The Concert

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 3: The Concert

She remembered the A. The oboe's A, the tuning A, the note that preceded every orchestral performance she had ever given, the note that was not music but the preparation for music, the agreement among seventy musicians that this pitch, this frequency, this 440-hertz vibration of air molecules was the center from which all other pitches would be measured, the reference point, the common ground, the shared assumption without which the ensemble could not function, and the A rose from the oboe in the pit of Severance Hall on a Thursday evening in November of her twenty-fourth year, and the A was the beginning, and the beginning was not the Brahms but the A, and the A was the last moment of silence before the silence ended.

She remembered the A because the A was the last thing she heard before the work began. The work being the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major, opus 77, the concerto that Johannes Brahms composed in the summer of 1878 in Portschach am Worthersee, the Austrian lake town where Brahms spent his summers, the concerto that Brahms wrote for Joseph Joachim, the Hungarian violinist who was Brahms's closest musical friend and who premiered the work with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on New Year's Day 1879, and the concerto was the mountain, was the Everest of the violin repertoire along with the Tchaikovsky and the Beethoven and the Sibelius, the four concertos that defined the instrument's relationship to the orchestra, the four concertos that every serious violinist aspired to play and that Nadia had been given the opportunity to play at twenty-four as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra's young artist program, the opportunity that was the pinnacle, the summit, the highest point of the performing life that the focal dystonia would end eighteen months later.

Severance Hall. The hall was beautiful in the way that concert halls built in the 1930s are beautiful, the beauty of a time when concert halls were built to be temples, the architecture declaring that the activity conducted within was sacred, or if not sacred then at least elevated, the ceilings high, the walls ornamented, the seats upholstered in a blue that Nadia always thought of as orchestral blue, the blue of seriousness, the blue of attention, the blue that said to the person sitting in the seat: the thing you are about to hear deserves your full presence, deserves the quality of attention that the performers on the stage are giving to the music, and the deserving was the contract, the unspoken contract between the performer and the listener, the contract that said: I will give everything and you will receive everything and the giving and the receiving will meet in the sound and the sound will be the music and the music will be the thing.

She stood in the wings. She could see the stage from the wings, could see the orchestra seated, the musicians in their blacks, the black of the concert dress that was the performer's uniform, the black that said: I am not the point, the music is the point, I am the vessel, the conduit, the instrument through which the music passes, and the black erased the individual and elevated the collective and the collective was the orchestra and the orchestra was tuning, the A spreading from the oboe through the sections, the strings tuning in fifths, the woodwinds adjusting, the brass checking, and the tuning was the ritual, the communal act that preceded the communal act of performance, the preparation that was itself a form of music, the dissonance of tuning resolving into the unison of the A, the unison the agreement, the agreement the readiness.

Her violin was tuned. She had tuned it in the green room, the small room backstage where soloists waited, the room with the mirror and the couch and the bottle of water that the stage manager had placed on the table, the water that Nadia did not drink because she did not drink before performances, did not eat, did not do anything that would introduce a variable into the body that she had spent twenty years calibrating for this purpose, the purpose being the production of sound at the highest possible level of precision and expressiveness, and the body was the instrument's instrument, the mechanism that held and operated the violin, and the mechanism had been prepared, had been tuned, had been calibrated through the hours and days and weeks of practice that preceded the performance, the practice that was not repetition but refinement, each practice session removing an imprecision the way Giovanni's plane would later remove a layer of wood, the removal progressive, the surface becoming smoother, the performance becoming more precise, until the performance was as close to the thing in her mind as her body could bring it.

She wore black. The long black dress that she had bought at a consignment shop in Cleveland Heights, the dress that was not expensive because she was not yet at the stage of her career where the dress mattered, where the dress was part of the brand, where the designer of the dress would be noted in the program or the review, she was at the stage where the dress was simply black and long and allowed her arms to move freely, the freedom of the arms being the practical requirement, the bow arm needing the full range of motion that the Brahms demanded, the Brahms being a concerto that used the entire body, that required the right arm to draw the bow from frog to tip with the full extension that produced the fortissimo passages in the first movement, the passages where the solo violin must project over the full orchestra, the violin against seventy instruments, the one against the many, the soloist against the ensemble, and the against was not opposition but conversation, the soloist and the orchestra in dialogue, the dialogue that Brahms had composed with the understanding that the violin's voice must be heard above the orchestra's voice without the orchestra diminishing its own voice, and the not-diminishing was the balance, and the balance was the conductor's responsibility, and the conductor was James Alderman, the associate conductor, a man of fifty whose conducting Nadia trusted because his conducting listened, his baton following the soloist rather than leading the soloist, the following the courtesy, the courtesy the craft.

