Christopher Hacker: The Morels

Those weeks following Arthur’s win the whole school seems to wake to his presence. In the cafeteria I watch the sight of Arthur silence each table he passes, one by one. And after he is out of earshot, a topic change, sotto voce :

Where’s a bully when you need one?

The Ensemble Contemporain commissioned him to write an encore, I heard.

If you ask me, Nacoki was robbed — did you hear his Sibelius? It’s like ten times harder than that Mozart.

And the Seventh? What were the judges thinking? Didn’t we do the Seventh last year?

That was the Fifth. Three years ago.

I often come across him in the hall now, engaged in some intense discussion with a member of the faculty. In music history, our teacher, who’d always given the impression that no musical achievement more recent than a century old was worth talking about, invokes Arthur’s name to illustrate the degree of the teenage Chopin’s prodigy as students nod their heads: Oh, you mean that good . I’m jealous, sure — jealous of his change in status, jealous of his effortlessness. How I struggled! With my lack of skill, with my lack of discipline. Arthur lacked for nothing I could see. The Annual Spring Concert is an all-day affair. In the morning the kiddie orchestra performs in the smaller recital hall, followed by a matinee program on the main stage, courtesy of the intermediate orchestra. Classes have ended; it’s a day for good-byes. The main event comes in the evening with the advanced orchestra, Mr. Strasser at the helm. It’s referred to as the “Concerto Concert,” although a full-length program has been prepared: three pieces, with an intermission after the first two.

To start, an overture.

Fidelio , Mr. Strasser says, addressing the audience after taking the podium, Beethoven’s only opera, was a failure in his lifetime. This was a student concert, after all, and even in the breaks between applause there was time for a teachable moment. Past the glare of stage lights I can see that this concert is better than well attended. It is packed. Although the mezzanine is dark — the only light comes from stray glints off the chandelier — it is alive with movement. It is rumored that scouts from CMA are in attendance, as well as several poachers from Juilliard. Zubin Mehta’s granddaughter is a student here, so I’m imagining that the grandfather is here too. Mr. Strasser looks dashing in his white bow tie and tails. He continues. During its short first run, he says, the score went through several revisions, and Beethoven wrote no fewer than five versions of the overture. In time, each has become part of the standard repertoire. Except this one. The “Characteristic Overture in C” was published posthumously. Beethoven considered it too insubstantial to open such a big opera, and indeed it is shorter and more lighthearted than its four brethren and remains mostly an academic curiosity. So, as we find ourselves seated here tonight in academia and as we are curious , let us draw back the curtain and behold!

With a flourish of his baton, we begin.

An oddly extravagant introduction for such a simple piece, as if he is trying to make excuses to the audience for its simplicity. Sometimes, there’s a discrepancy between how straightforward something sounds and how difficult it is to play. The hardest part of this piece for the cellos, the breve sixteenth notes, requires a light, steady bouncing of the bow coordinated with some fancy fingerwork. To get it right involves a metronome and many hours of painstaking work. To get nine other cellists sounding as one, and to have that section interlocking with the others, entail the coordinated efforts of several dozen players and weeks of rehearsal. And yet our passage should breeze by all but unnoticed — if Mr. Strasser has managed to get our balance right, the listener should only really be conscious of the few bell-like notes of the French horn, rounded out by the timpani, the strings a blurred picket fence seen from a moving car. If the listener is more than marginally aware of us, then we have failed. And perhaps this is our unsung heroism as skilled performers and the sacrifice great composers ask of us: to execute a difficult passage without drawing attention to the passage or to ourselves. It is something Arthur’s argument hadn’t taken into account: that sometimes not noticing is precisely the point. Does every piece and every performance have to hit one over the head? Isn’t there any room for subtlety? Couldn’t an evening at the symphony be, god forbid, pleasant?

As the final notes give way to applause, Mr. Strasser looks over at us — at me, it seems — and winks. Our playing has pleased him. For the past three years here, I’ve felt like an impostor, faking my way through lessons and rehearsals, but tonight, in this thrift-store tux smelling of camphor and mildew, in this seat in the school’s most advanced orchestra, I feel like a star.

Squinting out into the audience, I think: Arthur is wrong. Of the faces I see, not a single one is asleep or bored or even reading the program. All eyes are on us. The clapping, that burst of sound Arthur described as “white noise,” may have numbed a few hands to make, but its effect is anything but a canceling out: it’s a sound that enlarges us and fills our hearts.

There is some nervous excitement tonight about performing this concerto because in spite of it being the headline event, it is in fact the piece we have rehearsed the least. Mr. Strasser had bigger fish to fry than Arthur’s concerto. The Dvorak we were planning to play after the intermission was a beast and required most of our attention; the Mozart was easy, in a key that facilitated everyone’s being in tune — lots of open strings, the brass and woodwind parts describing natural overtones — so that the thing could almost play itself. Mr. Strasser said that as long as we tuned our instruments carefully from the oboe, we would be fine.

In rehearsals, we would always save the Mozart for last. Not a member of the orchestra, Arthur would arrive onstage as per Mr. Strasser’s instructions with fifteen minutes left on the clock, and after unpacking his instrument, he’d ride with us through entrances two, maybe three times at most, and then we’d call it a day. We had only played the piece through in its entirety once, earlier today, and although it had gone without a hitch, there was nonetheless something precarious about our performance, at least in my case, each phrase coming to my fingers just in the nick of time.

Doubtful , Mr. Strasser says now, addressing the audience, is the word you’ll find printed in your programs next to this concerto of Mozart’s, as it is considered by most scholars to be a fake. Penned in the last century by a violinist-cum-composer with a flair for pastiche. It is, like the Beethoven, performed only as a curiosity. It is not included in recordings of the complete violin concertos. The place it is most often heard, fittingly enough, is in the audition hall, learned by young violinists who, like the concerto itself, hope to be taken for the real article. It is ironic, however, that our winner, who turns out to be as real as Mozart himself at the same age — virtuoso violinist, accomplished composer — should be offering up this particular piece of apocrypha for us. Well, I think we can all safely assume that this piece, through young Arthur Morel, has never sounded more genuine than it’s going to sound this evening.

Applause and the thunder of our feet rumbling the floorboards bring Arthur from the wings to take his place beside Mr. Strasser.

They shake hands.

Arthur is, somewhat scandalously, not wearing a tux. He has on khaki pants and a brown corduroy sports jacket. He’s not even wearing a tie. If Mr. Strasser is shocked, he hides it well. There is a stir of eye contact and smirks through the body of the orchestra, cut off by Mr. Strasser’s swift turn and raised baton.