Carnegie Hall

August 13, 2000

CARNEGIE HALL

Eighteen months have passed since one of the major events of my whole eighty years. I have been trying to figure out why it was so great and how to describe it. If I had grown up on the west coast it might have been just a very pleasant afternoon. If it had happened forty years sooner it would have been just one more of the amazing things that great kids do. But in fact I grew up where "the city" or even "into town" means New York, and all my life I have heard about Carnegie Hall as the ultimate goal for any musician. We couldn't go there on a whim as people did who lived in the city. It was extremely special to afford tickets and take the trip into town. I saw the Don Cossacks choir there, as a teenager. With great effort I took the Youngest there to hear Artur Rubenstein and on another night Van Cliburn. I took her again to hear the Don Cossacks as I had.

Then one day last year the First Born remarked casually that she was going to be playing the piano at Carnegie Hall and maybe I'd like to come. She would be the accompanist for the Arundel Singers from Maryland.

Note that chorus or orchestra members come on stage together. The accompanist takes that long walk alone, in silence. The conductor walks out to applause from the audience and welcoming smiles from her group. A vocal music teacher told me once that coming on stage alone is the longest walk in the world. I asked about this and our star said " I walked and I walked and I walked and I thought I would never get there." She used a cane for courage.

Why did I cry? If only for the first minute or two? The rest of the audience saw a dignified woman in her late fifties, in a long, handsome black gown. I saw a three year old in a starched pink dress with a big bow, back straight, hand position perfect, at our old black upright piano. I saw a five year old devouring John M. Williams' First Book of the Piano. I heard her playing Pomp and Circumstance for high school graduations and being pained at the way a Junior played it at hers. We laughed together when she played Chopin at a Salvation Army camp concert and her mentor said "Well, that was very nice but it wasn't Chopin". We compared identical notes on our Bach music, made by college teachers a generation apart. I saw her as music director of one show after another becoming a talented and very supportive accompanist. And then I saw her playing that long, long Steinway on that famous, immense, shining stage, with confidence and great skill.

She said later that the piano not only did exactly what she asked it to but that it seemed to know what she wanted before she touched the keys.

Two friends and I had a fine lunch across 57th St. from the Hall, before the concert. One of them gave me a Tiffany Stained Glass Window silk scarf from the Metropolitan Art Museum, during lunch, to mark a momentous occasion. I don't remember a thing that we ate.