How can you write about music when it so absolutely transports you that, having been elsewhere the entire concert save for the applause that brings you back to the instant, you were without footing? Speaking of feet, was it the music director Steven Mercurio’s winged directives, or the scores, that kept the orchestra on their toes? 

Some pieces I classify as those that want to live. I have never heard a piece which wants to die, but I know that not all want to live. The Czech National Symphony Orchestra’s repertoire of Voříšek, Mendelssohn, and Dvořák was all about living, and making live. Every classical music concert is about life, to an extent. It is about sound and body, attunement and attention. 

The violin soloist, Sandy Cameron, is a flickering light dancing around the stage led by her violin, leaving a titan’s footprints in sound. For Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, I have some notes simply scribbled under “the solo”, namely, the virtuosic solo or cadenza that brings the orchestra back near the ending of the first movement. Moving into this cadenza there occurs a conversation between Mercurio and Cameron. The latter’s dauntless speed, thus far having been like rain running down glass, is tempered, becoming elastic, patient–almost penitent, before it spirals into a drop of masterpiece. There is nothing like a concert (and an audience too delighted by the music to eschew applauding) to remind you of Mendelssohn’s idiosyncratic omission of breaks between movements. The bassoon that guides us into the second movement utters a grave dawn that cuts the few claps short, but their presence is a beautiful story of innovation, reception, joy, and surprise, which recordings do not relay.

An orchestra is an otherworldly being that can swallow itself up in its own flames, and rise from the glorious ashes, in the span of seconds. In connecting the movements through the smelling salt of a bassoon note, did Mendelssohn foresee this capacity? The Czech National Symphony’s rejuvenating interpretation only proved to me that the 101st time you listen to a piece of music can still jolt you awake into an “...Oh.” Dvořák’s Piano Concerto G was no different, which the piano soloist Maxim Lando brought to new heights by jumping over every hurdle Dvořák set on his path, especially with the classical homages to Mozart. The McCarter stage allows an intimacy to contain both the incisive, sharp strings and the dazzling steps of the piano. The piano sounds astonishingly clear, like spring water over submerged stones: smooth, wet awake. And this is a piece where the piano shines through cadenzas and a collaborative, rather than competitive, dance with the smallest orchestra in Dvořák’s concertos. Lando must have been aware of the accolades at stake before each orchestral takeover, hence his brief relinquishing of the spotlight with a raised fist. Every time the piano stops, it is a triumph.

The story of a concerto, more so than a symphony, tells a story that you cannot adequately verbalize. The beauty of classical music is the unraveling of this story, unto which it obliges you to be present. This story cannot be speed-read, skimmed, or summarized (hark the “cabin'd, cribbed, confin'd” Macbeth.) It only unfolds in terms of its own time, and time is everything to music. Which is why Dvořák’s turn to Czech folk melodies in his piano concerto’s final movement eviscerated me. This last movement is pervaded by the sense of something skipping, not walking straight but with a little pep, all the while the first movement’s rich melancholy returns through a different theme. In folk melodies, there is a yearning, a piece of Romanticism which joins hands with the earlier classical sentiment of the piece. This yearning is a very locally inflected one emerging from Dvořák’s home, but exceeding national language. I have never danced to a tune like this back home, but I find in this movement some memories and fragments of where I am from. 

How can anyone write about music when memory, daydreaming, and displacement figure so remarkably in its experience? In retrospect, it is clear to me. Concerts, if not music alone, make you stop. The reward of a concert is that though absent, you come back to discover that you have words; that when you stop, you start to hear; and that once you hear, you feel that perhaps you might as well speak. 

The Scholar’s Take is a series of essays by Princeton students in response to experiences at McCarter. It is part of Arts & Ideas which connects University scholarship and campus life to the work on our stage. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Council at Princeton University.