The concertmaster stood. The audience applauded. The concertmaster sat. The conductor entered. The audience applauded again, the applause the greeting, the welcome, the social form that preceded the artistic form. The conductor bowed. The conductor turned to the orchestra. The conductor raised his baton.

But before the baton fell, there was the silence. The silence between the conductor's raised arm and the first note, the silence that was two seconds or three seconds but that felt like a held breath, the hall holding its breath, the two thousand people in the seats holding their breath, the seventy musicians on the stage holding their breath, and Nadia in the wings holding her breath, and the silence was the thing before the thing, the nothing before the something, the empty space into which the music would pour, and the empty space was not nothing, the empty space was potential, was the gathered energy of the hall and the orchestra and the audience and the soloist, the energy waiting to be released, and the release was the first note, and the first note was coming, and the coming was imminent, and the imminence was the silence, and the silence was the most musical moment of the evening, because the silence contained all the music that would follow, the way the seed contains the tree, the way the plank of spruce in Giovanni's attic contained the violin.

The orchestra began. The opening of the Brahms is orchestral, the soloist waiting, the orchestra establishing the key and the tempo and the mood, the D major warmth, the pastoral opening, the strings playing the main theme, the theme that the soloist will take up and transform, and the orchestral introduction was long, was three minutes, was the longest orchestral introduction of any major violin concerto, Brahms taking his time, Brahms establishing the world into which the soloist would step, and the world was D major, and D major was warmth, was brightness, was the key of triumph and celebration, and the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major was all of these things and more, was also darkness, was also struggle, was also the minor-key passages that shadowed the major-key passages the way clouds shadow a field, the shadows passing, the light returning, the light always returning, because D major was the home key, and home was where the music always returned.

Nadia waited in the wings. She listened to the orchestral introduction. She listened the way she had listened in rehearsal, with total attention, her body still, her mind focused on the sound, the sound of the Cleveland Orchestra playing the Brahms introduction, the sound that was one of the great orchestral sounds in the world, the Cleveland sound, the sound that George Szell had built in the 1950s and 1960s and that every subsequent music director had maintained and developed, the sound that was precise and warm and transparent and powerful, the sound that the hall's acoustics shaped and projected, the sound that filled Severance Hall the way water fills a vessel, completely, touching every surface, reaching every seat.

The introduction approached its conclusion. The orchestra built toward the moment of the soloist's entrance, the strings crescendoing, the winds joining, the music swelling, and then the orchestral texture thinned, the full ensemble reducing to the strings alone, the strings reducing to a sustained chord, the chord a platform, a launching pad, the chord saying: here, now, the soloist enters, and the entering was the thing, the entering was the moment, the moment that the months of practice had been building toward, and the moment was here.

She walked onto the stage.

The walk from the wings to the center of the stage was fifteen steps. She had counted them in rehearsal, not deliberately but involuntarily, the musician's habit of measuring, of quantifying, the habit that counts beats and measures and positions and steps, the counting the structure, the structure the control. Fifteen steps on the hardwood stage, her shoes making no sound on the polished surface because she wore soft-soled shoes, the shoes chosen for their silence, the silence being the respect, the respect for the sound that was about to come, the sound that would replace the silence.

She stood at the center of the stage. The conductor to her left. The concertmaster seated to her left and slightly below. The orchestra arranged in its semicircle around her, the first violins to her left, the seconds to her right, the violas and cellos behind the seconds, the basses in the back, the winds and brass and timpani beyond, the arrangement the geometry of the ensemble, the geometry that focused the sound toward the audience, the audience that she could not see because the stage lights were bright and the house lights were dim and the audience was a darkness beyond the light, a darkness that breathed and rustled and waited.

She raised the violin. She tucked it under her chin. She felt the chinrest against her jaw, the familiar pressure, the contact that was the first contact, the body and the instrument joining, the joining the prerequisite. She felt the weight of the instrument on her collarbone, the weight negligible, four hundred grams, but the weight was not the mass of the wood, the weight was the mass of everything the instrument represented, everything the moment contained, the years of practice, the hours of rehearsal, the months of preparation, the twenty years of training that had brought her to this stage.

She raised the bow. She placed the bow on the A string. She felt the hair contact the string, the contact a whisper, a touch, the lightest possible contact, the contact that preceded the sound, and the sound was one breath away, one motion away, one decision away, and the decision was not a decision because the decision had been made years ago, the decision to be a violinist, the decision that was not a decision but a recognition, the recognition at age four in Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis that the sound of the violin was the sound she wanted, the wanting that became the work, the work that became the life, the life that was this moment, this stage, this hall, this silence, this breath.

She drew the bow.

