6: L'Isle Joyeuse
How many times have I stood here?
How many more times will I stand here?
How much do I understand what it means to stand here?
“Miss Eiden, this way, if you please.”
The stage manager quietly gestured toward a seat for her. She declined with a small smile. As if he immediately understood, he nodded and retreated into the dark.
Aya looked toward the stage door and stretched.
The madness after Jin’s performance was something else. The calls for an encore, and the applause more generally, were such that her own performance had been delayed ten minutes.
The audience had slackened, as though the Third Round had already concluded.
Aya wasn’t sure how to feel about this.
I want to be here.
I want to understand, to comprehend, to feel what it means to stand here. I want to be excited, happy, afraid.
She’d never thought that before. She’d never felt much about the opportunity to perform; it had never been in question.
She had never been nervous, never been afraid. It was akin to doing a chore.
She had seen documentaries, yes. She had heard stories, of course.
Titans of the piano, brash and extroverted onstage—and on edge and afraid backstage, muttering what a mistake the whole endeavor was, how they’d rather have teeth pulled, right up until the doors open.
She’d also seen it firsthand, in competitions and at school: pale men and women with damp brows and sweated-through clothes writhing in their seats until their turn came.
Aya, who’d never even felt nerves, had no idea what all the fuss was about, but she could comprehend it. Fear—it was an emotion she’d never heard of.
—Why are they afraid? Aren’t they here because they want to be here? So why are they afraid?
She had once said this—yes, out loud—to a friend. She could never forget her face. And in that moment, she marked herself: she’d never say such a thing out loud again.
People were different.
No, she was different.
But, standing there, she understood.
She said the word to herself: fear, fear, fear.
She remembered something from long ago, from around the time she had first begun to learn the piano. She had been sitting at the window, listening to the rain. Imagining La Chevaleresque.
The realization that the random pitter-patter of the rain was being processed in her mind as music. That music was all around her. That the world obeyed and revolved around laws she did not comprehend.
That was fear.
That the world had sung its song of nature and beauty for eons before her, and that it would do so for eons after she had crumbled. That she was incomprehensibly small, and the world incomprehensibly vast.
That was fear.
The world has so much music in it. The sound of doors opening and closing. The sound of the wind on the hall’s windows. People talking, people walking.
It was totally different from the despair of the First Round.
She realized how young, how naïve she had been—as a supposed musician, and as a supposed adult. An underdeveloped artistry and inflated self-worth. Thinking back, she laughed bitterly. She felt her face burn up.
She had comprehended her arrogance several times this competition—but right now, standing backstage, might be the most stinging. She was embarrassed.
She realized how small she had been. Twenty years, and she thought she was some bigshot. She thought she was strong enough, smart enough. A regrettable ego, based on the fact that she made music, knew music.
How foolish.
She had been much more mature as a child, listening to the rain.
I’ve only been seeing what I wanted to see, hearing what I wanted to hear, playing what I wanted to play. Only looking at the parts of the mirror reflecting the nice bits.
I haven’t even been listening to music properly.
Her stomach churned.
Music was incredible, music was alive, music was something she would live with for the rest of her life.
Even as she thought she believed these things, she acted in the opposite. She abandoned some music, mistreated others, and indulged in noise.
The more she thought, the more a cold sweat erupted on her clammy skin.
When Kanadae and Maestro Hamazaki suggested that I compete, they believed in me. I had been so, so arrogant. When I was trying on dresses, I had been so, so arrogant. How shameful, how childish, how embarrassing.
Aya sighed. She couldn’t believe herself.
And she was grateful. Grateful to Kanadae and Maestro Hamazaki, who cultivated and coddled and cheered this foolish, prideful girl.
It couldn’t have come soon enough.
(If someone had been watching Aya’s face for the last minute or so, it would have been understandable to guess that she was some mean-spirited, dangerous character to be avoided. Smiling, frowning, blushing, turning, squeezing the eyes: she seemed manic.)
She was glad she had reflected. Glad to be feeling the fear backstage: it meant she was alive.
Not that late, right? Aya asked.
She imagined speaking to Jin, and Kanadae, and her mother.
Am I too late? Aya wondered.
What are you worrying about, you haven’t started playing yet! Worry about that when you’re onstage, Jin’s playfully dismissive tone came to her.
I guess you’re right, Aya thought.
