Gravy on the dancefloor

I get my hair done and go to a gig

How was I to know there are now TWO hair salons at the local shops?

There’s the one whose name I never remember, which faces Karori Road, and a new studio that’s opened in what used to be a cupcake place. The cake shop has been shuttered since Covid, its mint-coloured espresso machine sitting in the window, untended, for years.

Anyway, I needed a quick blow-dry before going to the orchestra on Thursday night. This makes me sound like someone who privileges her beauty regime, but let me tell you, I don’t. At this point I’m averaging one wax a year (in a panic, often on Christmas Eve). I comb my eyebrows with an old toothbrush. If you were to classify my personal style, it would be Look, She Just Can’t Be Arsed. But my frizzy hair does stress me out, so if I can knock that off my worry list before a rare evening out, it’s worth the expense.

I typed HAIR KARORI into my phone and up the number came. I made the booking in two haphazard voicemails, and then wandered into the salon a few minutes early, settling on the sofa to read magazines.

After a while a stylist came over and asked pleasantly if she could help. I referenced my appointment, and she informed me I had no such thing. This was perplexing, and we looked at each other. Then she told me there was ANOTHER hair salon around the corner and I was possibly expected there.

“This is Headlines,” she said, patiently. This clearly meant nothing, so she had to come to the door and point me towards her new rival. She couldn’t have been nicer about my mix-up. Perhaps I seemed concussed; at the very least, I was a ding-dong. The whole thing was mortifying, but at least I hadn’t got stuck into their mints.

In any event, it came to pass that I walked into the old cake shop and took my place before a mirror, passing from the immediate moment into the realm of memory. I’d last sat in this room five years earlier as an exhausted parent, watching my small girl and tiny boy eat cupcakes with swirly icing; I was still at the stage of feeling fearful all the time, and so broke our days into small and easy constituent parts. This was as much for my sake, as theirs.

There were years of this, my overestimating the dangers and underestimating myself. I was depressed, but this is seen as inevitable among mothers of young children. There’s a social acceptance of it; you’re told, it’s only for a few years. Nobody stops the bus for you. You struggle on, in all weathers.

I was pulled back into the present by the blast of the dryer. My hair looked better now than it had then. I tossed it like a frisky pony and cantered out onto the street.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that I should commit shop names to memory more often. I ignore street names as well, and so often mix up the ones which run parallel and look similar. Which one is Kent Terrace and which is Cambridge, again? And was it on Blair Street or Allen where I first met my husband in a restaurant? If I don’t know the answers after twenty years in this city, I never will.

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Can we talk about the concert? I’m in no way qualified to review a symphonic performance. I don’t know my arse from my oboe, despite a brief and wonderful stint working at the NZSO. I bought a ticket to get out of the house, to escape the smell of new paint, to contribute to the life of the city. I bought it for the Sibelius but not knowing anything about the soloist Maxim Vengerov, and never having heard the first piece on the programme: Schumann’s fourth symphony. I believe that in the concert-going classical community, this is called rawdogging.

I parked underneath Te Papa and bought emergency chocolate on the walk to the hall. On arrival I immediately joined a long queue of midlife and senior women waiting for the bathroom. Literally none of us had a functioning pelvic floor.

Then I went upstairs and found my seat, conspicuously alone. The couple behind me fell silent as I sat down, evidently fascinated by my lack of a mate. (Why, for god’s sake? This wasn’t Noah’s Ark, even if they were a pair of llama-faced twats).

My seatmates in the upper central gallery skewed old and well-to-do; I wasn’t the youngest but certainly had the least jewellery. Have you ever seen that meme of a fox with bulging eyes, in the middle of a pack of hounds on an English hunt? None of the dogs have noticed him and he can’t quite believe it. He points his nose in the same direction as theirs and waits for instructions.

I am the fox in this scenario.

I made a few mistakes. I became weirdly overheated in my non-silk pussy-bow blouse. I briefly lost my scarf. I also learned matte lipstick in winter is a mistake. Halfway through the evening your lips will lose all moisture and go puckery, like a nipple. It’s much better to wear gloss. But all these concerns quickly faded.

Surely you felt it across Wellington, the way the that for half an hour this past Thursday night, the Michael Fowler Centre was the lungs of the city? The music radiated from the stage, beyond the hall, oxygenating the pathways and streets, pushing warmth and life into the houses and up into the trees, the air, the stars.

I’ll never forget it.

