Rachmaninoff rocks

It's been said that everyone secretly wants to conduct a symphony orchestra. Well, maybe that's so, though it's a hope few of us will ever fulfill. But many of us may also harbor a related secret ambition: We want to be music reviewers. And this is an ambition that some of us can contrive to find ways to realize. Which is exactly what I now plan to do – in a kind of quirky way.

Last evening a large contingent of Kendal residents took the Kendal bus to the Midland Theater in Newark to attend a concert by the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra. The featured work was Sergei Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto, performed by Antonio Pompa-Baldi. On the bus ride home it was very clear that the general impression Mr. Pompa-Baldi had left with us was: WOW!

Despite its reputation as one of the most technically challenging works in the piano repertory, Rachmaninoff's third has been widely recorded and is therefore a reasonably well-known piece. It features Rachmaninoff's celebrated, heart-wrenching lyricism, and is studded with the kinds of sweeping melodic gestures that movie fans became accustomed to in films from the 1950s. (Though Hollywood's emulators never matched the master's sureness of effect.)

What attendance at a live concert allowed us to see and appreciate was the sheer physicality required of a performer of this work. It was not simply the fleetness of fingers that caught our eye, though several residents commented on the bus that it seemed impossible to have done what we had just witnessed with only ten of them. It was, rather, that facilitating that digital dexterity were two fast-flying arms – alternately pounding, stroking, and teasing the keyboard, and all the time leaping about from its uppermost to its nethermost reaches. I don't have the score before me, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rachmaninoff's dynamics ranged from ppp to fff. Certainly a perspiring Mr. Pompa-Baldi employed them all. It's no wonder that he used his periodic breaks to flex his hands and exercise his forearms. For when he was engaged with the keyboard, he was bombarding us with wonderful music. At the end of the evening Kendal residents joined all the others in attendance in standing to applaud a grand performance of one of the towering works of the Romantic period.

And I've now had fun pretending to be a music reviewer. But you don't have to warn me: I won't quit my daytime job.