The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

  Ursula smiled anxiously.

  ‘Water off a duck’s back, Pip. Come on!’

  Ursula leaned forward, her hands clenched together. ‘Were you very upset?’

  Philip looked at her, fed on her sympathy in spite of himself.

  ‘If every artist bunked off every time there was a duff review, we’d have no industry.’ John hoiked his trousers. ‘I’d be flat out of a job. Those boys think they’re God, but they’re just two-bit hacks scratching a living.’

  ‘I’ve taken a wrong turn,’ he gasped. His voice was thick. ‘Something’s gone out of my playing.’

  ‘Oh, Phil! Which side of the frigging four-poster did you get out of?’

  Philip shook his head.

  John laughed nervously. ‘You pick your moments. Do us a favour.’

  ‘ I . . .’

  ‘Let’s say for now you’ll play those concerts. As soon as we’re out of here, we’ll go to a pub, have a drink and a chat. You’ve got worked up about something that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters to him, John.’

  ‘I can’t play any more!’

  John was super-tense. ‘I just need to end the meeting on a constructive note!’

  ‘I just need to end the meeting!’

  ‘Philip, Jesus! D’you really have to piss on his enthusiasm? This guy is total gold dust. Your fairy godmother disguised as a fat toad.’ He smiled mock-manically.

  There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ said Ursula.

  He blinked in her direction.

  ‘D’you need someone to talk to?’

  John cottoned on. ‘Talk to us.’

  ‘I appreciate . . .’

  John nodded intensely. ‘Family problems?’

  Philip shook his head.

  ‘Oh . . . um . . . is your mother . . . is she . . .?’

  ‘My mother died years ago. I have no family.’

  ‘Oh sorry. Listen, Pip . . .’

  ‘ I appreciate your sympathy.’

  ‘Well, yeah . . . just that . . . this is such a great opportunity. You know, the concerts were a bit of a fluke.’

  Philip looked up in pain.

  ‘Well, not a fluke, obviously.’ John crushed his face with his hands, stress-exhausted. ‘You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.’

  There was a pause. Philip wiped his eye. ‘What d’you mean fluke?’

  John drove the fingers of both hands through his hair. ‘Philip, I love you, I admire you, I’d do anything for you, but the business is relentless. You won’t let me forward-plan. We’ve had no record contract in three years. There’s a new wave of competition-winners and plastic Chinese wunderkinder and Russian cyborgs who play Islamey with the backs of their hands. The industry’s in chronic recession. You have a loyal public, immense critical stature . . .’

  ‘Till yesterday.’

  ‘But your international career is dwindling. And there’s a feeling abroad, um, I don’t know, that you’re . . .’

  Philip looked away. ‘Go on! What?’

  ‘. . . resting on your laurels.’

  He was amazed to hear this from John, of all people.

  ‘It’s a fact. Great pianists are immortal but careers come and go!’

  ‘So I owe it to you I’ve been sponsored for three South Bank recitals which are all sold out?’

  There was a moment’s silence as John stared flatly at him. ‘You owe it to Frank.’

  ‘Frank?’

  ‘Your angel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘South Bank sponsor with uncustomary leverage.’

  ‘A sponsor!’

  ‘You know this. Promoter, sponsor, record company.’

  ‘I need to be told who my sponsors are!’

  ‘You don’t give a flying toss. You like to think venues are allocated according to some system of interpretative merit. But there’s a lot of shoving and pushing because the whole game’s so competitive and Frank’s sway made the difference. Don’t ask me how. He wants you on the platform and in the recording studio and can make it happen. Isn’t that good enough?’

  Philip gazed at his agent in astonishment. Suddenly he owed everything to a rich amateur. ‘One minute I’m a so-called “great pianist”, the next my career’s dangling by a thread!’

  ‘Which you seem keen to snip through.’

  ‘So which is it? Am I a “has-been” all of a sudden?’

  John’s face darkened at the testiness of his tone.

