All's well that ends well

A very long day yesterday which started with a 7 am (EST) flight that went through a bit of rough weather (I hate hate HATE flying! And of course I do much of it. Sigh...). But things calmed down on the final approach to MSP and ended with a flawless landing. You can tell the skill/experience of a pilot in the timing of a landing, which is, from a safety standpoint, probably the most significant part of a flight. And, as the last part of a plane-travel experience, certainly an important ending to the journey.

Which got me thinking about good endings. When my husband is warming up on the French horn (a daily sequence that I’ve memorized – sometimes when I wake up in a hotel room on the road I still hear that warm-up in my head!), there’s an extended section in which he practices long tones. Which are hard, because not only is it to practice sustaining notes, but a way to perfect the very endings of those notes – at the termination of a note, you need to maintain the pitch and tone quality and let it taper to the right point before releasing. Because you'll forget how nicely a note was played if it doesn't end well.

Which made me think about his horn teacher back when we were students at Curtis, Myron Bloon, legendary principal horn of the Cleveland Orchestra during the Golden Days of George Szell’s music directorship. Mr. Bloom (after all these years I still can’t think of him as Myron) was notoriously tough on his students and was the source of such bon mots as “That’s not a sound, that’s a noise!” - or, after hearing a student play a solo passage that was not played to his liking, “No, no, a thousand times no!”. Many lessons ended with students, crestfallen or near tears, slouching out of the studio. Not a happy ending.

I was back at my alma mater last week for rehearsals and concerts with 20/21, the contemporary music ensemble of the Curtis Institute. The centerpiece of the concert was Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques (which I’ve mentioned in a previous post). At the very end of the piece there is a written-out bar of rest, where the composer indicates that “The conductor must keep his arms in the air”. During our final rehearsal, when we got to that point, I did exactly as the composer asked, while several of the students in the ensemble quietly put down their instruments to wait out the silence (it's a really long measure). I reprimanded them – there should be no movement, just an absolute stillness. This should be a moment of uncertainty and suspension, a dramatic moment with the kind of rich silence from an audience not quite knowing what to expect next. It’s a little bit of visual theater worked into a dense and complicated piece, and it was this very suspension, stillness and silence from the assembled mass onstage that created the effect of this particular ending. A silently thrilling ending.

Which led me to a final thought, of my piano teacher back in Honolulu, who took me from my very first Hanon exercises to the F minor Ballade of Chopin. Before I took the stage for a concert or an audition (and it seemed like it was every other week in my formative years) he would remind me, “It’s good to start strong. But no matter what happens in the middle, all can be forgiven with a good ending.”