Moment with Mitya

Scrap the piles of dirt idea.  I'm having a moment.

Setting:
The mango-colored Philharmonie, a warm, large yet intimate hall filled with the most gloriously clear acoustic perfection, layered sound swirling over my head and leafing back the pages to a time when the world wasn't so big and I was the pianist in Shostakovich's 1st Symphony instead of the ash-haired German I saw tonight.  That piece, written when Shostakovich was just 19-years-old, is not only my favorite orchestral piece but also one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century - the Scherzo alone with its juxtaposed themes and menacing cymbals makes my skin crawl with electricity and fear.  The horror and grief and raging inner fire of a sickly young man oppressed by the Soviets, living his life under that dark shadow of constant terror, a world of the grotesque: this is the 1st Symphony.

I first encountered this piece in my high school days while playing the piano part with the university orchestra.  The strange and brilliant conductor read off a green mini-score, accused the basses of sounding like B-52 bombers, and once asked me in the middle of rehearsal if, after a particularly speedy chromatic scale on my part, I was perhaps on methamphetamines?  I'd already played the Shostakovich 2nd Piano Concerto and had read his biography, so these rehearsals and subsequent concert only strenthened my bond with Shostakovich.  Each piece you play becomes part of you (or you become part of it).  Most of the time, exhaustion takes its toll and renders many pieces unlistenable. But an orchestral piece, especially when rehearsals are few, is like the smallest glimpse of something far grander than you could imagine.

Tonight, I relieved it all, my own experiences with the piece 5 years ago--the notes, the rehearsals, the people, the witty lines, the orchestral score I was forced to read off since the piano part was long missing--, my life then and the friends I had (many now lost in the shadows of time and space, which, let's be honest, isn't such a bad thing),  Shostakovich's life and the circumstances surrounding his composition of this piece, and a thousand other things, all related and unrelated, evoked by the weeping cello or crashing drum, leaving me with impressions of things real and unreal, feelings I've nearly forgotten, and an overwhelming desire to send out postcards to a few people who share my symphony.

There are some people in life who will give you, freely, one of the two greatest gifts to be had: friendship and music. Friendship can turns sour. Music is a constant.

What struck me most tonight was how connected I felt to the symphony, as if it were mine, for me, alternatively whispering and shouting things for my ears alone.  It's in my pocket, like a gem, and I can take it out and marvel at its genius and beauty, turning it over in my hand to notice its glints of opalescent light, its angular cut, its heaviness.  Nobody can take it away.  And everyone can share it.  This is the gift.  Five years ago, my conductor gave this symphony to me, and I put it in my pocket.  I'm going to write him a postcard.