Where’s Jin now? Maybe he’s hiding somewhere, since the audience wouldn’t let him be if they got ahold of him.
If he’s hiding, it’s probably under his hat in a corner of the hall.
And Maya?
She felt her chest tighten.
She felt a spot of embarrassment. Maybe it was him she had been fleeing. With his head-on approach to music, his seriousness and maturity, his sheer confidence—maybe it had been all too bright for her.
Maya, he kept his promise to Maestro Watanuki.
—You have to keep playing. Promise me.
She imagined the scrawny boy nodding back at her.
—Ajang, I kept my promise.
She conjured the proud, smiling man.
I am so, so stupid. More than anyone in the world. I know nothing, and I think I know everything.
Aya breathed deeply.
I am so afraid. I cannot imagine stepping out onstage. Can I live as a musician? Can I hear my own music? Do I have music worth sharing?
I am afraid of the answers.
She began to quake.
I really am afraid.
She stepped back and forth, trying to walk it off.
The fear is good. The fear is exciting.
There are stakes now.
She heard people rushing into the hall to hear her performance. Standing by, excited and nervous. Their nervousness seemed to transpose itself onto her.
—It’s rare to close out a competition, you know?
She heard Masaru’s voice. She felt herself brighten.
It’s not a bad feeling, Maya.
The crowd growing larger. Fatigue and eagerness. The swell.
She was right in the middle of it.
Aya breathed quietly and closed her eyes. The darkness spread out infinitely before her.
She realized the people near her had become quiet. Nervousness so tense you could tightrope on it. An audience suddenly quiet.
“Miss Eiden, it’s time to go,” she heard a warm voice say.
Aya smiled. The stage door swung open.
Light flooded her vision.
Now, let’s make some music.
* * *
The moment Aya Eiden stepped out for her Third Round performance, the audience seemed to ripple.
There wasn’t noise or whispering, exactly. But the moment you saw her face, you held your breath, felt something come alive within you.
Of course, Akashi Dakashima was one of those people.
What could that smile be?
She was smiling. A smile he had never seen before—not a professional smile, not the slightly upturned lips of a steeled musician, but a relieved, refreshed smile.
Like a clear sky after rain.
No, not the sky. Say it had been raining a long time, weeks on end. Sometimes misty drops, sometimes unnavigable downpours, but rain, rain, rain. Until one day, the sky clears.
Aya Eiden’s smile was that of the girl stepping out to play under the sun for the first time in months.
Aya’s entry, as with the last two times, caused a particular stir. The stir of “We’re not done yet, Jin Kazama isn’t everything, let’s see what she has to say,” the stir of readying oneself.
Aya sat down and looked out beyond the piano. The same point she always sought.
What does she see?
I want to see it. I want to reach it. I want it.
Akashi felt a sudden, burning desire to call out, What do you see?
But he knew she couldn’t answer it any more than he could see it.
I want to be there. I want to be there, with Aya Eiden, feeling what she is feeling, in the place where she is.
He couldn’t recall the last time he had wanted something so badly. He felt ice-old sparks stinging his entire body.
Oh.
Oh, oh, oh.
I see.
I want to play.
He had thought he was done. That he had done his best, that he had left his mark, that he was satisfied.
Not at all.
He had only thought that from his fatigue, from his nervous.
This was only the beginning, he realized with fear in his heart.
I’m at the starting line now. I will seek, crave, work toward that place, that music, that feeling. Forever.
Aya’s smile had forced that realization upon him.
He felt a precipitous, overwhelming desire to sob. He held his breath and pressed his nails into his palms, but when he heard her play the opening of Chopin’s Ballade no. 1, he began to cry anyway.
* * *
Ballade.
Flipping through a music dictionary in her youth, she had found the following definition: “an emotional love song, usually of a slow tempo.”
These days, the definition is apt: an album needs one or two; a concert needs a few to give the band and the audience a rest; a singer should have—hopefully has—at least one that made it big. Something for lovers to listen to as they lean against one another.
But that would be a ballad.
This is a ballade with an e.
Ballade-with-an-e might be more of a folk song, plaintive and yearning, about the past or a loss.
Chopin took the ballade and transformed it forever.
Song, long ago, was essentially a mnemonic. In lieu of writing, one sang. But singing as recording was often not “what happened back then” but “how did they feel back then.”
