Her persistence worked to her advantage, and she was bold in contacting him directly, indicating that I am serious about this career and that we can achieve a lot together. Both hungry and eager to prove ourselves.
After I sent the email and reply, I did what I do every day because I am not just an actor, After I sent the email—the one I agonized over for forty minutes, rewriting sentences until they balanced the gossamer threads of humility and ambition—I did what I do every day because, despite my obsession with the craft of acting, I have other pursuits and skills that I have spent years, if not decades, honing, and to neglect them now would be a betrayal of my own interior world. I have always been the sort of woman who requires multiple projects running in parallel in order to feel whole, and so, even as the last echo of the "sent" chime faded from my laptop, I rose from the writing desk and walked the three steps to my music corner, which sits in a patch of sunlight by the living room window.
The piano, a battered but dignified Yamaha upright with several sticky keys around middle C, greeted me like an old friend. I ran my fingers over the worn ivory, each one marked with a faint smudge from years of practice, and then settled onto the bench. Every day, I practice for at least one hour, but on days like this—days charged with anticipation, uncertainty, a sense of possibility—I often go for three. My mother, in a rare moment of candor, once said that all the women in our family were restless—our hands always needing to move, our minds always scanning for the next challenge—and I have never felt that more acutely than on these long afternoons when my inbox sits quietly, holding the fate of my next six months within it.
Today, I launched into Chopin's Ballade No. 1, my fingers stumbling only slightly over the notorious run near the end, and then I tried a piece by Ginastera that I've been obsessed with lately. The dissonance sharpens my brain; I play it so loudly that the neighbors sometimes rap on the wall, but today they must have been out, because I was alone with the vibrations. When my hands grew tired, I switched to violin, tuning it with a precision that would have made my grandfather proud. I worked on the passage from the Shostakovich concerto until my fingertips throbbed and my right wrist ached.
I had, just that morning, finalized and sent in my application and video for the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium, arguably the most important competition in the world if you want to be taken seriously as a concert soloist. They don't run it every single year, and the rules are arcane, but I have already set my sights on the 1995 cycle for the piano, and I am confident that I will get in. My teacher, Ms. Kagan, who speaks with an accent so thick it is like syrup, wrote my recommendation letter on onion-skin paper, and I have memorized the way she described me: "Miss Olivier possesses a rare combination of technical brilliance and interpretive imagination, which, paired with her relentless work ethic, makes her a formidable competitor." I know it is gauche to be pleased with one's own press, but I savored every word.
It is not just about winning, of course; I am not naïve enough to think that even a first prize would transform my life overnight. But I am addicted to the horizon of the next challenge, the way I can imagine a future self who is not only better than I am now, but possibly—if I am very lucky—historic. The audition tape I sent in was the product of two months' worth of recording sessions, and I will admit that I sometimes play it back late at night, picking apart each phrase, searching for the human element inside the perfection.
What I write in my emails, or say in interviews, may give the impression that I am a born performer, hungry for stage lights and the heat of attention, but the truth is that I have always been most at home in the daily ritual of preparation, the disciplined retreat into obsessive repetition that most people would call drudgery. In this, I am much closer to my grandmother, who, even as she was dying, insisted on reciting her lines one last time, each syllable pronounced as if the rightness of the world depended on it.
I finished my practice around dusk. The apartment smelled faintly of rosin and the stew I'd set bubbling in the kitchen, and in the growing darkness I felt the tingle of anticipation for the next check of my inbox.
The
This year, for the first time in my life, I gathered all my courage and the entirety of my curriculum—every competition certificate, recommendation, and an audition tape so obsessively revised that I could recite its failings in my sleep—and sent an application to the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Not just as a violinist or a pianist, but for both. I submitted dual dossiers: one as a soloist for the violin, one for the piano, gambling that the selection committee would appreciate my impertinence or, at the very least, the spectacle of it. Anyone who has ever glanced at the list of laureates knows that this is a competition of legends; it has minted household names and destroyed just as many careers, its history glimmering with both triumph and quiet tragedy. But for me, the real draw was in the location, the sheer impossible place: Moscow.
Until very recently, this competition might as well have been on the moon. My mother's stories about the Soviet Union made it sound as strange and forbidden as a lost city—an alien architecture of culture and paranoia that glittered from afar but could never be entered. Yet with the iron curtain only now unspooled, the world had changed just enough for a woman like me, with an American passport and a name that straddled both continents, to be let in. The news came in a letter, not an email—stamped with Cyrillic flourishes, the address block typed on a ribbon so old the ink had faded to blue-gray. "It is the great honor of the Tchaikovsky Committee to invite you, Rose Lamarr Olivier, to Moscow, June 1994." I read it four times, then once aloud, then once more for my mother, who cried in a way she's never allowed herself to cry for anything I have done before.
There is something about the grandeur of Russian approval that hits differently from the American equivalent. The Americans will shake your hand with congratulatory brevity, but the Russians—oh, the Russians—will write you a poem, toast to your ancestors, and press a medal to your breast with a gravity that makes you reconsider your own importance. I knew, instinctively, that this was not only a chance for performance, nor even for prestige, but a kind of personal closure. My teacher called it a homecoming, even though I had never set foot on Russian soil. "So many of us are born with ghosts," she said, "but you—yours is waiting for you, alive, in Moscow."
All my life, I have been compared to my grandmother, that incandescent, cosmopolitan starlet who, in my mother's favourite story, charmed a Soviet cultural attaché into giving her a tour of the Bolshoi. It is said in our family that she could have had the whole of Moscow at her feet if only she'd wanted it, but she died before the walls came down, and her last wish—to perform in the city that made and ruined so many careers—was never fulfilled. For me, this competition is not just about the music. It is about trespassing into a place that women like her were never meant to reach.