Five Six Seven Eight

The first night had been an undeniable success. Family, friends, and a few artsy stragglers looking for something to do filled Westborough Theater to hear the tumult and revelry of this seductive and forbidden celebration of spring. Afterwards, champagne was drunk, wives kissed their violinist husbands, children hugged their cellist mothers, and headlights lit up long city streets through the fog.

On Tuesday, the Westborough Orchestra was weary, but still excited.  Manuel Liste, their director, had written his graduate thesis at Berklee on this piece, spending a long year researching the Ballets Russes' performances.  After his study, it was finally time for the orchestra to perform this the way he understood it.  For him, it was an act of creation: pulling Stravinsky's dreams out of the instruments, with no dancers to simulate the Rite.  The music itself had to communicate the spectacle.

At 7:00, the orchestra walked onstage to tune up.  Liste walked out triumphantly, ready for applause.  But as he geared to take his bow, he looked at only empty seats.  The theater manager was still walking up and down the aisles, but there was no other audience.  Liste had been told a few days before that sales were extremely slow for this, the tenth performance, but this was absurd.  Stravinsky, the revolutionary, was being performed for these people!  They didn't care.  The orchestra murmured as they tuned until 7:15.  He kept waiting until he could hear the woodwinds discuss leaving.  Then, it was time for action.

Defiantly, Liste bowed like Leonard Bernstein to the chairs.  He tapped his baton, and half of the orchestra held up their instruments, eager to start the opening theme.  The other half didn't.  Liste turned around and then turned back to the orchestra, tapping his baton six times.  Everyone readied themselves.  And then


and


The bows cut across the strings, upstrokes and downstrokes of the beautiful wood moving in perfect discordant unison as the brass shined and flutes and piccolos and timpanis and cymbals furiously furiously played the sacrifice.  And the sound reverberated in the theater the way it does when no one else can hear, shining brilliantly.  They played it all, no stops for rehearsal-- this wasn't a rehearsal.  This was the performance -- led on by the fervor of the ones sitting next to them.
 
After the last note, they sat for a moment in silence, and everyone knew.