There was no clue as to who had laboriously and fastidiously collected and pasted up the various clippings and assorted materials in the book.
The first entry in the book was a program from Albert Hall in London, where a twenty-three year-old Russian pianist named Svetlana Dyalovich made her triumphant debut, playing Tchaikovsky's B-flat Minor Concerto with Leonard Home conducting the London Philharmonic. The assembled reviews from the London Times, the Spectator and the Guardian were ecstatic, alternately calling her a "great musician" and a "virtuoso," and praising, her "electrical temperament," her "capacity for animal excitement" and "her physical genius for tremendous climax of sonority and for lightning speed."
The reviewer from the Times summed it all up with, "The piano, in Miss Dyalovich's hands, was a second orchestra, nearly as powerful and certainly as eloquent as the first, and the music was spacious, superb, rich enough in color and feeling, to have satisfied the composer himself. What is to be recorded here is the wildest welcome a pianist has received in many seasons in London, the appearance of a new pianistic talent which cannot be ignored or minimized."
There followed a similarly triumphant concert at New York's Carnegie Hall six months later, and then three concerts in Europe, one with the La Scala Orchestra in Milan, another with the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris and a third with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Holland. In rapid succession, she gave ten recitals in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and then went on to play five more in Switzerland, ending the year with concerts in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Liege, Anvers, Brussels, and then Paris again. It was not surprising that in March of the following year, the then twenty-four-year-old musical genius was honored with a profile in Time magazine. The cover photo of her showed a tall blond woman in a black gown, seated at a grand piano, her long, slender fingers resting on the keys, a confident smile on her face. They kept turning pages.
Year after year, review after review hailed her extraordinary interpretive gifts. The response was the same everywhere in the world.
Words like "breathtaking talent" and "heaven-storming octaves" and "conquering technique" and "leonine sweep and power" became commonplace in anything anyone ever wrote about her. It was as if reviewers could not find vocabulary rich enough to describe this phenomenal woman's artistry. When she was thirty-four, she married an Austrian impresario named Franz Helder… "There it is," Hawes said. "Mrs. Helder."
"Yeah." .. and a year later gave birth to her only child, whom they named Maria, after her husband's mother At the age of forty-three, when Maria was eight, exactly twenty years after a young girl from Russia had taken the town by storm, Svetlana returned to London to play a commemorative concert at Albert Hall. The critic for the London Times, displaying a remarkable lack of British restraint, hailed the performance as "a most fortunate occasion" and went on to call Svetlana "this wild tornado unleashed from the Steppes There followed a ten-year absence from recital halls "I am a very poor traveler," she told journalists. "I am afraid of flying, and I can't sleep on trains. And besides, my daughter is becoming a young woman, and she needs more attention from me." During this time, she devoted herself exclusively to recording for RCA Victor, where she first put on wax her debut concerto, the Tchaikovsky B-flat Minor, and next the Brahms D Minor, one of her favorites. She went on to interpret the works of Mozart, Prokofieff, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Liszt, always paying strict attention to what the composer intended, an artistic concern that promoted one admiring critic to write, "These recordings reveal that Svetlana Dyalovich is first and foremost a consummate musician, scrupulous to the nth degree of the directions of the composer."
Shortly after her husband's death, Svetlana returned triumphantly to the concert stage, shunning Carnegie Hall in favor of the venue of her first success, Albert Hall in London. Tickets to the single comeback performance were sold out in an hour and a half. Her daughter was eighteen. Svetlana was fifty-three. To thunderous standing ovations, she played the BachBusoni Toccata in C Major, Schumann's Fantasy in C, Scriabin's Sonata No. 9 and a Chopin Mazurka, Etude and Ballade. The evening was a total triumph. But then… Silence.
After that concert thirty years ago, there was nothing more in the scrapbook. It was as if this glittering, illustrious artist had simply vanished from the face of the earth.
Until now.
When a woman the super knew as Mrs. Helder lay dead on the floor of a chilly apartment at half past midnight, on the coldest night this year.
They closed the scrapbook.