Perhaps the deterministic, neutral, flat medium of the written word compresses our range of emotion; perhaps there are long-lost pinnacles of triumph and abysses of despair inaccessible to those who remember by the written word.
We all remember by song rather than by word, though—when we are children. When we sing (or scream) with joy, or are consoled by a lullaby, we are brushing against a purer, stronger emotionality—unfortunately meaning very little to us, being at most a few years old.
Chopin’s ballades, then, are miraculous in their remarkable intensity of emotion, in their distilled primordiality, in their unrelenting loneliness. A loneliness from being fundamentally alone in the world: one’s mind has a capacity limit of one.
Chopin knew this loneliness well: he had many acquaintances but few friends, and, living as an expat in Paris with no homeland to return to, his sense of loss would have been as frightening and overwhelming as anything.
But explicit, overt loneliness was—was unseemly. Was uncouth. Was gauche. So one buried it, and, with the rhythms of life, it stayed hidden well enough. One had people to meet, fees to haggle over, premieres to give. And one had lovers to entertain, and fan mail to answer, and concert reviews to write. One had to remember to laugh along at the right moments. So busy!
Easy enough to forget how lonely life is.
Confronting it head-on would be fruitless; that could only lead to despair. Seeing one’s own weaknesses—what good would that do anyone?
And that is why we sing, why we must sing. We must sing, that we might circumscribe, define, control this awful loneliness for one second.
And truly, what a miracle it is that one might sing through the piano? That one might sing out against one’s loneliness, and by doing so lessen the burden of others’ loneliness as well?
Thank you for listening to my song.
Aya smiled onstage.
* * *
Aya’s fear backstage, and her euphoria now, were distilled into the declamatory opening of the ballade: the piece became a medium for life’s desperate happiness and oppressive loveliness.
Masaru listened, mouth hanging open.
She’s evolved again. Her expression, it’s totally different from last time again.
Masaru felt himself twinge with jealousy that it had probably once again been Jin’s performance that had brought about her evolution.
Genius boy, always stealing the thunder.
Her sound was mercury, shimmering and oozing. Pure.
Ajang, you’re a goddess.
You have wings.
Masaru couldn’t believe it. Her sound soared and soared.
He had thought they were barely equals during the First Round, but she was transubstantiating before his eyes. His terrestrial, deterministic, articulate performance was nothing to her divinity, her infinitude.
What do I have to do to keep up with this girl?
Had he not held her had after the First Round, he imagined that she might have gone off somewhere. That she would drift away from music, that she would float beyond where he could reach her.
She really, really is something else.
He was sure that Kanadae, sitting beside him, felt more or less the same way. Kanadae, who had always been sure of her talent. Who had always trusted her hearing.
How proud she must be.
And then, silence.
Aya was still in her own world; the audience, right there with her, felt no need to disrupt her flow.
Aya composed herself, and then began her next piece, a piece that comforted, in its structure and technique. Schumann’s Noveletten.
It’s a good piece. I should play it.
Masaru felt his vision blur; with a start, he realized he was gently crying.
Why? This isn’t a sad piece.
But the shock didn’t dissipate; it only magnified and pulsed, stronger and stronger. His heart flopped weakly, arrhythmically, against his ribs.
Masaru felt as though he had just concluded an extended drip with Aya.
Ajang, I know we haven’t been alive a long time, but when we met up again, didn’t you feel like it’d been forever? But that we were somehow the same, despite how long it had been?
Masaru sighed.
Ajang, you’re back. I’m so glad I’m getting to see it.
Scenes from his childhood kept flitting by: Aya tugging on his hand, Maestro Watanuki greeting him for the first time, Aya crying on their last day together.
His parents’ faces when he told them he wanted to learn the piano.
The bored, sneering conservatory student paling by the second as he played for him.
His first day in the conservatory. Opening the Juilliard audition invitation. Meeting Maestro Silverberg.
What’s gotten into me? It’s not like I’m about to die.
Masaru chided himself, desperately holding back tears. But when he looked around himself, he realized it wasn’t just him: most people seemed either misty or dabbing at their eyes.
It’s not just me.
He was rather surprised—he had thought his tears were from knowing her.
Who thought so many people would cry from the Noveletten?
Kanadae, to her credit, was freely crying, letting the tears run and splash on her lap.
It must be from the ballade—the Noveletten is just pushing it over.
