Listening…we don’t.
The inner conversation never stops.
It’s a constant racket
– Philip Glass
Almost breathless I sat down in my balcony mid-center seat
just as Pinchas Zukerman assured yet with halting steps
approached the podium
What did I expect? Nineteenth Century classics
so familiar no need to read Program Notes How explain
what began with Beethoven’s brooding sostenuto
not the context – a timely expression
of Egmont’s fatal protest against a tyrant –
but the sustained perfection contained like a fist in poise
every performer every instrument every pause
held by the conductor’s restraint and his hands’ explosive power
The composer’s nerve-jarring passion came full
and all the hall felt one
Then I curved my hands around my face
alone on a high-cliff an ocelot’s eye
watching the brass in a blazing arc tier above tier
each instrument each motion
even the lean first violinist’s wrist
the concerto Mozart’s fifth the performers
listening each to each with impeccable ear
Zukerman magically turning with his violin
becoming the strings bowing with such verve and precision
it seemed he improvised
then the adagio’s resonance of cellos and double-basses
a passage that struck heart’s minor chord
struck again when Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony – his last
but one before his suicide – began
somber bassoons and clarinets sounding steps heavy with time
a prolonged andante andante andante
Midway the drummer danced between his drums
then the final drumroll
As if to explain the profundity of consonance
that night reading the last page of Psyche und Tod
a woman’s dreams during the war tortured and dark
then she beheld a time-faded gift from one of
Deutschland’s esteemed conductors an etching
[on the bottom left a scene of cruelty
on the right souls rising up out of the earth
rising to Death the Fiddler]
its signature: Tchaikovsky’s 5th