Today and yesterday at rehearsal I was so nostalgic during the Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concerto. Usually I get into the music (more or less) during the rehearsals, which leaves me free to concentrate on execution during the concerts. Yes – that’s what I said! I find that I need to have a certain margin of control during concerts which I can only get (usually) if I’m in a calm, focused space. Over-emoting or surrendering to emotion only creates problems for me – I leave the zone, so to speak.
But yesterday, during the indescribably lovely slow movement of the Rachmaninoff, there was a moment towards the last third of the movement, a transition, where the two flutes play five notes in thirds going into a very restful cadence – the denouement of the climax of the movement. It’s an incredible moment, and it made me think of a colleague who is fighting for their life right now against cancer, and I just began to weep (luckily, I was just counting a lot of rests at the time). My thoughts were of this person, and whether I’d ever hear them play again, or see them alive again, or how I could be any sort of help to them in their situation. And the music was the conduit to my innermost self, where these things normally lay under lock and key during public life, and Rachmaninoff had the key to this place, and the door was opened, and so was I. I got myself together during the end of the movement, and all was back to normal by the beginning of the last movement.
Anyone who wonders what music is “about” and why it’s “important” should look to any similar moment they might have had in their own experience as a listener. Music expresses that which would be too painful, too private to express in words or concrete images. Music can do this despite having been written by someone days, years, decades, or centuries ago – and it still has that immediate impact: how did Rachmaninoff know I needed those flutes in thirds yesterday? He didn’t – but the fact remains that those two instruments, capable of being shrill and staccato and strident in their upper register, were instead mellifluous and limpid and soothing at just the right time to open my eyes to what was in my heart. It’s a miracle, really. Tonight, listen to the your favorite moment of your favorite piece, and see what your heart tells you.