Poetry

Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Frederic Chopin, composer; Polish Festival Orchestra; Krystian Zimerman, conducting and piano

My favorite perquisite while studying at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati was the option to listen to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at Music Hall downtown on Friday and Saturday nights. Cost: five bucks. Just show your student I.D. In the summertime, when the Cincinnati Opera presented its season, tickets got bumped to ten dollars. But I didn’t mind. Springer Auditorium in Music Hall has over three thousand seats and is the third largest concert hall in the United States. Only the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, are bigger. I figured I could afford the extra five dollars in the summer for all of the space they needed to air condition.

In October of 1988, my friend D. stopped me in the hallway on a Thursday afternoon. “I’m going to go listen to Bella Davidovich trash her way through the Chopin E Minor Piano Concerto with the CSO tomorrow night. You wanna’ come along?” I guess so. Who’s Bella Davidovich? “You’ve never heard of Bella Davidovich?” I’m from South Dakota. “Right. Right. I forgot. I’m sorry. Well, I’m no longer asking you to go. I’m now making it mandatory that you go.” Excellent. Thank you for asking and then requiring.

It’s hard to define exactly what you mean when you apply the term “poetic” to music. But you know it when you hear it. And the Steinway on stage that night had poetry written all over it. I was so entranced by Miss Bella’s performance that I splurged and went to hear her on Saturday night as well. Man, oh, man. I had never been in love with an older woman before and I never have since.

Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin were friends. But they were unlikely friends. Though they had music and expert pianism in common and at their core, each had their own method of delivering their perspective of romanticism. While Mr. Liszt whacked you across the head with his, Mr. Chopin kissed you on the cheek.

Chopin was at his poetic best when his music had the consistency of gently rippling water. No athleticism, no gymnastics, no tricks and no secret ingredient; just pure, untainted and absolute – music. Through his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Frederic Chopin tells us everything that everybody already knows about love, but doesn’t know how to say.

A pianist who plays this piece eschews the blatant, the glaring, the unabashed and the brazen in order to quietly embrace subtlety, delicate refinery and intimately mannered nuance – to find and remain in that place where the sounds of tenderness, warmth and endearment drip – rather than crash. Michael Humphries, played by Ty Henderson, is that person. He doesn’t need the prize money. He doesn’t need the fame. He just wants to be in the moment with his audience, his orchestra and his conductor. So insightful, reactive and susceptible is he to the music he draws out of the piano that he prefers to be unencumbered by clothing when he practices. The steward who brings Mr. Humphries his dinner in his hotel room chooses to leave without a tip so that Mr. Humphries doesn’t need to rise from the piano.

During a particularly affecting moment in the second movement, on that second night at Music Hall in Cincinnati, a soloing French horn cracked a note, and Ms. Davidovich scowled. Looked straight into the horn section … and scowled! One would never have guessed that an artistic soul embellished with such beauty and virtue would crack the exterior of a performance to administer a look of disdain. She might as well have stuck her tongue out at him and given him a raspberry.

Credits: To Bella Davidovich, for poetry in music.