As if by clockwork, the great concert hall came to an absolute silence when Conductor Jeno Ormand turned his back on the audience. An almost imperceptible smile flashed as maestro established eye contact with his musicians. Then his face turned suddenly intense, with a darty side-to-side movement of his pupils that must have been a signal his players knew well, immediately followed by an instant upward glance toward heaven and a passing nod of the head as if to affirm for them that yes now we are all here and now is the time to do what we have prepared and here it is.
Suddenly his two arms were flung high in the air and immediately into a blurring descent to both sides in two long, quick arcs. The trombones announced, with urgent chordal brilliance, a boldly solemn procession of long notes in minor key. Cellos answered deliberately their last two notes; woodwinds caressed the dirgeful tones into the beginnings of a slow, harmonic theme.
Now out of the mists of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s trained imagination, a lone violin emerged, with soulful wailing, long and vibrating, then descending in quick staccato triplets, like a caged bird would sing, and lighting gently upon the full orchestra’s introduction: a captured woman’s tuneful telling of some ancient oriental tale, now arranged for twentieth-century symphony.
In the audience imagination, if they had read the program notes, the exotic woman Scheherazade would be spinning, through her lyrical telling of it, a nighttime yarn, a story retrieved from her memory, and designed to forestall her death.

in Carey Rowland’s novel being written, King of Soul