a tape playback.

As he entered the miserably decayed and malodorous barroom, he exchanged animated comments with the producer through an interpreter. He was then led to a central position facing the sixteen-inch monitor speakers and seated on one of the few safe, clean chairs. The entourage receded to allow him total acoustic independence.

The maestro, with a shaggy sweater draped over his hunched shoulders, listened carefully to the playback. He followed the music without a score, often smiling at the vibrant Russian sonority he had drawn from this superb pickup orchestra of mostly moonlighting New York Philharmonic players. Occasionally, he dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. He seemed pleased to be there.

So was I. As a life-long music student, I was drawn to the moment and the man—to the point, however, that I could not stop staring at his avuncular face. In order to break his hypnotic grip, I forced my gaze about the crowded room, finally scanning the length of the cluttered bar—past a leaking coffee cup, a bent soda can, a crushed cigarette pack, an open attaché case, a full ashtray, and a newspaper …

A newspaper!

It was a day-old New York Post and its shocking front-page headline pierced icily into the music’s warmth: RED AUTHOR REJECTS NOBEL PRIZE.

The grotesque, night-black letters made my face flush, my head swim. It was not just the tragic “Pasternak scandal” that disgusted me. No, I was supremely outraged by the blatant shallowness of the words—so typical of the Post’s style—and the way they unjustly intruded on this high musical moment.

I slipped to the end of the bar, tucked the paper under my arm, and returned to my haven, certain I had averted a political and personal insult.

But then I imagined the inevitable questions: Was I the only one who had seen it? Had some right-wing goon placed it there to incite? If the maestro had seen it, would it affect his music making? Is Kondrashin planning to defect?

The playback ended and the beaming maestro indicated his approval of the take. A coffee break was called. The orchestra members stretched and scattered about the main hall; the barroom entourage split into sociable groups, leaving Kondrashin and his interpreter standing momentarily alone.

Suddenly, my heart began pounding and my hands became cold in reaction to an urge so strong it terrified me. Yet I couldn’t resist it. As though pushed, I walked toward Kondrashin and his interpreter, holding the headline like a billboard before me. We exchanged a quick triangle of equally nervous glances. Then:

“Maestro. What do you think of this?” I asked.

But before an answer could form on his lips, I was wrenched backward in a powerful grip: a terrified RCA executive apparently felt that history could not withstand my impudence. He scolded me, then released me chastened.

When I set my gaze once more on the two men,

their faces were grim—in reaction to the question or to the scolding, I could not tell. The maestro said a few Russian words to the interpreter. They again glanced at me, with sadness in their eyes. Kondrashin, a tall man, seemed oddly compressed. The interpreter looked at me, then to the newspaper I now held limply at my side, then at Kondrashin, and then again at me.

“Terrible business,” he translated flatly.

He turned away.

Kondrashin rose, stepped carefully over the rat’s nest of cables, and exited to conduct more Khatchaturian.

In 1978—after being named People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R., after winning the principal conductorship of the Moscow Philharmonic, after premiering Shostakovich’s controversial Thirteenth Symphony, after how much personal agony we cannot know—Kiril Kondrashin defected to the West.

On March 7, 1981, by then, a permanent conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin died suddenly of a heart attack after a concert in Amsterdam.