2: The Carnival of the Animals

The competition enters its second half.

For the next two days, the Third Round will take place. Its contestants: one American, two Russians, one Ukrainian, one Chinese, four Koreans, one French, two Japanese.

It only makes sense that there are more Asian contestants at an Asian competition, but Miëko thought the distribution represented a larger realignment in competitions: they have always reflected, if not anticipated, shifts in the locus of power, and now was no different.

Asia’s rise also in part effected the rise of Yoshigaë’s prestige as a competition. A rising tide whatever whatever.

Miëko stretched and sat down in her seat in the judges’ balcony. She settled in for the long fight: six hours of music per day; much more than that when one factored in breaks, tuning, rowdiness.

The first recital of the day is at noon; the last recital will be over past nine.

The moment the staff opened the doors of the hall, it was packed: many contestants stayed behind to hear just how good those who knocked them out were; others were the usual friends and family and locals. At this point, everyone had a favorite, even if they hadn’t at first. Everyone was set on hearing every performance from here on out.

She felt the anticipation as well.

At this point, the filtering is complete. For twenty or forty minutes, kids, students can survive. An hour—that kicks everyone but the best to the curb. Professionals feel their concentration waver after an hour. To express yourself coherently and cogently for an hour straight—that is no easy task. The Third Round judges voice and musicality under stress and fatigue.

And it is the judges’ third time hearing the performer as well. They become stricter, less forgiving of eccentricities or cover-ups.

For the performer, well. It’s the third time onstage. They may relax, but God help them if they laxen.

Even after a day off, the physical and mental fatigue won’t have dissipated; even if one feels fine, one’s body may not be.

Both the judges and audience could tell the moment Alexei Zakayev stepped onstage that something was amiss.

He’s not smiling.

Zakayev, who had played the jester and crowdpleaser, now approached the piano with a darkened expression, rigid and cold.

His hands adjusting the bench seemed oddly stiff.

A small breath, and then he began, but he almost seemed possessed by some demon of depression.

A ripple shot through the hall.

What’s happened to him?

Miëko, not realizing that she was leaning forward, watched Zakayev fall apart.

She did catch a rumor that, hearing that he had made it to the Third Round, Alexei’s mentor had caught a redeye to Japan and trapped him in an all-day lesson yesterday.

Overpracticing, she realized. Plain and simple.

I understand the impulse—but he really should have been left alone. He was doing so well.

Miëko sighed internally.

Alexei had played so freely, so playfully, perhaps because of being the first in both rounds so far. With the odds stacked against him as much as could be, he could play without expectation or pressure. Would he have guessed that he’d make it to the Third Round as number one? Of course not. And that very lack of expectation had drawn out his best.

But now expectation there was—in large part due to his mentor’s appearance.

Or just because he had become the top twelve of nearly a hundred: he had, just for a moment, allowed himself to think that he could win.

He had become greedy.

Don’t think, she imagined him thinking to himself. Just play as you have been. Calm, calm, calm.

But the word “prize” hovers before him.

I have to play well, I have to play well, I have to—

As his fingers treaded the keys, he tensed: his gestures became exaggerated; his tone smudged. His liveliness and ease—his hallmarks—are gone.

Trying to recover his tone only made it worse. Mistakes he’s never made before.

Zakayev’s eyes seemed to be widening.

The audience felt his nervous energy.

It was already past being a recital. A car with broken brakes, maybe. The audience held its breath and watched Zakayev barrel toward his inevitable crash.

The piece ended and applause pattered, but Zakayev had fully dissociated.

The core of his program, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, began without preamble.

Hopefully he had intended a brisk performance. A youthful, energetic Pictures. But judging from the shadow that crossed Zakayev’s face a few measures in, it seemed to be a good bit faster than he had intended.

A hasty “Promenade;” with slipping fingers, the sound lacked any focus and didn’t resound.

Stay strong.

Miëko half-chastised, half-beseeched the boy. She had liked him.

You have a chance. Calm yourself in “The Gnome.”

Pictures at an Exhibition evokes a short story collection’s diversity and color: pieces of every character, tempo, mood. A meandering “Promenade” theme links the pieces together: truly a walk through a fin-de-siècle gallery.

But Zakayev’s brakes were doomed. Tempo be damned, let’s just finish, he seemed to say. Damn the lanes, damn the signs, damn the curb.

He hunched more and more over the keyboard. Miëko was frankly impressed at how few notes he was missing, given his tenseness and speed. But if he played “The Market at Limoges” like this, she thought he might actually die during “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs.”

Miëko felt her heart disintegrate.

He might just stop.

However horrible she felt, his mentor, sitting somewhere in the hall, was surely suffering more. Not to mention Zakayev himself.

Who, by the way, having paled to death during the first half, now reddened as he seemed literally to hold his breath to sustain his intensity.

And no wonder. At that tempo, for so long, he would be exhausted. His lungs burning, his arms stone.

The entire audience was frozen in place, their macabre fascination unyielding. Sharing his panic.

Rising notes, like a demented rocket shooting into the stratosphere. Fear and panic at their zenith.

Zakayev leapt off the top keys and plunged into “The Great Gate of Kyiv.” And by that, he slammed his hands on the top keys and bolted up before crashing down into the opening chord and the piano bench.

Miraculously, with the end finally in sight, he seemed to calm.

Miëko, the audience, and Zakayev himself seemed finally to breathe. She noticed her fellow judges visibly easing as well.

There are a lot of old people here. Take it easy, or you’ll give us a heart attack.

Zakayev finally mustered some of his old swagger; he seemed actually to be enjoying himself.

If you’d just played like this from the start …

Miëko crossed her arms. She loved his sound; it conjured an enormous, refreshing fresco.

His sound pulsed through the hall. It was actually marvelous.

