She’s an attractive woman, with her stylishly cropped, reddish-brown hair, her clearly delineated features, and large, nearly transparent green eyes. She cuts her way through the airport’s bland spaces with some impatience, her slim tall figure clad in jeans and short leather jacket, her head bent slightly as if to avoid notice. But there’s something about her that attracts notice nevertheless: perhaps it is a certain concentration of expression, or of being; perhaps it is the pale, light-absorbing eyes. What cannot be seen, as she pauses to buy her bottled water, or look around some insipid airport shop, is that she’s filled with a force of expressive meaning, a power of significant sound that enlarges the space within her to an immeasurable degree. Intimations of Schumann and Beethoven are always just below the surface of her mind and at the tips of her fingers, ready to emerge. She’s trailing a comet’s tail of music, a repertory of beauty and shaped feeling and strenuous human effort.