  Philip subsided in his chair, hand against his forehead. John’s sense of critical pressure had connected at last. Beyond the enthusiasm, the flattery and courtship was the usual abyss of uncertainty that dogged every pianist’s life. The flip side of opportunity was abrupt marginalisation. One had to compete, one had to prevail, or the world moved on. There was nothing he could say. Common sense could not explain what was happening to him.

  ‘Would you play for me?’ said Ursula.

  He could see the suspense in her eyes.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘It’s to do with the playing, isn’t it?’

  John glanced carefully at Ursula.

  Her lips parted.

  Philip was steeply uncomfortable. Even the simplest propositions were impossible to construe.

  ‘Would you play for me? I could come to your home.’

  His lips were dry.

  ‘I remember your Amsterdam recital so well. Schubert, Brahms. Ever since then it’s been a kind of dream to meet you.’ She hesitated, her neck muscles working. ‘I think it’s terrible that someone who has given so much should feel as you do now.’

  Her sympathy was distressing. He could hardly bear to look at her.

  Ursula’s face was a picture of compassion. Her fraught eyebrows dramatised a deep concern. ‘It’s difficult for you to know how much your playing means to other people. You communicate everything to us. We can only receive. We can never give back the same thing. Words are useless. But how you play a certain phrase means so much to a listener. What you do goes to the heart and people are so grateful for that.’

  John rubbed his cheek and looked at the floor.

  ‘Let me hear you, please! You need to play for somebody who really cares.’

  The directness of her appeal was unendurable. He would dissolve in her kindness if he were not careful; and whereas it would be a relief to dissolve, to disintegrate, it was not something to do here.

  He nodded tightly, holding on for dear life.

  He felt the heat of her gaze on the side of his face.

  John was consumed in his own thoughts at the end of the sofa, hands worked together on his lap.

  Philip turned towards her and offered a look of tacit appreciation and, for a second, he felt her acceptance of this look as a kind of pull on him, as though she had drawn something into her self. He had no idea what. He experienced, momentarily, the balm of an intense relief.

  Bulmanion cleared his throat before opening the door, and then came into the room in such a way as not to notice what was being said, or what he might be interrupting. The housekeeper followed him in with a tray.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, resuming his position on the sofa. He gazed airily about him, not wishing to impose. ‘Jeremy’s a little short-staffed today.’

  John glanced carefully at Philip.

  ‘Drop of tea, miss?’ said the housekeeper.

  Ursula drew herself up, making an arrangement of trailing hair, shoulders and bosom that was properly formal. ‘Oh, thank you!’

  Philip was left to exchange glances with Frank, which relaxed the situation momentarily. Frank seemed to have grasped the mood in the room. He had a better sense of the personality of the pianist he admired and was more careful.

  ‘Philip’s upset about the review.’ John rubbed his eye.

  ‘Of course,’ said Frank. ‘The review is bunkum.’

  Philip looked up in surprise.

  ‘A critical travesty penned by a mincing cre
tin. Those goons all have their petty agendas. I mean these days it’s all “my prose is purpler than yours”. Maurice Venables, for example.’

  ‘Maurice is fine. Maurice likes me,’ said Philip.

  ‘He was probably on holiday, and Andrew Dungface farms you out to those snapping curs Baldwin Cocker or Patrick Peabody. Cocker is a waffle merchant, and Peabody a hatchet man.’

  John shook his head in amusement.

  ‘You’ve been lucky, hitherto. All the gods get desecrated sooner or later. Look what they said about Horowitz - “a mere showman”. Brendel - “too intellectual”. Kempff - technically “not quite world class”, according to some arrogant German bureaucrat posing as a critic. Bolet was “too measured” when the poor old bugger was in his seventies, Richter “too hard”. Perahia “too hygienic” Kissin too God knows bloody what. They’re always trying to flip the apple cart. Daft eunuchs, the lot of them.’

  John laughed out loud.

  Philip smiled, in spite of himself.

