"As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the
fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away
inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood
vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing
beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying,
shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells
surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable
disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that
is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor,
technicians, swallows, wrens — think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone
just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times
everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived
it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect
day lacking nothing in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as
harmless and pretty as any on earth.
Then Bronfman appears.
Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo! Enter Bronfman to play
Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity
clear out of the ring. He is conspicuously massive through the upper
torso, a force of nature camouflaged in a sweatshirt, somebody who has
strolled into the Music Shed out of a circus where he is the strongman
and who takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan
strength he revels in. Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is
going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had
never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel
of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he's finished, I thought, they'll have
to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn't let that piano conceal
a thing. Whatever's in there is going to come out, and come out with
its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the
open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes,
leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly
gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force
than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is
dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!"
- Philip Roth, The Human Stain
