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| Hush. The piano is about to sing. |
The piano stands on the stage, alone, singular, grand majesty in black. On the ground, a few feet before it a microphone is propped, ready to receive the voice now in repose. The site of this introductory silence is McCulloch Auditorium housed by Pratt Music Hall. It's another Sunday concert at Moutn Holyoke College, this time by a guest performer by the name of Victor Rosenbaum.
Hush, the silence seems to say as senior citizens and music students filter in, the piano is about to sing.
The program gives a run-down of the evening's visitation: Mozart and Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. For it is a visitation, a present suddenly awakening the past, reading the past as it were in notes of music rather than words of literature, the usual circumstance for an English major such as FS.
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| Victor Rosenbaum coaxing pure music from the piano. |
Victor Rosenbaum appears and as he places fingers to keys the piano begins to sing. The notes of Mozart's Rondo in A Minor trickle into the silence, his fingers exerting a gentle pressure on the piano, his fingers coaxing and rousing the piano from its magisterial silence into this lilting joy, this give and take like a hand out of nowhere curling around your elbow and guiding you out of your lost self to safety.
This is the reason why you come, week after week without fail.
Before you, a young girl places a saucer of milk on the ground in the foyer of her house. She is nervous, looking back and forth, before rummaging into the pocket of her skirt for the cookie she saved during dinner. She does not think of Santa Claus, he of the hohoho and red and white and once a year visit. Instead, her mind trails off to her grandmother whispering of brownies, shy brownies, blessing a house with their helpful presence, wishing only for a little milk in response.
Yet, and yet, a little milk is too little, the young girl thinks so she saves her cookie from herself, because she does, she so does want to make a good impression on the brownie. It's a sugar cookie, fragrant with butter and a dash of cinnamon.
The next morning, both the cookie and milk are gone. The young girl is delighted. For an instant, she runs to and fro the length of the foyer, her thoughts skittering about even faster, a zig-zag joy of having found a friend.
This goes on until the young girl is a young woman, making her debut into society. On the night of her debut, the young girl now a young woman hesitates, hand against the threshold, suddenly lost. She feels a pressure against her elbow, which prompts her hand to fall and her foot to step forward. When she turns away from the light and all the faces turning towards her, she sees a small shadow duck behind an ornamental vase in the foyer and she thinks, Oh.
It is the happy 'Oh' of a friend remembered and seen again.
Your vision clears and Mr. Rosenbaum steps forward amidst the audience's clapping and bows. You join in the clapping, the clap of your palms signalling remembrance and joy, the little tale of "The Brownie and the Young Girl."
In contrast to this early piece of pure delight, the next piece rings out, a battle in its first movement of Allegro. Thus, Schubert comes riding out, piano sailing before him as his weapon and ally in musical arms against the assail of the enemy.
You smile, because of course this is Schubert, the he of immense drama, conflict, then reconciliation and resolution. (You know nothing as to his life, but his music prompts this description from you.) The battle that characterized the beginning of Schubert's Piano Sonata in C Minor begins to fade, no longer dominating, but softened, measured, a nostalgic meditation in the second movement of Adagio. The veteran of battle sits and reminisces, his life in all its intensity, its chaos, its joy, its sadness, its drama passes before him.
As you listen, you begin to hear an echo, the beginning of certain measures prompting an echoing answer from your memory of music. There are no names to match these echoes, only a sense of expectation, a hum from your mind to end such a beginning. How odd, you think. You put off the thought until the end of the song, because the third movement has crept up, a short Menuetto: Allegro in which you feel joy bubbling from your throat. Instinctively, your hands clasp, coming to rest against your heart.
This is Schubert remembering joy, you think. There is playfulness here, an Aha! and Hahaha! moment, because it is good to be alive, to have lived and had then to never live at all. Thus, the fourth movement Allegro ends in triumph, a confirmation of all that one can have in just living.
During the intermission, you scan the program and its extra slip of paper detailing the circumstances of each piece. Your instincts are proven right.
Rosenbaum comments that the piece is the "first of three great sonatas that Schubert composed at a furious pace in September of 1828, while ill and just two months before his death at the age of 31" and follows the death of his "compositional hero, Beethoven, who had died the previous year, Schubert here unabashedly borrows not only the key of Beethoven's most dramatic works, but also the theme and harmonic progression of one of them (the 32 Variations in C minor)."
