A night with…Theremin

They say the 13th of the month is a day of bad luck and if it happens to fall on a Tuesday, than it’s double bad luck. To superstitious folks, 13 is a number to fear in most circumstances, when one should at any cost avoid making life changing decisions, signing contracts, getting married, climbing stairs, taking a shower and generally…engaging in any activity that implies staying in or getting out of the house.

A day some people wish to get by as quickly an uneventful as possible turned out to be one of the most intense and memorable in my life. But then again, life is too short and I haven’t got enough time left for superstitions.

I was wearing my new fire opal necklace (another carrier of bad luck, they say and, as it turns out, one of my favourite precious stones), a beautiful and delicate vintage piece I had won on an Ebay auction earlier that week and he was wearing that Givenchy perfume that always makes me want to snuggle there, in the place between his arms that fits me perfectly and hold each other tight for as long as it takes to connect and transfer energies as our bones to melt together in a homogenous mass.

But as I later discovered, there were three of us that afternoon. In his chest pocket, a test of our endurance – a small box holding something inside that would somehow make us relive precious moments of our journey together as friends, comrades and lovers, accept and embrace them be they good or bad, go to inimaginable depths, look for God in shared sorrows and rejoice, as tonight has found us older, wiser and closer than we’ve ever been.

There was something in the air that would make us look forward to our lives opening up in front of us, come face to face with life’s most feared questions and answer them all simultaneously, with pounding hearts: “Yes, I do”.

The promise of new traditions; nights at the oldest inns of England, a trip to melancholic Russia, sunny Jamaica and romantic Venice just in time for the Carnival and our crib – a small cottage somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, in the warmest and most delightful place on Earth, with a pond and a boat, children and lots of animals playing together, just as the stories go.

 

But the night’s highlight was supposed to be the concert for Theremin and Orchestra at the Brunel Museum in Rothertythe we had tickets to. I’d been building up expectations, he’d been building up courage. We got there early, almost two hours ahead, because there was one way only for me to attend this concert: right in front of the theremin, next to it, breathing it in more frantically with every sound and movement.

 

But first, we made a stop right by the river, at The Mayflower, one of the oldest and most crowded pubs in London, and the place Captain Christopher Jones set sail in 1620 to discover the New World. As we entered, we could almost feel the past coming to life from dark corners, candle lit tables, a chimney, old photographs, Victorian busts, dusty miniature boats on the walls, lamplights, taxidermied animals and massive old books. It was perfect, I was at home. The bar was too crowded, so we went to a small park overlooking the river, sat on a bench and as we were both waiting for the other to start a conversation, we listened and listened to the sound of the Thames interrupted by laughter and clicking Prosecco glasses coming from the pub.

“Cheers!”

 

I looked around at the twenty-five empty chairs prepared for the orchestra overwhelmed by  shame for as much as I understood and respected the power and contribution of every single instrument to the whole show and the amount of work it must have taken to put everything together, I was only interested in the theremin. I only wanted to see and hear it being played, hauntingly, endlessly and pretend it was for me and me alone.

I was a man in a room full of beautiful, sophisticated, fascinating women desperately using their earthly charms to catch his attention without knowing that his heart has already been promised to someone else and that he is completely consumed by her presence.

The theremin was the only reason for my being there, partly because of the unsettling, gloomy, out-of-space-like sounds it makes and how these sounds travel deep inside you, grab you by the heart, rip it apart and transport each piece to a different place in space and time then reattach them to the body, with the promise of new dimensions, not yet discovered by the human spirit, making you feel like you’ve lived a thousand lives; and you probably have, during a one hour concert  – partly, because of it’s uniquely strange  appearance – a minimalist looking wooden box, a long antenna and a loop.

 

Oh, did I mention that it is the only musical instrument to be played without being touched?  Imagine an electronic harp with invisible chords and an instrumentist who knows exactly where to find each note on the invisible scale. With surgeon’s precision, he moves his fingers in the air around the harp, making whimsical sounds.

Precision is key and the movement of fingers resembles a spider building it’s web. For a vibrato effect, the instrumentist gently moves his right hand left and right around a note and to adjust the volume, the left hand is placed further away or closer to the metal loop. It is by far one of the most fascinating instruments to watch and listen to and you might even feel it’s alchemic powers taking over and changing the composition of your cells, healing them, rearranging their sequences.

Famous pieces such as Bernard Herrmann’s “The day the Earth stood still”, Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Waltz no.2”, Debussy’s “Claire de lune”, John William’s theme from “Star Wars” absolutely convinced me of the theremin’s mood versatility and if that is not perfection, I don’t know what is.

I remember looking through the room as tears were falling on my cheeks during “Spellbound” and thinking “Breathe it in, this night may have to last you for the rest of your life.”

Later update: I just came across an overwhelming example of what the theremin can do to a soul and feel I must share it with the whole world and all of my follower: 

Green Eyed Kisses,