  ‘It’s a great recording,’ said Frank. ‘It only adds to my determination and excitement. Listen, John will go over the details with you. I’m using a new business model. You become a copyright owner in the disc, with a say on packaging, and reissues. I’ve got foreign distribution all sorted. We move faster and lighter on our feet than the majors, who are so busy firing people they don’t know what’s going on, and my team are first-rate. There’s a new technology initiative through a subsidiary company and we’re hooking up with this Williams chap, who designed these extraordinary speakers.’ With a grand gesture Bulmanion plucked the music remote from his side table and clicked it in the direction of the wall.

  Piano sound erupted from the loudspeakers. John was suddenly alert, Ursula startled.

  The image was gargantuan, crystal clear, the surface immaculate. Waves of arpeggios rolled up and down in the bass. A trumpet-like clarion came in in the treble. Semiquavers showered the air like particles of light. They were immersed in sound, surrounded by glints and sparkles, a stirring envelope of shattering piano tone enhanced to an unbelievable degree so that one seemed to be in the centre of the composer’s mind, at the teeming source of inspiration, and as the texture became more complicated, the myriad skeins were held in high-resolution clarity by the astonishing loudspeakers, an interlocking tracery of brilliance that dazed and confounded simultaneously. The music came to its first cadence, like a detonation of grandeur, before releasing the right hand, which now swooped off with spread wings, soaring on its path like an eagle cruising the thermals and gusts of an immense canyon, whilst the left hand rose in pillars of golden sound beneath it.

  Bulmanion listened with transfixed radiance. John shook his head in near disbelief. Ursula was rapt, as though enslaved by a masseur’s masterful hands. Philip, too, was utterly captivated. He was listening to himself.

  When the track ended, John burst into eager applause. Bulmanion clicked off the player and put the remote on the table.

  ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ said Ursula.

  Philip could barely acknowledge this.

  ‘Yours will be the best-engineered CDs in the marketplace,’ said Bulmanion sonorously. ‘In a hundred years your recorded legacy will sound crystal clear and be the pride of connoisseurs.’

  John looked at him with brilliant eyes, urging him to embrace the vision.

  There followed some talk about the speakers. Frank had gone into the matter thoroughly before writing a cheque for two hundred grand. John nodded sympathetically. It was a pleasure to discuss very expensive things on apparently equal terms with Frank.

  Philip was paralysed by the playing of another self, a self he hardly recognised. The recording was fifteen years old and blazed with temperament and technique. Everything was so shaped and definite and confident and it frankly amazed him that he had once been the pianist who played like that. The strength of the playing lingered in his mind, overlapping something half forgotten, as if a torch from the past had been aimed at the present and amongst the shadows was the lost outline of what it had felt to be thirty-five, with a younger man’s fresher connection to the music. Listening to that earlier self he realised how much he had changed, and how irretrievable were the reflexes and impulses of early confidence, as though the means to play like that was driven by a need to express that was now less acute, or more qualified by a subtler sense of the music. The past was more cut off than even he had realised. The man who had achieved that sound was somebody else, someone he could be no longer. He felt a curious surge of rivalry with his younger self. He could do as well now, could do more. By different means he could achieve that powerful unity of effect. It would take a lot, absolutely everything, but this was the thing he was born with: the will to try harder, to make, once and for all, an indelible impression.

  He had a need to be on his own.

  ‘I hope you’ll come to the concert,’ he said suddenly.

  John looked at him in disbelief.

  Bulmanion smiled. ‘I booked my tickets long ago.’

  Philip rose from his seat quickly.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me. I apologise for my ill temper. It’s a very attractive proposition that you offer. I’d like to discuss it, obviously, with John and perhaps we can come back to you shortly.’

  Bulmanion stood up solemnly. ‘It would be a privilege to work with you.’

  John’s beaming face glistened with relief.

  Philip turned to face his agents. ‘John, you’re the best. Sorry I’ve been such a handful. Ursula, I don’t deserve you.’

  She smiled at him with lovely warmth.

  ‘Jeremy will take you wherever you wish to go.’ Frank guided his guest to the door.

  Soon he was on the back seat of a Mercedes. The big car made its smooth way along Villiers Lane. Philip listened in his mind’s ear to the Rachmaninov prelude that Frank had played to him, as if he were playing it now.

