themselves around me. Clarinet solo. Swelling violins reaching upwards. Adrenaline swarmed every receptor in my brain, swirling every sense into one massive wash of subconscious blur. The opening was over, but it was as though I’d played it in a dream. Careful consideration and tactics had given way entirely to over a year of committed conditioning. And now the orchestral exposition was coming to a close. This motive. I start it on E.
E.
E?
But somehow it’s not right. Why doesn’t that seem right? Hundreds and hundreds and uncountable hundreds of times I’ve played my part of the exposition. Why does the E seem false? Two measures. Time became tangled up in itself as my cue approached.
It’s not E.
One measure.
The fourth beat of the measure spilled over the cusp of time, and my fingers found A minor long before I did, but not a moment too soon. The first motive. A minor again. And the simplicity and elegance of Grieg’s famous first theme sounded into the auditorium. The first motive gave way to the second, and the orchestra rose underneath the piano’s bright tone to sweep us all away into the third motive.
But I don’t even recall playing it. Apparently I did, because I found myself reminding my wrists to launch off the descending accents on the way back down the keyboard. The chromatic thirds. They happened without my knowledge, and then there was the oboist, volleying Grieg’s triplet motive back and forth with me from across the stage, before we all came to the rush of a lush stream of notes arriving at the most breathtaking resolution in all of romantic music. I’ve always said I could play that single line and that single resolution for hours and be happy. The release of the final chord is like a spectacular cathartic drug for my fingers. My spine tingled as I let it go, and then I realized where I was.
I was on a stage.
Playing a piano concerto.
This was my moment, and I was in it.
My gaze swept around the orchestra, and a few players caught my eye with a grin or a moment of wordless understanding.
The over-the-top loss of control faded as the unprecedented adrenaline receded, and my mind was my own again.
And oh, here it was: the most heart-breaking entry of the entire piece. One finger, with utmost care, released beautiful, crystal-clear C major that pierced through the texture like a sunbeam, and I emptied my soul into the heavenly theme that carried it. Hours of minute adjustments to the nuances of touch, tone, and shape in that single line were all worth it as I breathed life into that melody in that moment. Grieg swept us all through the heights of ecstasy, through the clutches of turmoil itself, to the pinnacle of tension in a blaze of octaves and glory, before snatching it all back and depositing us all, with a gentle nudge, at the tender development section. Now it was my turn to step up and support – support Aly, sitting right across from me, who was painting a delicate reminiscence of the first motive with the translucent brush of a flute. A horn rose with its own contribution: a haunting echo in warm brass tone.
Dazzling arpeggios forced me to cut in on the recollections, and months of repetition allowed my fingers to comply with the score.
The harmonies began to shift moment by moment. A major? A major. Question? Answer. B major? Yes, B major. C sharp major?? D major?? Tension?? More tension?! Where is the answer now??
It revealed itself in a sudden, quiet, unassuming return to A minor and the first theme. ‘Do you remember?’ asks the piano. ‘Yes, we remember,’ answer the strings quietly. ‘Then let’s do this.’ Soaring cantabile, daring animato, and it all comes sweeping back.
A twist, and harmonic sleight-of-hand have taken us past a point of no return, though, and three sharps leap into the key signature. “A major! A major! Isn’t it glorious??” laughs Grieg. A rich new tone colours the return to the tender cantabile theme, as we savour its romantic beauty together one more time. The new colour is short-lived, though, as a blast of fortissimo and a final, brass-laden I-IV cadence bring every vestige of motion on the stage to an irrevocable halt.
Cadenza.
This, I can scarcely explain in words. It was fire and technique and passion spun into a wave of sound. It was dozens of hours of discipline and inconceivable strings of countless mental cues streaming out in a flood as my mind assessed and adjusted their simultaneous execution. It was nearly a thousand notes on every individual page of music for a few minutes of unprecedented pyrotechnical, pianistic glory. And if you took every emotion that music is capable of evoking in the human heart and boiled them down into a crushing, intoxicating, exhilarating serum, then that would be the substance that replaced the blood in my veins in those moments.
The last four notes. My fingers pulled them from the keys like thick strands of rich molasses, lingering, savouring the last one as the orchestra took it from me one last time…
“NOW!!”
Some unconscious reflex within me snatched my brain back from Narnia, where it had left to without my permission, and my fingers, machine-gun-like, began picking off staccatissimo sixteenths that I had not even mentally located, never mind issued instructions for my hands to play. The only part of the last page that I actually recall after that moment was plunging onto the penultimate tripled A, and then the very last chord. Oh, the last chord! If there was ever a chord or a musical moment in my life that I invested every particle of my body and soul into, it was that final, second-inversion chord that was being held by everything I am made of. Everything – EVERYTHING emptied through my fingers, through those keys, in a surge of unreserved passion, and we held it, held it all together, and my eyes locked onto Dan as he held it all in his hands for that last glorious, resounding moment where time stood still. And in the instant of the final cutoff, that mysterious and miraculous corridor that only music can open between the hearts of musicians and their audience, those of performers and their colleagues, of the past and the present, and of the Creator with human beings, was sealed once more, until the next time the power and beauty of music would stir within us again those things we did not even know were there.
Your writing here is almost as lovely as your playing was! Gorgeous.
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