Latecomers to the Concert

You talk of 'losing yourself in music'. It is the comfy clothes of the clichés of approbation to be used today - like 'love'. To 'love' a band could mean a degree of enjoyment or devotion that spans mild appreciation for the choice of the iTunes shuffle, or rampant, obsessive fandom.

This last week, I was late for the concert of a brilliant pianist, and declining to make an obvious entry between the flow of pieces (between which there was no window of applause), I felt it necessary to rather linger in the anteroom outside than intrude foolishly amongst the better-mannered, and more punctual audience. I sank onto a step, and listened.

There is nothing so thrilling, I have often said, as the green-room sound of an orchestra warming up in the pit. The Konserv at Stellenbosch is a myriad of doors and walls whose generous confines occasionally allow vaporous sounds, thrilling airs, to flutter past the passers-by. What now emptied from the hall was an overflow of notes, tumbling and raining down from Chopin and Rachmaninov preludes. Streams and cascades fell between torrential thunderstrokes with earth-moving finality, and I was left breathless.

Another person appeared. We smiled briefly at each other, in reciprocal sympathy for our tardiness, and mutual pleasure of the performance. He hovered at the crack of the door. I watched in fascination as, eyes closed, he his fingers began to move, yearning after the sounds pouring from the keys, his head tossing gently in thorough acquaintance of the piece.

Another man entered; a small man, compact, with wizened grey scruff covering his face and pate, and with a ready smile, though missing a tooth or two, and gesticulating, with the over-exaggeration of a complete foreigner, he mimed a request to join me on the little step. I smiled and budged over, a gesture more to indicate my willingness than of necessity. In unbroken silence – but for the thunderous passion booming gently through the walls – the three of us lingered to wait out the storm. Though the first soon left, the second remained tucked on the step, blue cap in hand, staring at the carpet, tossing his head, dolphinlike, to the waves.

I could feel my head beginning to empty. It had been alarming, the first time this happened, to feel the return of conscious thought seeping back cautiously after the first brilliant performance I witnessed. I felt like I had somehow broken the bonds of gravity and had floated in ephemeral space, buoyed up by the flurry and flourish of the tumultuous sound of that stately instrument. But now I embraced it. The very furtherest extent of my thought, when it did come, was that next door, these notes were being brought to life; someone's fingers were creating and killing them right next door. And as they dripped and danced about the room, I was swept up in the tide, plummeting from their short lives, jostled out by over-eager successors.

With gradual interest I began to notice my little foreigner on the opposite end of my step. Sitting with knees pulled up close, half-leaning against the wall, one hand lay forgotten, neatly on his lap, and the other brought to his eyes. It was too intense for sleeping; I watched his chest heave with mighty effort - I half expected to presently find him weeping - moved beyond expression by what he heard. I could not but look on with envy and with awe, admiring him from one step away. Could that unearthly music be made visual, if you could paint it, it was, all its electrical energy, its heavy falls, all its impossible pouring rivers, somehow entirely captured by this little man, huddled against a carpeted wall, his eyes closed in thorough absorption.

And then I was lost. We stayed for the rest of the concert, slipping in at the eventual applause for an encore, and witnessed the insect fingers that scuttled at inhuman speeds, bringing forth more sounds than could be heard, and joined the applause at the end. But if I forget the face of the pianist, I will never forget the face of his music.

I shook hands with him afterwards, and he held mine. Even if I could speak his language, I don't know what I would have said to convey my wonder of his.