YPO European Tour: A Moment by Chris Hailey

A Moment
There is a moment when the music dies away, a silence unlike any other, that pause before the first tentative applause breaks the spell. As the conductor gradually lowers his arms time is suspended and then, slowly, presence becomes memory , immediate sensation gives way to reflection, and the mind, in ever widening pools of resonance, is cast back across the arc of a journey traveled together. A bond of concentrated immersion between performer and audience stands revealed. It is a precious thing, this taut, slender thread that has bound souls, minds and bodies into a single shared experience. And we learn much about who we are by where we have been. But in that one hushed moment in between we learn, too, what we might yet become.
There has been a series of such remarkable moments on this journey of discovery. In Prague and Litomysl, in the Great Hall of the Slovak Radio in Bratislav; in the grey, cramped House of Culture in Jihlava, in the majestic 14th-century Dominican church in Krems. Different venues, different audiences, here Dvorak, there Mahler, and everywhere that same mysterious moment in which the circumstances, venue, even the youth of this remarkable orchestra are forgotten before we are all engulfed in a single miraculous instant.
And it is miraculous, in fact a chain of miracles, from all that goes into a composition and its completion, to the way it finds its advocates and enthusiasts, and to how a conductor embraces, studies, and interprets its message….
Another vignette: a veteran from the trenches, a horn player in the Slovak Radio Orchestra, earnestly shaking Ben Zander’s hand with the words: “after forty years at last I heard this symphony played as Dvorak intended.” This old musician was full of enthusiasm for this bracing, compelling interpretation that revealed qualities of Dvorak’s New World Symphony that had, for him, remained hidden. This was praise indeed both for Maestro Zander and for the remarkably sensitive orchestra that realized his interpretation with such clarity and intensity.
The young players of the YPO are good and they know it; they’ve been told that by their parents, teachers, mentors, adoring audiences, and above all by their devoted conductor. They’ve got chops. Their pianissimos are breathtaking, their fortes inspire awe, their ensemble is beautifully balanced and each soloist a brilliant reflection upon the whole. They are so amazingly responsive to every gesture, cue, and glance. With this orchestra Ben Zander can do anything. But what they may not yet realize is the full import of that moment of silence when the playing stops.
Once the spell is broken we are almost relieved by the rush of emotion and moral uplift that is the anonymous safety of an ovation. Because in that one moment of silence we are all – audience and players alike – suddenly naked and profoundly alone. It is a moment of potential and, yes, possibility, and its content is ours alone to fill. To provoke such inward probing is one of the highest ambitions of art; to create such moments, an achievement of the first order.