A performance of Ravel's piano concerto in G major

As I mentioned in an earlier post I was at Montreal's Maison Symphonique to see this concerto performed by Hélène Grimaud and the Orchestre Métropolitain with Nézet-Séguin conducting. It was a powerful performance, amplified by how long it had been since any of us had experienced a live performance.

The second movement has been spinning around in my head ever since. I used my memory of the concert in a piece of creative non-fiction, where the narrator is uncovering his feelings about the death of someone to whom he used to be close. It finishes like this:

   She raises her hands above the piano keys and pauses. Time congeals and stops. Then, at the perfect moment that only she has foreseen, she slowly lowers her hands and begins to play, delicately unwinding that long lyrical melody I know so well. Time is liquefied, flowing, meandering back on itself in a long loop. We hear her breathing in the quiet passages of music. It’s only when you’re as close as I am that you appreciate how much physical effort it takes her to play as emotionally as this. I wait for her breath at the end of each phrase, like you do when you’re at the bedside of a dying person, waiting to hear if there will ever be another breath. And then those discordant notes that initially sound so wrong, but as the harmonics linger you realise that they’re so right. My heart is sore. We’ve arrived at a truce, but peace is still a long way off.

    The end of the second movement, a long-drawn-out note, and then there is silence. The air is charged, radioactive, and no one in the hall stirs for a long time. There is not a cough, no sound of a breath, as we await the final movement.

Postscript, September 2025:

A later version of my piece was published in the September 2025 issue of the Canadian magazine Blank Spaces. You can find information and links to all of my writing at www.LaurenceWrites.com.