Yet, the piece is clearly Schubert's. Rosenbaum ends his commentary on the piece with "But with that material and inspiration, Schubert rises to a new level of compositional mastery in his own unique voice."
The next piece is also the penultimate piece, Schumann's Scenes of Childhood or Kinderscenen, Opus 15. Because this is Schumann, within a few minutes, your heart has risen up your throat and in counterpoint, your interwoven fingers have risen up to cover your mouth, open and curving into a grin. The first few pieces of his themed work Kinderscenen sound like laughter, the heady moments of childhood when giddy happiness overwhelmed all of one's senses. Life itself was an adventure.
And yet, that childhood has gone and passed you by with nary a second look, while you strain your neck to find it, while you stand and look at the sky on a moonlit night and count the stars, wishing for one to fall so that you might make a wish.
You linger and in your lingering, remember so that as you grow old, you also grow young, memories visited and revisited till they grow anew. You can only try, you tell yourself, what is the harm in that? Till the end, you try.
The finale of the concert is Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasie, Opus 61. It sounds like a waltz, the mystique of the dance as captured by a piano and its pianist moving in concerted motion with one another. In counterpoint to Rosenbaum's moving fingers, his lips move as if he sings along with the piano or rather he sings and the piano is his voice in action. Suddenly, the elegance and mystery of the Polonaise-Fantasie brings not to mind the waltz, but a boy for whom the letters of the alphabet, the strictures of grammar, and the nay-say of society mean nothing.
"He never cries, he never speaks," the boy's mother says, fretting to her husband. They look at their son, sitting by the window, mouth opening and closing as birds trill and tease, spring is here, on the tree outside.
"A quiet boy, neither ill-mannered nor lazy, but he seems unable to learn or comprehend the importance of letters and words," writes his third-grade teacher. This is the same comment in some version or other written by all the boy's teachers.
Only the music teacher at his school writes otherwise. She sends the boy home with reams of music sheet every day. He returns the next morning without fail with the reams of music sheet filled. When she plays the notes, she transcribes the music into scribbled words of feeling. She sends her own personal notes on the music notes home to the boy.
'Listen to him,' she writes, 'he speaks music.'
The boy's parents are overjoyed. They enroll him in music classes. Gradually, they save up enough money to enroll him in a special school devoted to music.
At his first recital after the encore, his teacher rushes forward and shakes their hand. He is all smiles, he sees their son's future. The boy's parents listen attentively, but what catches their attention is not their son's teacher, but the off-hand call of one of his classmates.
"Oy, oy!"
The boy turns.
"Good concert," his classmates says, pumping the boy's hand up and down. "We all knew you'd do it. You're the boy, y'know. The boy who speaks piano."
That is all the boy's parents need, this confirmation of who their boy is and how he is to know the world around him. This is their boy (although one day he will not longer be a boy): the boy who speaks piano.
So ends the concert and so ends this trailing review of it. There's nothing more powerful than the immediacy of a live performance, when all you have is yourself, a seat, and the air swelling with music. You the listener become awash in the atmosphere of music. There's a tremor beneath you as your chair vibrates a little from the sound ringing through the auditorium.
Why might this be of interest to an English major, you ask? (Especially as told by the food-obsessed FS?) It is of interest to anyone living, but for this particular English major (for FS is an English major), a live performance becomes a live inspiration of story-telling as can be evidenced by FS' accounts i.e. verbal interpretations of music above.
Upcoming performances are:
Friday, October 21 at Chapin Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Family and Friends Jazz Concert by Big Band, Vocal Jazz and Chamber Jazz
Saturday, October 22 at Abbey Chapel at 4:00 p.m. Family and Friends Choral/Orchestral Concert by the Mount Holyoke Glee Club, Chorale, Chamber Singers and Orchestra.
Sunday, October 23, 2011 at McCulloch Auditorium at 4:00 p.m. Warbeke Memorial Concert by the Kavafian-Schub-Shilfrin Trio, members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
For more information, visit the Mount Holyoke Music Department.