How to describe the Schumann? It was like bouncing along in a carriage. At one point the conductor Andre De Ridder did a little kangaroo hop on his podium. This provoked a ripple of laughter. The score was very generous, giving each of the sections a chance to shine. I liked seeing Larry on the timps, Andrew in the second violins, Malcolm on the double bass; these had been my work friends, and I miss them. Kirstin and Bridget side by side, their flutes glittering under the stage lights. I liked the sparkling hair clasps among one or two of the first violins. It was all so lovely to watch, and the music was like a bubble bath. The audience loved it and the applause thundered.

Weirdly, the concerto was programmed after the interval. Usually the star turn shows up in the first half, but Maxim Vengerov, you imagine, is a law unto himself. Out he came, and he looked like a bouncer in a Timaru nightclub. He had a barrel chest and seemed almost casual, like he was about to start a shift. He had an unremarkable haircut and his shirt was untucked; his shoes absolutely shone, as if he’d spent his youth in the Navy. He carried his Stradivarius as if it wasn’t one of the most rare and valuable instruments on earth.

I didn’t know this until I looked him up later, and bear in mind I used to be a publicist so am used to puff, but he’s been called the best violinist on the planet. This is a big call; you shouldn’t say it unless it’s arguably true.

Vengerov is a legitimate superstar, subject to gruelling seven to eight-hour rehearsals as a young child, debuting at the age of five, recording at ten. He spent seventeen years learning from the mighty conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who taught him he mustn’t channel his own emotions or insert his personality into a piece. He must become the composer’s voice: “The color of your sound should be so different, so, the listener could hardly recognise your own style. That quality distinguishes a true artist from just a good instrumentalist”.

Also, he has a smile that would melt ice. The guy could have walked out in shorts and flip-flops and it would have made no difference. We were already sold.

I can’t adequately describe what he made that violin do. At one point it sounded like a woman’s voice. From phrase to phrase, it sounded different; from yearning to defiance, from a tumbling, sunlit rush of water to the still oil of a perfect sea. I was used to the Hilary Hahn recording, which has a precision and mastery that can stop you in the middle of your ironing, making you float. I didn’t realise how differently another violinist could make it sound.

It felt like a hot, satisfying meal - meaty, if I can say that. It was sinew and muscle, fat, salt and protein; he played like he was giving off steam. I started to imagine the violin as a giant lamb cutlet, the medallion tucked under his chin and his fingers dancing along the bone. If he’d walked across the stage leaving gravy footprints, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I’d been hungry, and now I was fed.

He rolled his neck a couple of times, and during pauses, he extended his wrist and flexed it. During one passage he turned to face the violin section; during another, he lifted his chin off the rest, while he was playing, and seemed to stare hard at the audience. He bounced in his shoes a couple of times; he tugged under his armpit. It felt relatable, despite the fact he’s probably a multi-millionaire and now lives in Monaco. The humanity of the performance was wonderful; you really did feel like one step away from Sibelius. I liked watching the violins gazing at him appreciatively during his virtuoso moments. Some tilted their heads, to better experience the music. Others stared fixedly at the ground, motionless - not wanting anything to distract from the moment.

The piece takes you everywhere but has a surprisingly low-key finish. Had thirty minutes gone by? He could have walked off the stage in those breathless moments - we sat there stunned. As it happened, the hall went bananas with cheering and the rushing sound of hundreds of people getting to their feet, their hinged seats smacking shut behind them, to express back to the musicians how they had made us feel.

The ovation roared and was exhilarating; Vengerov had to come back to the stage at least four times, I lost count. He pressed his palms together in appreciation and acknowledged the players and the conductor. I was smiling so hard my face hurt. The music still hadn’t left the place but was in the space above us, the notes dancing along wavy ribbons of staff.

All the troubles of the world, so insistent, so noisy, all the time. And yet here we were at the bottom of the planet, being held by the hand of one person - himself Russian, Jewish - and being reminded that all of us are blood and bone, warmth and strength, lovers of beauty, and ready for wonder.

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Karori this week has been popping off, as my kids would say. Early yesterday the dog and I walked past a man with a black eye sitting in a parked car, his back seat full of bread buns. It took everything I had not to knock on the window and say, “What the hell?”

I was driving at the time but wish I could’ve taken a photo of a white van parked in Marsden Village on Friday. It belonged to an art placement company (Imagine going around the city hanging pictures!) and along the side it read

ANDY WALLHOLE

For a well-informed review of the NZSO with Maxim Vengerov, here’s a piece from this morning’s Post newspaper by the ever-thoughtful Max Rashbrooke. I sat next to him once at lunch. Lovely chap.