June at the Phantom Recital Hall

It's a warm, rainy night in early June....and will this rain ever stop? It's been a horrendously wet season so far, and the jokes about washing mildew out of one's hair are already stale.

However, we're at the new recital hall at the university, where a piano student is giving a recital of Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit", which includes this eerie section...



Despite sounding like the name of a Clark Ashton Smith character, "Gaspard de la Nuit" is a three-movement suite by Ravel, each movement based on a poem by Aloysius Bertrand. "Scarbo," the final piece, depicts a goblin dancing and pirouetting around the landscape, getting into mischief. It's considered one of the more difficult pieces in the standard repertoire....but yet this student handles it with ease. From whence came their unearthly talent?