The Concert

The tickets were a gift, generous and unbidden, and so the concert was, too. It had been a while since I sat in a hall while music poured over me, and I had forgotten how exciting it can be. Even the preliminaries: A rush to find parking in the limpid early evening, a parade of evening-dressed concertgoers entering the hall, taking a seat quickly before the lights dimmed.

The featured performer was Itzhak Perlman, and Lexington audiences are not used to having him around. The applause was loud and sustained -- even before he began to play. But then -- ahh -- he did, and there was that familiar, charged concert stillness, and the violin singing out over it, taking us along.

 Perlman hunched over this violin, seemingly at one with it, and when he finished the opening section of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, he used the fingers of his right hand, slightly cupped, to gesture "come here, come here," to the first violin section, asking them for more, for a swell of sound to answer his lone voice. And they responded, this student orchestra that was most definitely not the New York or Vienna Philharmonic but which, last night, must have felt, just for a moment, like it was.

When the last notes sounded, the audience jumped to its feet.