Chamber Performance with David Kim

Today I ate the last of an incredible week playing chamber music with David Kim, the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra.  I admit to having no small amount of fear of Tchaikovsky's huge string sextet, Souvenir de Florence.  I had memories of a summer several summers ago, of trying to put together the work with five peers, feeling the colossus weigh us down in rehearsals and swallow me in the performance. It is longer, more daunting and more demanding than many symphonies.   It requires an incredible intensity of energy for about 35 minutes.  And with only six people carrying the load, it is a lot to bear.

At the first rehearsal, Mr. Kim's first comment was to me, and he continued to pursue it throughout the week.  Leading from the bottom.  This is an exhausting work to perform and he was giving me a great deal of the responsibility in the momentum and the sound of the entire group.  My incorrigibly staid countenance learned a new energy this week, one of urgency, of flushed passion, of breathlessness and flight.  Empowering those around me, feeling the source inside of me give rise to something in others and in turn feeding from this.  In the slow second movement I have very sparse pizzicato, one at the beginning of every measure.  Boom...................boom.................boom.............David told me to lead him in his solo of sixteenth and eighth notes.  How, I'm hardly playing?  But I did, and I heard him hear it, and it was a really beautiful thing.

To have someone receive your energy and respond to it.  No words to get in the way, no meaning to parse, only gesture, only drama, as pure as the willingness behind it.  I'm looking for this in music.  The connection that is possible in these places–with other musicians, with the audience whose breath was with us, too.  It seems so natural in the middle of it, and yet it dissipates so quickly and we are left with our awkward selves, trying to make sense of living, trying to make sense of loving.  Or maybe it's only me that feels searching in this way.  Searching for that shared space that trusts, that moves, and is still, all at once.  That living that dies in every moment, happily.

To touch people.  How beautiful!  As we finally came to the last page, I felt myself chew a little more slowly inside despite the quick tempo, my motor being the driving force and the fault of the coming end.  And then it was over.  We had the pleasure of a two string chamber orchestra pieces with him leading on the second half.  And then it was really over.  And that's the way it goes.  There is so little time to be born in the instant.