Читать книгу Searching For Sophia - Andrew Saw - Страница 14

9

That week the love gods smiled. Stardust was in the air. Aphrodite and Eros had a logistics meeting and tweaked the cosmic algorithm for Sophia and Joe. It was surely the gods who made me buy Jarrah a cocktail a few days before the Sydney Symphony Orchestra launched its season of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

When I told Joe my cosmic theory he yelped. “Sophia playing Scheherazade? Fantastic! The Enchantress of a Thousand and One Nights.”

I don’t remember everything he said as he surged towards the Opera House for his date with Scheherazade, but I know he was adamant that the ferries scudding in and out of Circular Quay were like fireflies floating on honey. From the Botanic Gardens he noted intoxicating jasmine scent billowing on a zephyr-breeze.

It was a lovely night, no question, although it would have been nice to be in it without Joe’s live commentary. The bars along the Opera House walk, he explained, were fields showered in stardust with beautiful courting gods and angels playing for their future lives. Under the waxing moon the giant sails of the Opera House were the wings of a giant pleasure machine.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,” Joe puffed as he advanced before us.

“A stately pleasure-dome decree;

“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,

“Through caverns measureless to man

“Down to a sunless sea.”

“Oh for God’s sake!” Jarrah yelled at his back.

“Just setting the mood.”

“It’s set already, like blancmange.”

“It’s enchantment.”

“We get it, Joe, just shut up for a while, okay,” she pleaded.

“But you do know what Scheherazade means?”

“You know we don’t.”

“Scheherazade means ‘The person whose realm is free’. Isn’t that amazing?”

When he turned with a grin, I could practically see the capillaries in his eyes pulsing with stardust. “She’s a free woman, the mistress of her domain,” he added breathlessly. “She can be whoever she wants to be.”

All three of us had gone to some trouble for Sophia, whom Joe seemed to have conflated with the Persian princess. It was Jarrah and Joe who introduced me, a tee-shirt wearing surfer, to the unheard-of idea of dressing for pleasure. Jarrah was in a 1950s red silk Jacques Heim dress with a flared pleated skirt and red shoes, and Joe was in a Tom Ford-inspired charcoal bespoke suit with white shirt and silver tie.

At just over 65 kilos, Joe’s muscular welterweight body makes him an ideal model. Jarrah’s delicate frame does the same. Plodding along in their company, I felt like an expensively dressed giraffe.

All around us, citizens of a certain age were edging carefully up the steps to the Concert Hall, but Joe covered the ground in a series of bounds. When he reached the top, he spun around, grinning with very white teeth under flashing dark eyes. He spread his feet and punched the air with a left-right left-right boxing flurry. Pashmina-cloaked ladies flinched and an ancient gentleman in a cream fedora raised his cane.

When we finally slid towards our seats in the centre of the tenth row of the stalls, I feared the worst. It wasn’t just that my classical music experience began and ended with Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was the aura of Concert Hall self-satisfaction. We seemed to be in a crowd of devotees hoping to venerate music as an escape from the crass epidemic that is the twenty-first century; yet, fifty years ago, this same audience would have been standing on their seats screaming at The Kinks and The Rolling Stones.

There was a dimming of lights, some furtive water slurps from the audience and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra filed onto the Concert Hall stage. I counted at least twenty-five violins, plus cellos, but there was no sign of Sophia. Joe was craning forward in the manner of an anxious ibis, and I was surprised to see that Jarrah had a small pair of binoculars.

“Can’t wait to meet her afterwards?” I asked her.

“Nope, I need to study the alien in detail.”

“You’ll never keep those away from Joe.”

“He’s got his own.”

“Right.”

Finally there were just two empty chairs left next to the conductor’s podium. A slight little man with a shaved skull appeared first and then finally Sophia materialised to a smattering of applause from the crowd. She strolled through the orchestra with grace, her back straight in a simple black dress, her dark hair tied in a bun accentuating her long pale neck, her violin and bow in her left hand. Even ten rows from the stage, I could feel the measured calm of an ice queen.

“God, she’s a knockout,” Jarrah said, peering through her binoculars.

“Told you,” said Joe. “This is unbelievable, I think she’s guest violin.”

Sophia took her seat while the little man turned, faced the orchestra, lifted his violin to his chin and nodded to the oboes. A single note flowed into the concert hall. The strings followed and then the rest of the instruments. When they were tuned, he sat content. Meanwhile Sophia looked through the audience into the unknowable, her face as pale as sculptured marble. The conductor appeared; there was a flurry of applause, to which he responded with a long bow, and then it began.

To be honest, the best way to understand what happened to us that night is to look for Scheherazade on You Tube. Nothing I can say here will ever do justice to those fifty minutes of music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. After a few heavy chords from the full orchestra, Sophia stood and played a solo of such sinuous beauty and yet so full of melancholia I was taken to a place I’d never been before. I’d never heard the essence of love distilled with that kind of intensity. Then the orchestra took over with a beautiful sweeping melody flowing like waves on a caramel sea. For four movements the harmonies twisted and turned, streaming through delicate devotion, cold fury and rapture. Sophia’s solos returned, taking me deeper into the sensory journey. She seemed to be channelling the sound of space and time.

The spirit she distilled was extraordinary, although I’m not sure if it was made more potent by the fact that I knew her. If she’d been a stranger it might have been different, I’m not sure. Whatever the case, I can pretty much guarantee that if you’re falling in love you should devote fifty minutes to Scheherazade. The enchantment will take you deeper into who you are and the lover you could become.

As we edged through the crowds at intermission, I expected a lot of chatter, especially from Joe, but he was silent, lost I assumed in adoration. On a balcony overlooking the harbour with a drink in his hand, he stared expressionless at the distant lights of Kings Cross.

“I’m going home,” he said, swallowing the last of his champagne. “This was the biggest mistake of my life.”