Menhuin Competition 2018, Metallic tang and Rosewood

I’ve come home to find all sorts of clutter scattered across my table.
I push the cleaning aside for now and decide to write one more diary entry.
I want to record the emotion I felt when I happened to watch a seven-year-old video of Chloe Chua—
before it fades.

I never really liked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
(It’s a very subtle matter of taste; I’m not particularly fond of Wagner’s or Mahler’s symphonies either.)
I never thought deeply about why I didn’t like it.
Maybe because it has always existed to me like a ringback tone that goes unanswered,
or like the music that plays when a department store is about to close—
something too familiar to really hear.

When I listened to The Four Seasons,
the images that came to mind were always the same:
an old wooden piano in my grandfather’s house, the hills of south coast England,
the skin of a woman, her wrinkles etched deeper by a lifetime of harvesting potatoes,
and fields of sunflowers.

Music like a pastoral landscape—
there was always something in it that reminded me of looking at a Monet.

But today, after watching Chloe Chua’s performance,
I realized that maybe all of this comes from shallow media impressions
and my own fixed assumptions.
Her Four Seasons at the 2018 Menuhin Competition, played at age eleven,
was probably the first Vivaldi performance I’ve ever listened to from beginning to end.

Wearing a lemon-colored dress, surrounded by the affectionate gaze of the ensemble members,
she played in such complete immersion
that I found myself thinking:
This must be the highest form of sublimity that human music can achieve.

(Why are we so deeply moved when a child performs with astonishing mastery?
Is it merely because of the self that perceives its own smallness longs to feel powerful?)

The horsehair of her bow guiding the ensemble, the puff sleeves,
and the way she sometimes lifted her small left foot slightly off the floor while playing—
she looked at once like the Pied Piper,
like a young gypsy,
and like a bold fabler.

The Vivaldi concerto that had always felt too pictorial, too direct
suddenly became poetry.
What once felt simply like autumn and winter was no longer autumn or winter at all.

A leather-bound volume resting in a bookstore window,
the faint metallic tang of a railway moments before the snow begins,
travelers who never find their way back home,
a single small earring on a quiet earlobe,
and the fine threads of paper that whisper against the fingers..

A performance that takes nostalgia—
those distant, gone landscapes—
and rearranges them into everyday sensation is nothing short of astonishing.

Where have the fablers and the gypsies gone?

At the same time, I imagined the helplessness and boredom
that prodigious children like her might face as they grow up.
Beauty is, indeed, never simple.

And with that thought,
the table covered in clutter—so far from lemon-colored anything—
suddenly feels a little more tolerable.

When I was about sixteen, I took violin lessons at a nearby church,
but I could never get used to the feeling of the chin rest pressing against my collarbone,
and I quit after three months.

Still, sometimes I imagine myself playing a beautiful violin
made of rosewood and ebony.
It would probably be a squeaky dedication for my cat, Peru.