Such was the unfathomably, almost discomfitingly heartwrenching intensity of Aya’s sonority. Even with such bright music, the emotions churned and churned. Emotions one never knew one had.
The audience stared and stared. They let themselves be sucked into Aya’s whirlpool of emotion. And in the depths, they found themselves, in their most naked, vulnerable form.
How.
Masaru watched Aya, watched as she held back a smile of satisfaction.
How can she be so pleased, and we be so stripped of our defenses?
How can her music expose us to ourselves, make us confront ourselves, so forcefully?
He recalled her face when she first recognized him. A little disarmed, a little lost, a little sidelong—and then very, very happy.
Maestro’s face when he introduced her to them.
He knew, incidentally, that he had wanted to chide him, very badly, for his interest in Ajang. That it wasn’t the time for crushes, that he had to focus. But Masaru knew very well who the woman next to him had been. And he knew that even the fearsome lion would have to keep his mouth shut next to his once and future lioness.
Masaru kept a closer watch on his teacher’s mood and inclinations than he ever knew.
Maestro, I may lose to her, you know? And she has far surpassed me in musicality. And of course there’s Jin Kazama.
Maestro, you’ve said to me that I have to win, that I will win—and I thought so too. But what can I say when these are my opponents?
You think so too, right?
But Masaru knew: these reflections were meant, futilely, to distract him from the oppressive power of Aya’s music.
Damn it.
Masaru wiped at his eyes.
The Noveletten finished briskly, but Aya once again remained seated, eyes closed. The audience followed her lead.
Stillness.
Her trance held.
Ajang, what are you going to do, making your entire audience cry at the Noveletten?
Isn’t your next piece even darker, even more sonorous? Isn’t your piece the gravest of Brahms’s piano sonatas?
He watched her place her hands on the keys. The sight alone made his eyes grow misty again.
* * *
Brahms’s piano music is concentrated at the beginning and end of his career; his solo work for the instrument especially is almost entirely from the first half of his life.
Brahms’s Piano Sonata no. 3 in F Minor: the work of a just-bloomed twenty-year-old. His last piano sonata.
It’s the product of a mere two decades, but it’s quintessential Brahms. Grand sonority, meticulous architecture, sweeping Romanticism—and an homage to Beethoven (Brahms can make even the fate motif sound organic and startling).
The piano sonata: a genre almost every composer must wrestle at least once; perhaps Beethoven’s legacy towered too tall for Brahms to give it more than a respectful but sidelong glance.
Aya Eiden: also twenty years old.
But Aya’s twenty and Brahms’s might feel a decade apart: their knowledge, their experiences, their environments. Twenty today—unlikely to be married; in tertiary education, with any luck; hopefully without child—would resemble twelve in Brahms’s time.
But Brahms, one must suppose, was mature for his age: even his early piano works, common wisdom says, requires the maturity of at least early middle age.
Brahms, if no one else.
Or so Nathaniel Silverberg thought when seeing her program.
But now, as he sat and listened, it was time for that adage to be quietly retired.
He had rather suspected this when he was listening to her Chopin ballade. When he realized he had been listening not as judge but as just one more supplicant, waiting for the benediction of Aya Eiden.
The resurrection of the goddess.
He knew of her story, of course—but this was not someone whose every note was suffused with that pathos. She didn’t need it, not really.
She was working toward her sound, but she had something to say. So many students and—ahem—colleagues seemed to have so little to say.
Each note born of her fingers seemed serious, deliberate, meaningful. In every corner of the piece, intention, consideration, and study could be heard. Her music had a universality about it.
What a wonderful thing, music, Nathaniel thought.
In the moments before the second movement, he began to think.
That titanic opening. That menacing exposition.
How it hadn’t been one bit noisy. How orchestral it had been.
How certain of her sound she had been.
With certain pianists, one feels, nervous, tense, for no particular reason; that nervousness, usually, comes from an uncertain sound. One feels the pianist’s hesitation, the cock of the head—I hope this note sounds the way I want it to.
Aya’s music was certain. There was no doubt about what the next note would sound like: it would sound exactly as she intended.
We can trust her, Nathaniel thought. We can relax.
She has something to say. Let’s hear it.
It was a tale—a sad tale, but from a long time ago. One she hadn’t told before. But she was ready now.
She told it quietly, precisely, with a minimum of fuss or filler. With a firm tone, like a judge, she spoke.
Nathaniel listened and listened.
The story began its second movement, its second phase.