  Chapter Seven

  The day of the concert started with a phone call from Cynthia Erhardt. She wished him luck and begged him always to relax the upper body and foot arches, so that energy could ‘come through to all of us’. He received flowers from the John Sampson Agency with a note from Ursula, voicemails from Laurent Mattier Brzeska of the London Piano Competition, and from Olivier Desormand of the Conservatoire in Paris. Everyone knew about the concert. The Guildhall’s Alistair Banville said his pupils were coming. There would be London-based concert pianists, Frank’s production team, sundry figures from the British musical establishment, critics, the public, and friends.

  He rose late and wandered around his bedroom getting dressed. He was neither confident nor nervous. He was in the pre-concert groove of strained determination, a familiar state. One sleepwalked through all the intervening stages of the day incapable of doing anything except become tensely ready. He booked his cab, checked his shirt and tailcoat.

  For the last three days he had practised without break, dawn to dusk, an onslaught. He wanted to be absolutely fit, as assured as possible in the technical security of his playing. Inspiration would come if it chose to, and if it chose not to he would take his own advice to Vadim and get through it anyway. Because you had to keep playing. The best-prepared concerts could misfire. If preparation were no proof of success, self-doubt did not mean failure.

  He had not allowed himself to think sideways or backwards. Sleep had come to him steeply and profoundly on the Saturday night, and after rising late on Sunday he had begun to feel his old self again. He practised with a consuming attention to sound. He allowed his hands to reacquaint themselves in super slow motion with the topography of each piece.

  ‘What d’you do on the day?’ Derek had asked him at their last lunch. Derek had wanted to film the behind-the-scenes run-up to performance as part of their pitch to the BBC, but Philip had declined, not wishing to be distracted for so trivial a cause.

  He had practised, of course, limbering up with exercises before the final run-through at QEH. And mid-morning he went
to the bookshelf and took down a volume of Chopin portraits. He turned to the Bison daguerreotype, taken months before the composer’s death. Chopin was posed in a photographer’s studio, seated with his hands on his lap. Even in the mottled grey of the picture his illness was blatant. The looks of a thirty-nine-year-old man had almost vanished behind the swellings of oedema and the tension of pain. He was mentally and physically ravaged by consumption. Famous, but too young to die, Chopin faced the camera with the barely suppressed despair of one who knows the awful significance of a formal portrait in this state of health. Peace would come before very long, he knew; death would release him from the burden of illness and incurable nostalgia. This he bitterly accepted, and was letting it be seen. But Philip saw something more in the faded old photo, something he had never really noticed before. Although on edge with discomfort, it seemed as if Chopin, when the shutter fell, had wavered a fraction, his sternness faltering, his eyes following the train of a thought on its way across space-time into a realm that pain had never obliterated, the secret sanctuary of a poetic distraction from which, in the short space of his life, he had drawn immortal inspiration.

  Philip closed the volume gently. He sat at his desk for several minutes.

  He arrived at the South Bank by cab at a quarter to seven. He came through the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hall and made his way through the empty auditorium to the dressing rooms behind the stage. There were people in the anteroom moving chairs and shifting music stands. He checked in with the floor manager before disappearing into his room. He unpacked shirt, tailcoat and antiperspirant. His cigarette pack he put carefully on a shelf, together with house keys and spectacle case. He could see from the clock it was ten to seven. The room was a comfortable cell: upright piano, vinyl chairs, ashtray, wall mirror.

  He stripped down in the washroom and showered. The tingle of water on his skin brought everything to the surface. His naked body was like the essential self he would bare on the concert platform.

  At ten past seven he stood in his bathrobe smoking a cigarette. Every inhalation banished nervousness for about thirty seconds. He dressed carefully and methodically. The shirt was fresh and cool; his tailcoat eased on comfortably. He fixed his cuffs and combed his hair, checking the results in a mirror. The whiteness of the shirt improved the colour of his eyes. He polished the lenses of his spectacles and slid them back on.