“We’d love to hear little Philip play,” they said in patronizing voices.
“Play the Mozart, Philip.”
Philip looked into their bored faces and sat down at the piano, angry. They went on chatting among themselves.
He began to play, his fingers flashing across the keyboard. The talking suddenly stopped. He played a Mozart sonata, and the music was alive. And at that moment he was Mozart, filling the room with the magic of the master.
As Philip’s fingers struck the last chord, there was an awed silence. His parent’s friends rushed over to the piano, talking excitedly, effusive with their praise. He listened to their applause and adulation, and that was the moment of his epiphany, when he knew who he was and what he wanted to do with his life.
“Yes, I always knew I wanted to be a pianist,” Philip told Lara.
“Where did you study piano?”
“My mother taught me until I was fourteen, and then they sent me to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.”
“Did you enjoy that?”
“Very much.”
He was fourteen years old, alone in the city with no friends. The Curtis Institute of Music was located in four turn-of-the-century mansions near Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. It was the closest American equivalent to the Moscow Conservatory of Viardo, Egorov, and Tor adze. Its graduates included Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Peter Serkin, and dozens of other brilliant musicians.
“Weren’t you lonely there?”
“No.”
He was miserable. He had never been away from home before. He had auditioned for the Curtis Institute, and when they accepted him, the realization struck him that he was about to begin a new life, that he would never go home again. The teachers recognized the young boy’s talent immediately. His piano teachers were Isabelle Vengerova and Rudolf Serkin, and Philip studied piano, theory, harmony, orchestration, and flute. When he was not in class, he played chamber music with the other students. The piano, which he had been forced to practice from the time he was three years old, was now the focus of his life. To him, it had become a magical instrument out of which his fingers could draw romance and passion and thunder. It spoke a universal language.
“I gave my first concert when I was eighteen with the Detroit Symphony.”
“Were you frightened?”
He was terrified. He found that it was one thing to play before a group of friends. It was another to face a huge auditorium filled with people who had paid money to hear him. He was nervously pacing backstage when the stage manager grabbed his arm and said, “Go. You’re on.” He had never forgotten the feeling he had when he walked out onto the stage and the audience began to applaud him. He sat down at the piano, and his nervousness vanished in an instant. After that his life became a marathon of concerts. He toured all over Europe and Asia, and after each tour his reputation grew. William Ellerbee, an important artists’ manager, agreed to represent him. Within two years Philip Adler was in demand everywhere.
Philip looked at Lara and smiled. “Yes. I still get frightened before a concert.”
“What’s it like to go on tour?”
“It’s never dull. Once I was on a tour with the Philadelphia Symphony. We were in Brussels, on our way to give a concert in London. The airport was closed because of fog, so they took us by bus to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. The man in charge explained that the plane they had chartered for us was small and that the musicians could take either their instruments or their luggage. Naturally they chose their instruments. We arrived in London just in time to begin the concert. We played it in jeans, sneakers, and unshaven.”
Lara laughed. “And I’ll bet the audience loved it.”
“They did. Another time I was giving a concert in Indiana, and the piano was locked away in a closet and no one had a key. We had to break the door down.”
Lara giggled.
“Last year I was scheduled to do a Beethoven concerto in Rome, and one of the music critics wrote: ‘Adler gave a ponderous performance, with his phrasing in the finale completely missing the point. The tempo was too broad, rupturing the pulse of the piece.’”