The Concert Pianist (27 page)

Ursula dabbed her cheeks. There was no point in leaving the room

Philip was touched and acutely depressed by the spectacle.

John leaned forward. He had been thinking his way around the matter.

‘Vadim would step down. Messy, but fuck it! I can do it. And yet! You know I nearly fired him for messing Marek Nolson around, skiving off rehearsals etc? According to Marguerite he's putting in the hours and practising hard for your concert. I mean he's rising to the occasion, wants to live up to the strength of expectation in your fan base. Do you really want to call him off? He seems to have turned a corner.'

Philip smiled suddenly. He wondered whether his broadside in
the
Taste of India restaurant had hit the mark after all. Interesting that this update should herald from Marguerite. Maybe things had settled down in that quarter. He felt stronger with this development. It implied that despite appearances he still held sway with Vadim, which would only be the case if Vadim respected him as an artist: a warming thought.

‘I expect he wants to show the world he's a better pianist.'

‘No, no,' said John. ‘Not at all. Far from it.'

‘I wish he would.'

‘It might be better to let things stand. He's your protege, after all.'

He was amazed by the depth of his solicitude for Vadim. Something about Vadim called for special terms of treatment, an allowance he was only too ready to grant, given the slightest excuse. If he were really back on the rails it was a lot harder to be selfish and Philip was consumed by the implications of this. Very little could be arranged at short notice. The prospect of his not being able to perform was absolutely harrowing.

‘D'you want me to speak to him?' said John.

There was a long silence.

‘Um . . . is the documentary going ahead?'

Philip managed a nod.

‘Great!'

John's energy was coming back. He glanced at his computer screen, scanning for new emails.

‘Best thing we can do now is get cracking.'

Philip's head fell forward. He was in a different realm now.

Ursula reached across to touch his forearm. He took her hand, enclosing her fine knuckles in his broad palm. She squeezed back and the gentle pressure sent a lovely sensation around his elbow and into his shoulder. He looked up sharply, almost to break the spell. ‘Would you come and hear me play?'

She returned his gaze with an excited look.

‘That's a great idea,' said John.

‘I'd love to!'

‘I'd be so grateful!' he said.

‘Just whenever you want,' she said. ‘Call me. I'll come right away.'

John looked on with strained benignance.

‘Oh good.' Philip smiled back at her. ‘Great.'

He
realised that it was now time to rise and move on, and that their business was done. They had an agenda. He must let them get on with it. His eyes prickled as he got ready to leave.

‘We'll do everything humanly possible,' said John, hand on mouse. He was tapping in a phone number. ‘You heard about Konstantine Serebriakov?'

Philip turned. ‘What?'

John stared back at him for a moment.

‘He just died.'

Philip glanced away. He was not surprised or shocked but felt the loss immediately, something removed, taken away; the quiet pity of another's death. Dear Konstantine - seen a few days ago, gone now, a dry leaf, fallen. He wanted to sit down, but somehow stayed on his feet, receiving Ursula's look of sorrow almost as an additional token of sympathy for himself.

Later, as he walked through the bright afternoon sunshine that picked out colour everywhere and strolled along Piccadilly towards the leafy gap of Green Park with its sun-shot crowns of chestnut trees covered in white cones and the simmering blue above, it seemed that Konstantine was only fractionally more absent now that he had been for years. The grand old man was a residue of a something that had passed into posterity decades ago. His death merely the perfection of a withdrawal into the domain from which he had come in the first place: the realm of music, a realm of afterlives.

Chapter Nineteen

Derek had decided not to use footage from their trip to the cottage. He would not intrude on Philip's grief. The human-interest approach he no longer valued. Instead of filming the pianist's daily routine, or personal story, he wanted to convey his inner life - music as experienced through the mind of an artist.

‘We're making a subjective art film that inhabits the sensory, intellectual and musical consciousness of a pianist.'

‘Will the BBC wear that?'

