The performance had the scope and scale of a natural disaster. The Romanze opens with an entirely doable B flat, but I landed on an altogether different note, and flailed and thrashed through the rest of the opening phrase like a drowning three-year-old. After four bars my intimidating accompanist decided that there was no real point in hoping for some kind of overlap between the key I was playing in and the key he was playing in. He pulled his fingers away from the keyboard and, looking inquiringly over his shoulder, sounded a discreet B flat.
“Shall we start again?” I wanted to die. I will say no more than that. I would have welcomed the guillotine, the noose, I would have welcomed the chair, if it meant never again — never, ever — having to grapple with this booby trap, this serpent, this metal hex. But the coup de grace was not an option. In three minutes’ time I could consign the instrument to the dustbin of history, but for now I ruefully stumbled back into the movement. The testing high-F entry at the top of a cascading legato phrase was predictably and morale-sappingly missed. I felt like a rock climber reaching blindly up for a crumbling handhold. It was missed again when the phrase was repeated. I tripped and stumbled and clattered through the delicate stockade of semiquavers and barreled on through the rest of the assault course toward the end. Pain-wise, it was the closest I’ll ever get to giving birth. It passed. It happened. The agony in due course subsided, leaving behind the ghost of a memory of a public disemboweling.
The audience’s polite response was tinged with relief. I bowed with as much dignity as I could muster. Beneath me Murray Perahia scribbled something briefly. I assumed it was, “Shit.” Out in the audience my mother clapped supportively and my father grimly. I could see him thinking: “We came up to London on a Sunday for this? I’ve paid for lessons for seven years for this?”
“Jasper has had yet another good term,” wrote Kevin at the end of my last term as a schoolboy. “That he has not won a prize for his playing is a matter I feel more of misfortune than a reflection of his ability. I am sure that in the future his progress of the last two years will be realized as a worthy investment. I hope he continues this musical interest throughout his university life.”
I didn’t play the horn again for twenty-two years. — Jasper Rees, in his book A Devil to Play: One Man’s Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra’s Most Difficult Instrument (read for free)
