Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor, Op. 23, No. 5

Valentina Lisitsa is angry. Her eyes drop shut with a sigh. Her hands unfurl upwardly, concentrically out in release, abandon, after another middle-march repetition, and then down again to sewer’s table, machine, see how her back jolts in her red dress. I never noticed before. I was in college; there was much I hadn’t learned. Begrudge her not these staccato mistakes, complexity compressed. Be one of the millions of views, see instead the holes the hammer hears, nails turned to screws that puncture, her tempo slightly faster than her peers’, any number of features one might call effortless. Modern man, she is tired. I never noticed before; what industrial repudiation, to blaze through incorrect notes, to give grand up-yours to the piece the century turned out with a cog. All ramped up, they will applaud uproariously, thought Rachmaninoff. For spite mechanistic, she continues, thinks, I am his persuasion to crack sound. I am sixteenths banged unrelentingly back. I am an eighth for an ending.

Savannah plays on as I sit watching her practice the piece, speed increasing measuredly through the demands of pensive passage, her imbricate arms having always worked in this way, her friendship I have taken for granted, I think. Was I not just talking to her so casually who will soon throw down “Rhapsody in Blue” like a grand rug unfurling in one, fell swoop, great conduit of current orchestral mode; is too much being asked of the piano, I mean? Can it contain more than it did before, processor whose interior is called the action, percussive appropriate whose assembly line checks, spurns, rejects, says how’s this for handmade, how did you think things would be done moving forward, multiplicity of fallen instruments placed within a prelude. I am just beginning, a wheel cuts the countryside while clarion chord in major heralds the beast out the cave hit by trebuchet under such sun as is no boondoggle. My vision gave way to sound too long ago to remember. My instruction to you two is to sit, count time till they decide what remains.

Samantha and Eddie, on the far side restaurant of the high flung floor, have found panorama seating. They are going out to dinner before the concert in a hotel that was Eddie’s first project out of college. Audrey Hepburn diagonal, architect draws her dipping her head over Seattle’s oldest church. Bang of repeated wrist action, beamspan of a skyscraper his fingers transmute, a starling swing that, in first-person, would knock you clean out. Bang, and you’re back farther. It is the turn of the century. It will lead to King Kong’s fall, crepuscular crowds whispering agog we were wrong, we were so wrong, when what they’ll have done is prop up an animal their own size, when back-facing preservation against bullets, glass, hand-cranked sirens, is a newfangled speaker saying his message is first. Minor chords are playing leggiero, meanwhile, to chide his voice and others in era of vacuous expanse, the future inclining its ear back from a thirty-second TV theme that frames a family of criminals it thinks genius. What else will we harken to ourselves alone, what mingling of cacophonies, with each new year needing its own masterpiece, deserving not the composer thereof, piano performer we plucked up with our brand—look, she gleams like an angle, buh-ding, cha-ching, bling—thinking not how her performance would be leadened by the actual weight of a watch. Bang, muted city clocked. They check the time to make sure they’re on track. All set, thankfully, like flint against empire’s abstractions, they look across table at one another as if acknowledging that all supports will fall. Selfsame gratitude given, sounds in the lights of sights seen, artists loud and soft, crescendo and smorzando, will feel revolutionary forever. See Smith Tower over there? Not long ago, it was the highest building.