The last chord.

His “The Great Gate of Kyiv” was his best playing all competition.

He stood up, looking as though he’d been to hell and back. The audience applauded him, consoled him.

“Oh my God,” he could distinctly be heard muttering to himself. He stumbled backstage.

Moments like this, Miëko thinks that pianists perform more with their heart than anything. As with sports, in which a single mistake often destabilizes the athlete’s spirit more than anything, leading to mistakes only an amateur or even beginner would make.

*   *   *   

The audience had been treated to quite the thrill to start the Third Round, but the second contestant, a Korean girl, proceeded with her clear, direct, expressive performance to seize the hearts of everyone in the hall.

Schneider’s pupil?

Nathaniel Silverberg watched the girl onstage. She studied in Ireland but had grown up in Korea.

Good athletes, phenomenal athletes, often fail to become even decent coaches. Conversely, in music, plenty of musicians make their name not through sold-out performances but through sold-out performances of their pupils. Schneider is one such musician: with surprising frequency, a contestant or young artist he liked turned out to have grown chez Schneider.

Contestants all have their own character, of course, but mentors, no matter how much they respect and acknowledge their pupils, still end up leaving their fingerprints all over it.

Can she be said to have a Schneider-esque sensibility? Is that even meaningful?

Sure it is.

It isn’t a bad thing. Since Haydn taught Beethoven, taught Czerny, taught Liszt, taught anyone who knocked on his door—Liszt was one of Maestro Hoffman’s musical grandparents (which would make him and Jin Kazama cou—)—pianists absorbed, if not imitated, their mentors. Even now, in a world with increasingly homogenous performances and musicalities, a mentor’s touch is indelible.

So what is it, to be Schneider-esque? A fidelity to the score, a deep understanding of large-scale structures and judicious expressivity to convey it. His pupils’ similarities, Nathaniel believed, arose not only from his pedagogy but also from their desire to please—and not to upset—him.

Sometimes aspects of a mentor’s musicality reveal themselves by proxy in a pupil. Schneider’s militant anti-fussiness was distilled and clarified by his students’ directness, for example.

It’s hard to say that musicians always know the kind of music they want to play. The longer one is an active professional, in fact, one’s musicality is wont to be diluted. And those pieces one likes or wants to play are not always the same as those one is good at playing.

He himself only had these realizations, Nathaniel reflected, after he began to teach. Teaching others—and suggesting how to improve and hone their musicality—taught him to apply the same critical eye toward himself. A constructively critical eye, that is.

What did Maestro think of teaching? What did he feel as he taught the boy?

Did he leave his fingerprints on him? Did he leave them on me?

In whom is there more of Maestro?

Can I find Maestro Hoffman in the boy? What will happen if I do?

*   *   *   

At this point, it’s a matter of taste.

Akashi Dakashima, having returned as a plain and simple audience member, listened to the third contestant, also Korean, and marveled wholeheartedly.

A number of contestants he had admired in the Second Round and believed would make it on, even if he didn’t, ended up being eliminated alongside him. He couldn’t understand why. But then he found recordings of his favorites, and listened to them alongside recordings of those who had passed.

And he had a jarring revelation.

The judges really were incredible.

Akashi would never have said it out loud, but he believed his ear to be quite discerning; he had no problem telling apart most professionals, say. But on his second or third listen through a dozen and a half recordings, he realized something he had missed almost entirely in the hall.

His favorites from the Second Round who had been eliminated all shared a flaw: here and there, they all played as if to get through the music. They couldn’t sustain the tension, the narrative drama; their music sounded like a book halfway through being edited, with plenty of sections to be sharpened. He even came to wonder how he had been so blown away in person.

Jennifer Chan’s record was one he paid especially close attention to; it had been so exciting in person, but sitting and scrutinizing it, he realized just how boring it was.

She was a musician who didn’t know how she sounded.

The current contestant’s second round was so prim that he didn’t remember the performance at all, but now his mighty, muscular Beethoven showed how wrong Akashi had been.

And now Ravel’s La Valse—that impressionistic firework—was blowing him away.

Had the judges been this keen?

Akashi despaired as he listened.

Those damned glissandi.

The contestant was dispatching glissandi up and down the keyboard with the expression of someone wiping down a table after a leisurely breakfast. When Akashi had bfirst learned glissandi, he had wept from the pain. They looked as though you were just stroking the keys with your fingers, but they were in practice extremely painful. A technique from hell.

Did he suffer too, at first?

He watched the contestant’s face in profile.

I want to play that piece. I want to play it like him.

The pure pleasure of listening to a piece on repeat, buying the score, breaking the plastic and folding the spine down so that it would sit open on the piano.

The absolute joy of making those sounds which you so loved with your own two hands. Like holding your newborn child—and he knew.

The misery of realizing just how hard the piece actually was.

The unfathomable technique needed to dispatch so many pieces with anything more than sheer desperation.

Practicing and practicing and practicing and standing in the exact same spot as months prior.

Despairing at the possibility that this would be as far as you got.

And then one day, being able to play it, just the way you hear it in your head.

That sheer happiness. Like seeing the light at the end of a pitch-dark tunnel.

And then performing it.

Akashi sighed as these thoughts rolled through his mind. He couldn’t believe he himself had gone through that process.

I’m glad I performed. I’m glad I’m a part of that constellation of pianists. I’m not the brightest star, not by a long shot, but there I am.

He was proud of himself for his realism. He was happy to have gotten as far as he did.

He suddenly wanted to cry.

But he shook away his tears and looked at this much brighter star playing one of his favorite pieces.

A star he’d never become—a fact he was okay with.

And when that star handily finished off La Valse, Akashi got to his feet and sent bout after generous bout of applause his way.

Next was Masaru Carlos.


© BSP 2022