D Flat

[Excerpted from notes by Adrian Brinkerhoff discovered after his disappearance, not so much discovered as recovered, stiff as slate, like blood on a blackboard. -- The Producer]

Having colored hearing, or synesthesia, both Nabokov and his wife Véra experienced tastes and colors at the sounds of letters ("steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k..., creamy d, bright-golden y,... the drab shoelace of h..."). Nabokov was as sensitive to spaces as to colors, note "the green drawing room (where an odor of fir, hot wax and tangerines would linger long after Christmas had gone)." Such syntheses color the musician's mind. Each piece you play takes on the scents and sights of its rustling audience, rusting salon, roasting dusk, the dripping post-rain trees and rumbling summer evening creeping in around the notes through the valanced mahogany muntins, every hasty trill, balanced leap, and improvised sforzando immortalized in its own amber light, to be brought up precisely before the note in question is repeated again, limber enough to be resurrected thirty years later from the throng of similar aspirants waiting in the plush lounge of hindsight to be called in at will, not by premeditation, but out of whimsy, instinct, folly. As well as the lighting, many musicians have productive associations with various keys, from the over-eager, juvenile, bushy-tailed C to the voluptuous velour seraglio of G flat. C sharp is almost dedicated to Rachmaninoff and Scriabin in its fury and aggression. D flat involves exactly the same notes on the keyboard as C sharp, but the tones are produced by the calming flat, not the hair-raising sharp, creating a drowsy lushness, an overgrown ravine hidden in the rolling countryside, enveloped by glades and bosks, by Constable and Corot, the fallen apple midsummer before a warm caramel storm. A smug sunset leads to the Jane Austen inevitability of dinner and love on the moors. I've chosen these pieces because to me they cling to that nocturnal trellis that lives only in the world of D flat. The dreams they provoke are not accidental. The moods they inspire must be similar to the same moods that brought them into the world. That is, they re-create themselves easily, assuming the pianist doesn't trip over them, but has the foresight instead to slip into the hedges and wait for thunder.