Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems

The Open-Air Recital Survived a Shaky Start

107 The Open-Air Recital Survived a Shaky Start when, in the first movement of the Emperor Concerto, where Beethoven tries to out-swagger Napoléon, a woodpecker countered with Bronx cheers. Next, every sprinkler in the grassy amphitheater squeaked on, and listeners fled as if the Little General’s cavalry had thundered, sabers flashing, from the woods. The “Rondo“ took a whupping, too, when a squirrel in the oak that spread above the stage, banged acorns off the soloist’s head and his ebony Grand. The setting sun scorched through dark columns of trees behind the stage, as the new soloist marched on. Her blonde hair glowed, angelic as the tones she drew, just tuning, from her violin. We strained forward as her hands caressed the wood. She was deep into Tchaikovsky’s Canzonetta, where he mourns his unconsummated marriage, when a woman’s voice rose from behind the trees: “Oh God,“ it trilled, a clear coloratura. “Oh, oh, oh!“ What could the soloist do but keep playing? What could the conductor do but wag his baton? What could the damp audience do but shush our children, pretending not to hear the woman’s sobbing obbligato merge into the theme? And when the finale began, allegro vivacissimo, and the soloist 108 lashed her instrument into a gallop, it seemed natural that the woman’s cries should intensify, and the soloist draw strength from her as together they approached that last exhausting run up the scale of passion toward the summit from which, gasping and quivering, they flung themselves. When, paroxysms done, the conductor dropped his hands, and the violinist (on whose slim legs, seen through her violet gown, I could have played a pretty tune) lowered her bow, the applause that surged up out of the soaked grass was for the woman in the woods as much as for the soloist: head bowed, smiling. Spent. ...