A gentle, flowing narrative of an entire life.
The audience just watched her onstage, listening to her, looking inward. Their lives so far, their trajectories and orbits. What had they accomplished? What did they regret? What was next?
Such was her story’s honesty and openness and directness.
Nathaniel instead tried to parse her story.
An early start to life as a prodigy. The awe and amazement around her, twenty-four hours a day. Absurdly busy, so many cameras. Peripatetic.
A death. Despair. Unceasing stares. Everyone an enemy.
A long, long silence.
The appeal, and fear, of a quiet life.
Is it peace? Or a deadening?
Is it enough?
Insecurity at her lack of appreciation for what others so desperately want.
Fear at being worn out.
If she’s tasted heaven and hell at twelve, why even bother?
What more could there be?
One particularly lonely night. Cold tile, dim lighting. A flash of silver.
Red, red, red.
Never again.
Choosing to try. Making an effort to try.
Something began to flow within her. At first, just intermittent drops. Plink, plink, plink.
And then steadier drops, and then a small rivulet.
The rivulet swelling. A brook, a stream, and then a river.
Healthy, vibrant. Teeming with life.
The third movement, a dramatic scherzo. The complexities of life.
A competition, the first in forever.
How afraid she must have been. Curious stares, critics licking their chops, and the dismissiveness of her peers.
You’ve had your try, their smirks said.
How afraid—and of herself, more than anything or anyone. Could she play again? Was she ready for the stage?
The stage: a holy site and torture chamber. To have left it behind and then to return …
Olga had said to him that Jin Kazama had been the second-lowest scoring contestant to reach the Second Round.
The lowest?
Aya Eiden.
When she had met Masaru, she was still lost, uncertain. She didn’t seem to have registered that she was back onstage, back on view.
She hadn’t seemed to realize that she was, once again, a musician.
Two years of conservatory, and still acting like a child. Nathaniel had made a note to talk with Hamazaki after the competition—You’re babying her.
Now he didn’t need to.
She had reunited with Masaru—with the musician—and the music—she had found, all those years ago.
Nathaniel had not been pleased. He had trusted in Masaru’s victory—still did. Even after she appeared and stole his heart, he still trusted.
And of course, there was the confounding factor of Jin Kazama, god-child.
Aya was closer to Jin than to Masaru. Might it not be the first time she’s met someone of her temperament, and a match for her talents, if not surpassing them?
Nathaniel rather suspected that however shocked he and his fellow inveterate judges had been after the First Round, that Aya’s shock would have been far greater.
And now, her resolve had finally hardened.
She had finally realized that the stage was where she belonged.
The fourth movement. The story of looking back.
Things she had not noticed while living through them coming back. Things she had not heard, now making themselves known. Her arrogance, her naïveté, her childishness.
The meaning of life not only in music, but as a musician.
All held their breath as they offered their ears to Aya’s music. They watched. They absorbed her life as she shared it, its trajectory and detours. An eternity through countless instants.
The fifth movement. Her story was ready to look forward. The music, patiently, slowly swelling—the oncoming finale.
The open expanse calling. The energy of the ocean, the salty air.
Yoshigaë.
And then an expanse even greater.
No looking back now. The past was gone. There was so much to do—so much to see, so much to play, so much to live, and live for.
We knew this, and she knew this. She was sure of it. And she couldn’t wait.
* * *
The last chords, F Major like the brilliant morning sun. They rang and rang and rang.
She sprang up, a radiant smile across her face. The audience, too, sprang up—and screamed. A tsunami of cheering and applause. Aya jumped in shock, but also laughed, incredulous.
It had only been the story of her life, after all.
* * *
The ovation wouldn’t quit, but one piece was left in her program. Aya smiled and sat down; the audience too, sat down, when she placed her hands on the keys.
A small sigh.
A little sunburst, a thank you for listening.
Like Masaru, an encore-not-encore—for her recital and for the competition.
L’Isle Joyeuse.
* * *
Could there be a more fitting end?
The thought drifted into Kanadae’s mind, addled by general exhaustion and her adoration of Aya’s exultant performance.
The program had been Aya’s. Of course Maestro Hamazaki as well as her mentor had offered reasonable advice, but the program had been submitted as she had originally conceived it.
Though Aya couldn’t have known, the programs themselves evolved—from the easy appeal of Waldstein and the Mephisto Waltz to the serious, thrumming narrative of the Brahms—as she evolved over the two weeks of the competition.
