Dear Mr. Chappell:

What is the real story behind those last-minute substitutions that you have done when another pianist has canceled a concert? Like, how many hours was it really from the time they called you to the time of the concert?

— Curious

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Dear Curious:

Well, the story goes something like this:

“I see that Claudio Arrau is playing the Brahms Second two weeks from now. What if he cancels? Maybe I should start practicing.” I was talking to my friend George Orner, who was the principal second violinist in the Baltimore Symphony at the time. I was just joking. I didn’t practice the piece.

That was October, 1977. In early July, I had performed the Brahms Second Concerto at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York. I was in the orchestra pit, and the Stuttgart Ballet was onstage dancing to the music, which they had choreographed. Although I had first studied the piece in 1972 and had memorized it then, I was reading from the score for security during the ballet performances because I had to completely subsume my own interpretation of the music in favor of the dancers’ requirements. Four movements long and over forty minutes playing time, the Brahms Second Concerto is one of the biggest and most difficult pieces in the piano repertoire.

The summer and early fall of 1977 found me in kind of a funk. For one thing, I had been sick for some weeks that summer. For another, I had finished my studies at Peabody Conservatory and was wondering and worrying about my future career as a concert pianist, which didn’t look too certain. I hadn’t touched the Brahms Second Concerto since July; in fact, I wasn’t practicing the piano much at all. I was reading a lot, focusing on classics such as the Iliad and the Bible as a self-directed study in the humanities.

At 3:30 p.m. on November 2, 1977, I was reading a passage from Ecclesiastes that said, in effect, don’t imagine that you know what will happen next, when I received a phone call from Ann Goldberg of the Baltimore Symphony. “Can you play for Arrau tonight?” Ann was the person who engaged the soloists with the symphony. I flashed back on my remark to George Orner. I wasn’t sure I understood what she was asking. “Arrau is sick,” she went on. I asked, “Do you mean, could I be on hand in case he can’t do it?” “He is not going to play. Please hold.” This was one of several times that I was put on hold during the conversation. Ann was taking calls from all over the country. She had called the managers of Andre Watts, John Browning, and several other luminaries, and all of them were calling her back to say no.

Teri Gold, a singer whose student recital I had recently accompanied at Peabody, was working as Ann’s assistant. She told me later that she had said to Ann, “What about Jeffrey?” I was a known quantity at the Baltimore Symphony, having been a concerto soloist with them several times already. Ann asked, “Does he play the piece?” Teri went to get the list of my repertoire from a file cabinet. As she put it, “Jeffrey, my hands were shaking when I reached for that file.”

Thank you, Teri Gold.

When Ann came back to me on the phone, I asked, “Could I just play through the piece once and then let you know?” “No, we need to know now. Please hold.” I ran to my music cabinet, pulled out the Brahms score, and carried it back to the phone. I opened it on the floor in front of me and started turning the pages with one hand while holding the phone with the other. Ann came back. “Jeffrey?”

I had one thought: if I didn’t do this, I would hate myself for the rest of my life. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I told her. “All right, when I’ll get Comissiona’s approval, I’ll call you back,” she said, and hung up. Sergiu Comissiona was the conductor. At 4:00 o’clock, she called back. “You’re on.” The concert program would begin at 8:15.

The only other phone call that came that afternoon was from the symphony board member who was hosting a reception for Arrau that night; could I attend in his place? Yes, of course, was my reply. I made a call to George Orner to ask for a ride to the concert. A piano student came to my door, totally forgotten, whom I had to send away. I didn’t even take time to call my parents.

I played through the piece once with the music and then once without the music. I did my afternoon meditation. I ate some scrambled eggs. Then I got dressed. As I fastened the cuff links on my tuxedo shirt, I asked myself what I was doing. “I’m playing the Brahms,” I answered to myself.

George picked me up a little after 7:00. “Psychic,” he said to me as I got in his car. At 7:30, I was meeting with the conductor in my backstage dressing room at the Lyric Theater. As I played through the piano part on a tiny upright piano, he sang along and conducted. He was concerned that I wasn’t making a big sound. “I’m saving it for the concert,” I told him.

The concerto was the second half of the program. I waited through the first half and the intermission. Then it was time. I walked onstage. I had decided that it would be a distraction to read the music, so I was performing the Brahms Second Concerto for the first time in public by memory. I played the first movement. There was applause afterwards. I played the second movement. One little slip-up in the second theme, but retrieved on the repeat. Again, applause afterwards. Third, fourth movements went by. Last chord. I stood up, turned to Sergiu, yelled “Jesus Christ!” which, in the roar of applause, I’m not sure even he could hear, and gave him a hug. Standing ovation. I walked offstage. My head, from the concentration and energy, felt as if it were expanded to arm’s width.

There were excited reviews in the paper the next day. Word was out. That night, the repeat of the previous evening’s program (some joked that it had been the rehearsal) brought numerous friends and colleagues to the audience. They formed a long line to greet me backstage after the concert. “So this is what it takes to get you downtown,” one of them said.

Subsequently, whenever Comissiona introduced me to someone, he would say, “This is Jeffrey Chappell, who substituted for Claudio Arrau on four hours’ notice.” As the number of years from the actual event lengthened, the number of hours in the story shortened. After awhile, he would say “Three hours’ notice.” Then, “Two hours.” “One hour.” My legend is greater than I am.

As a reward, the symphony hired me back to play the Khachaturian Concerto with them the following season. That performance took place in March, 1979 and was conducted by my teacher, Leon Fleisher.

At 5:00 p.m. on Monday, October 11, 2004, while giving a piano lesson at Goucher College, I received a phone call from my manager. Could I play the Khachaturian Concerto with the Annapolis Symphony that week to substitute for a pianist who had canceled? I hadn’t even looked at the piece since my last performance of it twenty-five years before with the Baltimore Symphony. Two nights later, I was in rehearsal. This time, I used the music so that I could maximize my practice time on the text and not on memorization.

Although the Annapolis Symphony had sent out an alarm to managers all over the United States, expecting to fly the substitute soloist in from anywhere, I had to drive just 45 minutes from my Washington, D.C. area home for the rehearsals and concerts. I took the week off from teaching and instead spent my time napping and practicing. I called it my Khachaturian vacation.

I also took the time to send out an e-mail to various people to let them know that I was making a last-minute substitution for another pianist who had canceled, with details of the performances in case they could attend. One of them wrote back, “What do you mean, ‘last-minute’? You have two whole days.”

The two performances on Friday and Saturday garnered standing ovations as well as compliments from the conductor, David Itkin, and the musicians in the orchestra and in the audience. At Saturday’s reception after the concert, an elderly woman approached me to express her enjoyment of the performance. She told me that it was amazing to her that I could pull off such a feat in so little time—how did I do it? I replied that I didn’t know how I did it, and that I was the person who was the most amazed by the whole thing. She cut right through it. “No, you’re not,” she said.

— JC