‘Yes. You need art to address art. Documentary is too literal, too earthbound, too personally intrusive.'

He wanted Philip to recall the history of his musical awakenings, like a parallel biography. He would find a way to match this material visually, providing a sort of filmic descant to a richly scored narrative.

Philip was pleased. It suited him, anyway, to recover first impressions and return in his mind to a period when the musical landscape was unfolding for the first time. He would draw energy from the memory of all that.

Derek meanwhile fastened on images. He was intrigued by the iconography of the piano. The piano was a kind of habitat, its keyboard a stage for all manner of digital dramas, and a sensual surface of subtle resistances. Its rounded end and curving line were suggestively feminine, its soundboard like the inner depths. He became fascinated by the player's lifelong physical relationship with an object of musical furniture. The Steinway in Philip's house was like a companion or familiar. A piano on stage seemed almost bridal.

Derek was correct to linger on the physical relationship. There
was
indeed something amorous in the player's angle of attack, the way the body expressed itself into the instrument. Every player experienced a need to transmit feeling through touch itself. By the time technique was ingrained musical impulses had become tactile ones. The hand's stretches, the pectoral projection of vibrant chords, the caressing of keys were as much emotional releases as physical means; and although there would be tiresome days when Philip was at war with the mechanism of a piano, there were moments in the heat of performance when he felt fused to it. This precious sensation was the fruit of long partnership.

Even as a child he would have known this instinctively; and just as the piano drew him like an alluring mistress, so sheet music became the herald of forthcoming escapades. He read the literature cover to cover before he could play it. Scores were like journeys through a different dimension of landscape, mapping the physical adventure of a piece and its expressive topography. He would dream of the pages of Schubert sonatas as unending forests in which one could get lost, like the wanderer himself. He remembered gazing for the first time at the jagged semiquavers of Schumann's Presto Passionato, which suggested a pianistic intensity quite different to the mountains and precipices of transcendental Liszt. The Schumann looked crazed and uncomfortable, already patterned with madness. Liszt's Studies, by contrast, were grandly Alpine, as though Liszt wanted to parade unscalable difficulty even in the appearance of his scores.

Derek had the idea of tracking the sheet music of a Liszt étude with a cursor while Philip played through it, so the viewer could witness in notational form the amount of data Philip was processing to generate the music. They picked the central section of Wilde Jagd, using four cursors across two staves to illustrate - first in slow motion, hands apart, and then together at full speed - the right-hand melody coming through broken-chord semiquavers, the echo of that melody an octave lower picked out by the thumb of the left hand, and a syncopated leaping accompaniment which the rest of the left hand had to deliver at huge speed and inconvenience below the ‘echo'. ‘What you're hearing is a headlong lyrical melody changing colour and direction, gaining in passion and excitement, forcing itself to apotheosis, but what makes the passage so exciting is the complexity of additional information going on around this,
all
of which the listener is experiencing holistically while the pianist, after a thousand hours of practice, struggles to blend and differentiate as though he had a brain for every finger. In the ideal performance everything must be felt, every note must exist, in balance, in proportion, duly graduated, and what is so madly exhilarating for the audience when the pianist is absolutely fantastic is not the spectacle of dexterity so much as the acceleration of the listener's intelligence. Just as fine prose makes an artist of the reader, so galvanic virtuosity sucks the audience into the pianist's hyper-alert mental field. Suddenly the audience is processing emotionally charged information at a hugely enhanced rate, and it is the excitement of holding on for dear life to this stirring, multi-dimensional outpouring generated by another human being that accounts for the éclat of true virtuosity. Prestidigitation per se is irrelevant.'

Derek wanted to film Philip teaching. Through the Royal Academy Philip got back in touch with the Russian student whose previous lesson he had cut short. He apologised on the phone and invited her to come back again. She was almost dumbstruck to hear his voice, and then nervously eager to fix a date.