The first note of the solo entrance in the Brahms Violin Concerto is a sustained A, and the A is the same A that the oboe played for the tuning, the same pitch, the same frequency, 440 hertz, but the A that Nadia played was not the oboe's A, the A that Nadia played was the violin's A, and the violin's A was different because the violin's A was produced by horsehair drawn across a steel string on an instrument made of spruce and maple and ebony, and the production was not mechanical but personal, the A carrying the signature of the hand that drew the bow and the body that held the instrument and the mind that shaped the phrase, and the phrase began with the A and the A was the world, the A was the concerto, the A was the evening, the A was Nadia Kovac at twenty-four on the stage of Severance Hall playing the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major with the Cleveland Orchestra.

The left hand. The left hand was in its prime. The left hand was twenty years of training distilled into the four fingers and the thumb, the fingers moving on the fingerboard with the speed and precision that the Brahms demanded, the Brahms being a concerto that demanded everything, that demanded the full range of violin technique, the trills and the double stops and the octaves and the harmonics and the bariolage and the spiccato and the ricochet and the flying staccato and the fingered tremolo and the position shifts from first to seventh to third to fifth, the shifts executed at a speed that made them inaudible, the listener hearing not the shift but the arrival, not the journey but the destination, and the destinations were the notes, the notes that Brahms had written, the notes that Joachim had advised, the notes that Nadia's fingers found on the fingerboard with the accuracy of a navigator who knows the coastline by heart.

The first movement. The cadenza. The cadenza was Joachim's, the cadenza that Joachim had written for the concerto that Brahms had written for him, the cadenza being the unaccompanied passage in which the soloist plays alone, the orchestra silent, the cadenza the soloist's opportunity to display technique and musicianship without the support of the ensemble, the cadenza the solo within the solo, the alone within the alone, and the aloneness was the thing, the aloneness of the performer on the stage, the aloneness that was not loneliness but sovereignty, the sovereignty of the musician in command of the instrument, the sovereignty of the trained hand on the fingerboard, the sovereignty of the bow arm drawing the bow, the sovereignty that Nadia felt in every nerve and every muscle and every thought, the sovereignty that was the work made manifest, the work paying its dividend, the dividend being this moment, this cadenza, this sound.

The trills. The left hand executed the trills with the speed and evenness that the cadenza required, the fourth finger and the third finger alternating on the string, the alternation rapid, the rapid alternation producing the shimmer that is the trill's acoustic character, the shimmer that is one of the violin's most distinctive sounds, the sound that is not a note but two notes so close together and so rapidly alternated that the ear perceives them as a single vibrating entity, a sound that trembles, a sound that lives, and the living was the left hand, and the left hand was alive, was fully alive, was operating at the peak of its capacity, and the peak was the summit, and the summit was this evening, and the evening was November, and November was Cleveland, and Cleveland was Severance Hall, and Severance Hall was the Brahms, and the Brahms was the left hand, and the left hand was the thing.

The vibrato. The vibrato was the oscillation of the fingertip on the string, the controlled rocking of the finger that varied the pitch by a fraction of a tone above and below the target note, the variation producing the warmth that is the violin's most human quality, the warmth that makes the violin sound like a voice, like a singing voice, like a voice that is not speaking but feeling, and the vibrato was Nadia's vibrato, was the particular oscillation rate and width that she had developed over twenty years, the vibrato that was her signature, her identity, the thing that made her sound like herself and not like any other violinist, the vibrato that her teacher Professor Aaronson at the University of Minnesota had called beautiful, the word beautiful not a compliment but a description, the description accurate, the vibrato beautiful because the vibrato was true, was honest, was the expression of the hand's relationship to the string, and the relationship was intimate, and the intimacy was the art.

The second movement. The Adagio. The slow movement that was the concerto's heart, the movement in which the violin sang rather than declaimed, the movement in which the melody was everything and the technique was subordinate to the melody, the technique serving the music rather than displaying itself, the serving the highest use of technique, the use that makes the technique invisible, the listener hearing not the fingering or the bowing or the shifting but only the melody, only the song, and the song was Brahms's song, and the song was in F major, and F major was the key of the pastoral, the key of calm, the key of the countryside that Brahms saw from his window in Portschach, the key of the lake and the mountains and the Austrian summer, and the calm was the movement, and the movement was the singing, and the singing was the left hand, and the left hand was Nadia's, and Nadia's left hand sang.

