A stagehand pointed at bar 212 and said the bassoon entry was wrong. The conductor stopped the whole orchestra to make him repeat it out loud.
He’d said it quietly, to the librarian, and she’d asked him to say it to the podium.
That was the mistake. Not his.
“Bar 212,” Nico Ferrante said. “The second bassoon comes in a beat early in the part. It’s a copying error. The entry’s on the third beat.”
Eighty people looked up from their stands.
Piers Lachance turned on the podium with his baton still raised.
“I’m sorry — who is speaking?”
“Nico. I’m on the deck.”
“On the deck.” Lachance repeated it the way you repeat a word in a language you don’t speak. “Say it again. Louder. So the room has it.”
Nico said it again.
He said it exactly the same way, at the same speed, without adding anything, and that steadiness was somehow worse for the room than if he’d faltered.
Lachance let a few seconds go past.
“Play what’s written, not what you imagine.”
Somebody in the cellos looked at the floor. The second bassoon — a woman in her fifties who had been playing that entry wrong for three rehearsals and had said so twice — put her instrument across her knees.
“Yes, maestro,” Nico said, and crouched back down by the chairs.
It was the third rehearsal.
On the first he’d moved a stand two inches so the harp could see. On the second he’d found a mute in the wrong case before the section did. Small things. Deck things.
He’d known about bar 212 for four months.
Adele Hooper came out from the wings with a big bound score under her arm. Librarian. Twenty-two years in that hall.
“Maestro.”
“We’re working.”
“He wrote it.”
The baton came down about six inches and stopped.
“He wrote what.”
“The piece. That’s Nico Ferrante.” Adele set the score on the podium rail and opened it flat with one hand, at a page she clearly hadn’t needed to search for. “The commission was four thousand dollars, which is not a living, so when the run came up he took the stagehand job, because he wanted to be in the room when it was played.”
She turned the score toward the light.
“Bar 212. Third beat. That’s his hand.”
What happened after
Lachance did not apologize in the room.
He looked at the page for a while. Then he said, “Second bassoon, from 208,” and lifted the baton, and they played it, and it was right, and that was the whole of it.
He apologized afterward, in the corridor, badly, to a man in a crew t-shirt who was carrying four chairs. Nico said, “It’s a copying error, maestro, they happen,” and carried the chairs out, and that was the last conversation the two of them had.
The premiere was on the Saturday. It went well. The review in the local paper spent one paragraph on the conducting and four on the piece, which is the kind of thing a composer keeps.
Piers Lachance finished his guest week and flew home. The following season’s programme went out in the spring and his name wasn’t on it, and no reason was ever given, because that is how orchestras do it. The same programme lists Nico’s piece for a second performance, conducted by the composer.
Nico worked the strike after the premiere. He’d been paid for the shift and there were sixty chairs to stack and he liked the job — the quiet hall afterward, the work lights, the sound a stack of chairs makes rolling across an empty stage at half past eleven.
Adele found him doing it and said he could go.
“I’m on the deck till twelve,” he said.
Read the rest of the series in The Mosaic Stories.
More from the series: She Held Up The Whole Line For An Old Man Counting Coins — Then Someone Explained Why · He Sent Her For Coffee In Front Of The Whole Crew — Then Nine Trucks Turned Around · She Checked The Car Seat Straps — Somebody Else Had Been Buckling Her Daughter In
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