She arrived off the street on a Wednesday morning, very composed and gracious, her nervousness under tight wraps, her alert eyes flicking between tall Philip and short Derek. She was determined to seem professional and to master whatever was required for the documentary and she allowed herself to melt a little as Derek explained how very relaxed he wanted things to be. Philip insisted on her taking tea and sitting down while they talked about Moscow, her family, her digs in London, the personalities at the Royal Academy, none of which relaxed her. He said that she had made a very good impression last time, and that today he would talk more and she could play less.

He sat near by at the end of the keyboard. He was right over her, closely engaged with the way she moved on the keys, her hand position and fingering. She fought the distraction of his closeness and started to play Chopin's Funeral March Sonata, almost maximising her gestures to buy space.

Her face was marvellously expressive, frowningly Russian, full of pouting woe and musical surprise. Her shoulders moved a lot. She pivoted from the waist. Music ran through her, from the balls of her feet to the tips of her fingers. She had beautiful, arched hands with
long
fingers, and almost tentacular arms, and a slim, sinuously wavering torso that Derek dutifully filmed.

‘What's going on in these opening pages?' said Philip, after she had played for a couple of minutes.

She looked puzzled. She had not expected to be tested in this way. She was not even sure she understood the question.

‘Page one after the grave,' he said. ‘It's breathless, jumpy, all very urgent and nervous. But look, see here, five chords and you're into this hymn-like song, which becomes so ardent and flowing.'

She nodded. This was a fair description.

‘What d'you make of this contrast?'

She frowned again. Language was not really her medium.

‘Panic, turmoil, terror,' he continued, ‘next to passionate vitality?'

She looked at him with deep brown eyes. ‘No time to waste.'

He smiled triumphantly. ‘Exactly! This sonata movement has no time for transitions. Extremes are pressed together, suggesting the adjacency of opposites, minor and major, fear and abandon, panic and exaltation. Already in a couple of pages Chopin has set life against death. Without being too fanciful I think we can discern breathlessness in the first subject material. In the development this progresses to, shall we say, consumptive coughing. The crisis of the development is a sequence of spasms. Even if you resist the link to Chopin's health, the net effect is absolutely sick and desperate. And yet it abates, the dark night of the soul, and the second subject returns. “Let me live, let me live,” it seems to say. It's interesting that Chopin's most passionate stretch of melody stands toe to toe with music of such morbidity. Fear of death, you might say, has squeezed out an amorous desperation. In the coda, passion and terror are welded together, bringing us to the end of present-tense life in this sonata. From now on there's no hope. The scherzo is a
Totentanz
in mazurka rhythm, the funeral march is exactly that, and in the finale Chopin takes us beyond the grave.'

He looked at her keenly.

‘How do you address a work like this?'

She sat there waiting.

‘For the pianist,' she said, ‘is very hard.'

‘You can't fake it.'

‘You have to be quite brave.'

‘
This music stares death in the eye. It thrusts us at panic, grief, resignation, and terror.' He paused for a moment. ‘Chopin rounds off with a smashed-shut door. After that, we can move on. To acceptance. Or rebirth. But not in this sonata.'

She nodded, taking it all in, hands resting on her lap, fingers entwined.

Derek's camera ran discreetly a few yards off, following the silent exchange of looks between teacher and pupil. She was getting what she had come for and was deeply thoughtful.

Philip gazed at the keyboard in ongoing concern. What he had said to her could be known. How to assimilate it pianistically was another matter and for the time being it was better to let the words sink in.

She was in no great hurry to touch the keys.

Chapter Twenty

Philip was more excited by the prospect of having tea with Ursula than the idea of playing for her. His cleaning lady had spruced up the piano room, perfected the kitchen surfaces, cleaned the loo and bathroom; and Philip had purchased the creamiest gateau from the local patisserie and dug out his best bone china. Wine glasses were buffed to a sparkle, should they prove necessary, and Chablis was chilling in the fridge.