CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 39
The Knight Concert Hall’s stage stretched into the audience like a wooden hand. Ian loved the intense flavor such modern structures gave the music, both the nearly ideal acoustics and the audience’s proximity. Many musicians, especially soloists, found it unnerving. He had heard them speak of how the audience was allowed to invade their private space. Ian could well understand the sentiment but did not agree.
He had always loved that first instant of coming into view onstage. All his senses were in overdrive as he entered from stage right. With a single step, he experienced a subtle shift to the air, from the compressed tension and dust and shadows backstage to the open volume and anticipation of a sold-out hall.
Tonight he thought the acoustics were particularly sharp. He had sensed the same element during rehearsal. It seemed as if the architects had designed the chamber for the benefit of the orchestra as well as the audience. He listened as the grand wash of applause echoed off distant walls. He stepped forward and bowed, the audience’s faces like crinoline masks in the reflected light. He turned, acknowledged the conductor and symphonic orchestra, bowed once more to the solo violinist, settled on his chair, positioned his guitar, and waited.
The conductor raised his baton, checked his violinist, checked Ian, counted the time, and began.
Their first piece, Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major, was written in the 1730s and had originally been designed for the lute, two violins, and what historians believe was a harpsichord. There was some dispute over this, because according to the original score, the final line called for a basso continuo, an underlying series of lower notes that might also have been played by several instruments together. The lute was a stringed instrument with a bowed back, creating a soft and lovely sound. But its low volume meant other instruments had to be limited in number and played piano, piano. Quietly.
After the modern-day version of the guitar appeared in the mid-1800s, new renditions were made of the more popular Baroque concerts. Yet the problem remained the same: how to utilize the full breadth of a modern symphony and not drown out the solo guitar.
Their conductor, Israel Saban, did a masterful job of bringing out a rich and fluid sound, while carefully restraining the orchestra’s overall volume. The result was a delicate and precise work of art, one that had the audience holding its breath to the very final note. Then . . .
Bravo!
When the applause finally quieted, the chamber remained filled with an electric joy. The audience was with them now, fully and utterly engaged. Joined together by a confidence that they were going to be not just entertained but also thrilled. The orchestra felt it as well. The players shared a smile with the conductor before he lifted his baton, received his nod from Ian, counted time, and began again.
The world of classical guitar underwent a seismic shift with this second piece. Ian had loved this music from the very first time he heard it, and the more he’d learned of the composer, the deeper this bond had grown. The composer, Joaquín Rodrigo, had been nearly blind since childhood. He had created his best work in the midst of the worst crisis Europe had ever known. This particular piece, the Concerto de Aranjuez, was written in 1939. The Spanish Civil War was at its bloody zenith. Rodrigo’s work was to be premiered before the dictator Francisco Franco, who had recently signed a wartime pact with Adolf Hitler. Rodrigo’s music was supposedly intended to celebrate the current political situation. It had to be grand in nature. It had to be relevant to Franco’s aims of remaking Spain as a modern power. It had to bow to Spanish music and its historical roots....
All this and not drown out the solo guitar.
There had been centuries of debate over how to include a guitar’s resonant precision within a full orchestral arrangement. No guitar could be made loud enough to compete. If an entire orchestra ever struck a truly emphatic note, anything the guitar might do, no matter how lovely the sound, would be lost. The guitar, after all, was not a piano. There was no way to hammer out more volume. So the guitar was mainly restricted to chamber music. Played with just a few other instruments, never so many as to drown the poor fellow out. And so it remained until one remarkable man changed everything.
The nearly blind Rodrigo did not even play the guitar. His passion was piano. Yet with this concerto, Rodrigo utterly transformed the relationship between guitar and orchestra. Allowing the other instruments to perform along their full range, and yet enabling the guitar to stand out with its incredible beauty.
Rodrigo designed this concerto as a series of minuets. The orchestra and the guitar entered into a lyrical dance. When the guitar played, the orchestra almost held its breath. Then it leapt in volume, a huge crescendo that echoed and somehow even amplified what the guitar had to say. The effect was, in a word, magic. Crowds all over the world could not get enough of this remarkable new concept. A lyrical ballet featuring two completely different sounds.
The audience brought Ian and the conductor back five times. Even then, they refused to be seated. When Saban turned around and lifted the orchestra, Ian backed to one side and applauded with the hall. And there on the balcony’s left side was Kari. She felt so close, it was as if she could reach across the hall and embrace him.
During the applause, two cellists and the timpanist drew out the grand piano that had been waiting patiently backstage. A discreet curve had been designed into the orchestra’s second and third rows, unnoticed by the audience until the piano was fit into place.
During rehearsal, Saban had proposed that if indeed an encore was called for, he and Ian surprise the audience by performing a duet. The piece was another of Ian’s favorites, the Sonatine in A Major, by Anton Diabelli. It was just the two of them now, Ian and the conductor, transforming the orchestra into another happy, perspiring, smiling audience.
Diabelli was a nineteenth-century composer and music publisher, and the first man to recognize Schubert’s genius. Diabelli also conducted the first public performance of what became one of Schubert’s most famous pieces, “Erlk?nig.” Two hundred years later, Segovia arranged this work for the guitar. And Segovia’s rendition, a century or so after that, became the first serious piece Ian learned to play.
Diabelli’s most famous compositions were his sonatinas, piano duets that constituted remarkable balancing acts between the guitar and a much more powerful piano. In these compositions, the instruments formed opposing forces that swirled and spun in magnetic tension.
Too soon it was over. For the first time in over a year, Ian greeted the music’s conclusion with that impossible thought. Too soon.
As the audience rose to its feet and shouted its approval, Saban joined Ian at the front of the stage. He pretended to mock Ian’s height and dragged him over to center stage. There he climbed onto the conductor’s stubby dais, stood on his tiptoes, and drew Ian into a sweaty embrace.