She recalled Aya’s uncertain expression before the start of the competition.
She must have expected, in some corner of her mind, her triumphant resurrection. She must have expected that it would go this way. She surely had her doubts and fears, but she must have thought that a colossal return to the stage was in her fate.
Kanadae took a breath.
The sharp trills opening L’Isle Joyeuse.
Debussy was said to have written it while on vacation with his second wife Emma.
The immediate impression: a sun-soaked ecstasy, grandeur and delirium. A beautiful piece, saturated with happiness.
And Aya too, performing it, seemed overflowing with joy. She was literally radiant.
The joy of making music. Of becoming one with the audience. Of reviving one’s talent.
A joy most musicians never feel so strongly.
Her audience lapped at the overflow.
She’s back.
Kanadae felt tears coming on, again. She had felt it at crucial moments in both the First and Second Rounds, but never as intensely as now.
Those times, she had merely returned. This was a homecoming.
She was as certain of this as anything.
The loyal priestess to the god of music had returned. She was ready to give her life to him.
Kanadae was proud.
Look, Dad.
I was right.
I told you she’d become something great.
Kanadae wanted to stand and shout.
I was right!
For Kanadae was joyful, as joyful as Aya was, trill after trill shooting out from the piano like impossibly beautiful rays of light.
* * *
Has there been a greater L’Isle Joyeuse?
Miëko watched, astounded, locked onto the stage.
Aya Eiden looked a notch greater, bigger somehow. Her presence could be felt, forceful but not imposing, even in the judges’ section.
How incredible—to startle and shock, even at this late hour, amidst the nearly unbearable fatigue.
Who is going to win?
Miëko wanted more than anything to look at Nathaniel, but she resisted the temptation.
She had thought Aya had been impressive but lagging; her maximum ability, however, was greater than she had realized—perhaps she hadn’t even reached it.
She suddenly thought back to Hoffman’s recommendation, and Sergei’s comments about him. What had Hoffman’s goal been? To hurl a bomb at the musical establishment? Really?
At first glance, it seemed correct. To take the uptight, stuffy judges down a few notches with the naïve, brilliant, sparkling Jin Kazama.
—I present to you all Jin Kazama.
—He is a “gift.”
—Probably from the heavens above.
She heard the recommendation read in Hoffman’s voice.
—It is not he who is being tested, but you and me.
—Whether you will accept him as a true gift, or look upon him as a calamity—that is up to you.
How happy Hoffman would have been to hear this L’Isle Joyeuse.
* * *
She had a realization in that moment.
What I am seeing now is the answer.
As she listened to Aya Eiden, evolving before her eyes, detonating an explosive joy.
Jin is not a bomb meant to demolish the musical establishment. He is not even the main bomb. He is the trigger—the first atom to reach critical mass and start shooting out particles and energy, triggering a reaction in all the other atoms around him, on and on and on.
He is the trigger to unleash all the pent-up energy and creativity and life in today’s musicians.
His music will be the trigger for us to find our own music.
Hoffman’s bomb isn’t just dynamite.
It’s a nuke.
The results were plain for her to see. Aya, at first so burdened by her training and her past, now free to sing to her heart’s desire.
We are so, so screwed.
There have been many “gifts,” and not just Jin Kazama’s performances. It was no calamity. It was the greatest gift there had ever been.
Miëko realized that she had tears in her eyes.
Not only because of Aya’s fantastic, supersaturated performance, but because Hoffman’s will had been so perfectly passed down.
In Aya’s performance, she also heard Jin’s, and Masaru’s, and Hoffman’s performances.
What a joy to be able to hear this.
What an unspeakable joy.
* * *
L’Isle Joyeuse soared to its climax.
The joy of playing, the joy of seeing the talent, the joy of being carried away by it all.
We are on the isle of joy.
We are all soaked in joy, staring up at the sky. All receiving the greatest gift ever given.
The last phrase.
Sprinting up to the top of the keyboard—and then plunging down.
Aya had bolted up at the end of the Brahms; not now.
She had an assuredness about her; with the happiest smile one could have, she stood up calmly.
Applause to close out a festival. For the contestants, the judges, the audience, and everyone in between.
The Third Round was over.
Two weeks of recitals were over.
Only the Final Round to go. One day, six performances to go.