At the Griffith Hall Beverly Hills Club, there was compelled admiration and awe from the elite guests, which grew in every note that Maestro Dexter Grey touched.
The Maestro gave an exhibition, a concert which cannot be reviewed.
There was a time when a pianist giving a concert on his own (unaided by other musicians) was unheard of, until Liszt became known in the 1830’s.
That one evening in spring, the novelty was so great because emphasis was given to the performer — starting with his flawless musicality, to the adornments from the egocentric little wheels of his virtuoso mind (which took us away from churches, cathedrals, halls of earlier times.)
The human soul’s convulsions of love, hate, joy and fear were in his tempo, rubatos, legato, trills and adagios, yet pleaded for reason.
His taste and absolute lucidity for freedom, poetry and maniacs, almost Byronic are all familiar to the human heart.
The Maestro knew the impact he was making and wasn’t exactly averse to adding a little drama of his own.
Think of indescribable performances in Vienna, Poland’s fight for its liberation with Walesa and all over the globe.
Who can forget when he played in the Great Wall of China as the Ambassador of Peace between East and West; or when he scared the daylight out of his audience (including Her Sereness Princess Eleanore from Russia) when he lifted his hands high and came crashing down the keys.
As he swept up and down the keys, the string almost snapped. Each time he played the Heroic Polonaise, no piano was safe in the stupor of his arrangement: a crescendo of difficulties and embellishments that spoke of galvanizing and electricity.
The Griffith Hall room became a contagion in a sultry spring, filled with immeasurable wax light and breath-taking phantasmagoria created by Sydric Panganiban, captured in the magical lens of Edwin Leviste.
Some hundred perfumed, sweating, perspiring with glitters, with the phenomenon of tickling, musical potions and other unmentionable matters that could make a fashion reporter weep or an inebriated music writer sober.
The Maestro started with Liszt 6th Hungarian Rhapsody, unceremoniously interrupted by a photographer’ s flash.
He played the Organ Prelude in C Minus of Chopin “to calm his nerves.” He will always play what occurs to him at the moment, only to launch back in the 6th Rhapsody with a vengeance.
He was intemperate. Then, in a legato that flowed like oil, The Etude Op 12 was like silk heaving in an ocean, heavenly melodies weaving in and out of time.
The Immortal Waltz melted hearts than any other piece of music.
There’s the autumn leaves, which reminded all of the saddest season. The Maestro’s agony of expression and redemption, then by its end, mingled with a radiant smile of joy, when he gazed at his beloved wife, Dr. Erlinda.
Chopin’s Heroic A flat, Polonaise buoys the spirits of a city savagely stricken by uninterrupted Nazi bombs. That last music played, before the city surrendered to the Nazis, started with a few bars of prelude, into a storm of rain like runs, hail like trills, lightning arpeggios and thunder chord.
He did not rush over the keys. He made the floor shake and the whole audience were wrapped in sound.
Prayers of broken hearts, revolt of fettered souls, the pain of slavery, lost Freedom’s ache, the cursing of tyrants were exultant to songs of victory.
Meanwhile, even the sophisticated crowd at the Country Club dining room at the veranda started to stream down to where the music was playing.
The ones drinking by the bar came to see and hear the maestro — all eyes were on him.
Frustrated members of the mainstream media simply stayed by the door, hoping for a glimpse and parched with any quote from the Maestro.
Like the magical lure of the Pied Piper, everyone followed his celestial musicality.
While the Maestro wooed the public that one enchanted evening, he also humbly served art — an American we can place with pride beside the greatest recognized creative figures in any other county.
