Appassionata by Eva Hoffman

Author:Eva Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590513514
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2008-07-18T15:00:00+00:00

In the morning, a recording session. The studio is in a low stone building, picturesquely overgrown with green vegetation. From the white-walled room where she will play, she can see the control console, the gleam of high technology. The piano, in the middle of the white space, looks like some geological beast, left over, in its great bulk, from another epoch.

She warms up with some arpeggios, waits for her cue. “Ready to roll?” the technician asks through his microphone, and smiles at her encouragingly. She gives him some test sounds, pianissimo, fortissimo, treble, bass. She’s recording a sequence of Beethoven Sonatas, and she starts with Op. 109. The technician tells her he won’t interrupt till the end of the movement; they can go over the corrections later. When she finishes, she looks up at him to see how she’s done. She respects the views of technicians highly. This is where real criticism happens, in praxis. He gives her a thumbs up, and summons her to come into the cubicle and listen with him. She sits in front of the console, with its array of buttons and levers. The sound, through the earphones, is startlingly clear, pellucid. No surround of moisture or breath is perceptible, just crystalline notes. It always takes her a moment to accept this sonic perfection, this distillation from her breathing, roiling effort. The technician is following with the score open, and when they come to a transitional passage between theme A and B, he presses the stop button. “Did you hear that?” he asks. “Yes,” she says, and though she hardly knows this man’s name, this is a moment of precise communion. They’ve heard exactly the same thing: the bass figuration in the left hand is a decibel too loud, and several notes have fallen out of alignment.

“Do you want to redo it?” he asks, and she nods, and goes back to the piano. There’s no need to discuss what she needs to do, they’ve heard the same thing. She waits till her concentration returns, and begins a few bars earlier, so as to elide into the passage in question, then segues into a bar on the other end. She gets a high thumbs up, and joins the technician in the cubicle again. “Perfect,” he says. “It will go right in.” There’s another passage to redo toward the end of the movement; and then they go over the whole thing bar by bar for fine-tuning. A ritardando, she thinks, is too exaggerated, and he speeds it up by a smidgeon on the computer. The graph on his screen pulses just perceptibly faster. He takes a few bars apart, and makes a few bass notes more pronounced. Now the line fits, seamlessly.

“Shall we have a listen, then?” he asks. He stretches his arms and crosses them behind his neck; the concentration of their task has been intense. They follow the completed version in silence. When they come to a singing bel canto passage, he gives her a small, approving nod.

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