She played the Adagio and the hall was quiet and the quiet was the listening and the listening was two thousand people receiving the sound that one woman was producing with a wooden box and four strings and a bow and two hands, and the receiving was the contract fulfilled, the contract between the performer and the listener, the giving and the receiving meeting in the sound, and the sound was the Brahms Adagio, and the Brahms Adagio was the most beautiful thing in the hall, and the hall held it, and the holding was the acoustics, and the acoustics were the architecture, and the architecture was the temple, and the temple was Severance Hall, and Severance Hall was Cleveland, and Cleveland was November, and November was her twenty-fourth year, and her twenty-fourth year was the prime, was the summit, was the peak before the descent.

The third movement. The Allegro giocoso. The joyful finale, the movement that Brahms marked giocoso, which means playful, which means joyful, which means the movement dances, and the dancing was the rhythm, the Hungarian rhythm that Brahms had absorbed from Joachim and from the Roma musicians he had heard in the taverns of Budapest, the rhythm syncopated, energetic, the rhythm of the csardas and the verbunkos, the folk rhythms of the Hungarian plain transposed into the concert hall, the folk music elevated to the art music, or perhaps the art music returning to the folk music, the direction uncertain, the uncertainty the point, Brahms understanding that the highest art and the simplest folk song are connected, are variations of the same impulse, the impulse to make sound, to organize sound, to give sound meaning, and the meaning was the movement, and the movement was the finale, and the finale was the ending, and the ending was approaching.

The left hand. The left hand in the third movement executed passages of extraordinary difficulty with the ease that difficulty earns when it has been practiced until it is no longer difficult, the difficulty dissolved by the practice the way sugar dissolves in water, the dissolved difficulty invisible, the listener hearing not difficulty but music, not effort but expression, not work but play, and the play was the giocoso, the playfulness, the joy, the joy that Brahms had written into the movement and that Nadia's hands were releasing from the score into the air of the hall.

The ending. The concerto ended with the orchestra and the soloist together, the D major chord, the chord of home, the chord that resolved everything, the chord that said: the journey is complete, the music has arrived at its destination, and the destination was the beginning, the D major that opened the concerto and that closed the concerto, the circle complete, the form perfect, the Brahms perfect, and the last note sounded and the last note faded and the silence returned, the silence that had preceded the music and that now followed the music, but the silence was different now, the silence was changed, the silence after the music carrying the memory of the music, the silence informed by the sound, the silence richer than the silence before, because the silence before was potential and the silence after was fulfillment, and the fulfillment was the applause.

The audience stood. The audience stood not because the convention required standing but because the body required standing, the body that had been held in the seat by the music now released by the music's ending, the body rising, the rising the response, the response involuntary, the applause beginning before the standing was complete, the applause the sound that follows the sound, the human sound that follows the musical sound, the percussion of the hands following the singing of the strings.

Nadia stood at the center of the stage and the applause washed over her and the washing was the recognition, the recognition not of her but of the music, the music that had passed through her, the music that she had been the instrument of, the musician as instrument, the violinist as violin, the person as vessel, the vessel that the Brahms had filled and that the Brahms had emptied and that the applause was acknowledging, the applause saying: we heard, we received, the contract is fulfilled.

She bowed. She held the violin at her side and the bow in her right hand and she bowed, the bowing the form, the form the courtesy, the courtesy the tradition, and the tradition was the evening, and the evening was the concert, and the concert was the Brahms, and the Brahms was the left hand, and the left hand was alive.

The left hand was alive.

She remembered this. She remembered it in the room above the workshop on Via Palazzo in Cremona on her second evening, holding the left hand in the right hand, holding the hand that had played the Brahms, the hand that had trilled and shifted and vibrated, the hand that had been alive, that had been the most alive thing in Severance Hall on a November evening, and the aliveness was gone now, the aliveness disrupted, the aliveness rerouted by the focal dystonia into channels that did not lead to the fingerboard, and the channels were permanent, and the permanent was the loss, and the loss was the thing she held in her hand, the thing she held every evening, the memory of the aliveness held in the hand that was no longer alive in that particular way, the hand that was alive in other ways, in the general ways, in the ways that did not matter to the concert stage, in the ways that did not play the Brahms.

She held the hand. She remembered the Brahms. She remembered the A, the tuning A, the oboe's A, the soloist's A, the two A's that were the same pitch and different sounds, the pitch the agreement and the sound the individual, the agreement the foundation and the individual the music, and the music was the Brahms, and the Brahms was the left hand, and the left hand was in her right hand, and the right hand held it, and the holding was the evening, and the evening was the second evening in Cremona, and Cremona was the workshop, and the workshop was the new work, and the new work was waiting for her in the morning, and the morning was coming, and the coming was the continuation, and the continuation was the life after the concert, the life after the Brahms, the life after the left hand, the life that was beginning.

And the beginning was the workshop.

And the workshop was the morning.

And the morning was the wood.