Counterpoint by Philip Kennicott

Author:Philip Kennicott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

I FIRST DISCOVERED AND fell in love with Horowitz’s playing when my parents sent me off to a summer chamber music program in Maine at age fifteen. It required an audition tape to get in, and so for days I recorded and rerecorded the same Brahms rhapsody until finally I produced a version that had both a daring tempo and a reasonable degree of accuracy. This felt a bit like cheating, capturing the best performance without the pressure of an audience, and I wondered what would happen if the selection committee asked to hear me produce the same music live. But I sent off the tape with great anticipation and it was indeed good enough to secure me a place at the camp. I was thrilled, not just to explore a new kind of music, but to escape my home, live on my own, be surrounded by peers, and perhaps have a girlfriend.

The acceptance letter came with news that I must learn a Beethoven piano trio before I arrived in July for the six-week program. The tuition cost over a thousand dollars, which my parents paid without complaint. My mother was diligent in preparations, buying new clothes, packing a trunk with care, explaining to me the logic of her provisions, sunscreen and insect repellent, hats and sweaters, sneakers and boat shoes. When she packed a pair of pajamas, which I never wore at home, I asked her why, and she hesitated before saying, “Wear them every night. I don’t want any sickos looking at you.” I had never thought of myself as a thing that might be looked at, and the idea intrigued me. As she closed the trunk, I put in a fresh, untouched copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I finished during the summer, despite the unusual distraction of having friends, with whom I walked to the town nearby, went sailing on the placid bay, and, one evening late in the summer, played spin-the-bottle.

The campus for the program was a maritime academy, a tidy brick school far larger than the musicians needed, full of empty rooms and dark hallways through which we ran after slipping free from our nightly curfew and the college-aged counselors who enforced it. The grounds were open and grassy, stretching down a hill toward the water, where one could borrow small sailing tubs when not practicing or rehearsing. More than the Beethoven, which I learned competently, or the private lessons I took, or the mornings I spent practicing, or the afternoons I whiled away with Tolstoy, I remember sitting on the lawn after dinner, talking and listening to students who were greatly more sophisticated than I was. They debated the merits of various artists, and they had strong opinions on whether Horowitz or Rubinstein was the greater pianist, whether Rudolf Serkin or Wilhelm Kempff was the true keeper of tradition, and where in the pantheon one placed sui generis figures such as Glenn Gould. They were New York City kids who spoke of

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