The Schiermonnikoog Festival invited me to play three concerts.

Nobody mentioned the bicycle.

Schiermonnikoog is a small island off the north coast of the Netherlands, and visitors are not allowed to bring cars. So everybody cycles. Calmly. Constantly. Without looking where they are going, because they already know.

You walk up to the concert hall expecting a foyer and you find bicycles. Rows of them. Bicycles leaning on bicycles. The Dutch do not park bicycles. They plant them, and by October the harvest is enormous.

An old harpoon gun mounted on a post next to a row of bicycle racks
An old harpoon gun, installed right next to the bike racks. By day three, I understood the impulse.

Then they gave me a bicycle.

It is the one at the top of this page. Blue. Pretty. It looks like it has never done anything wrong in its life.

It had no hand brakes.

To stop, you pedal backwards.

Please understand my position. I am a pianist. Pedals are my entire career. I know exactly what a pedal does. You press it, and the sound keeps going. That is the whole point of a pedal.

So I pressed the pedal and the bicycle kept going, which is exactly what my training had prepared me for. Then I wanted to stop.

To stop, you pedal in reverse. There is no reverse on a Steinway. I would know. I have looked.

Meanwhile my hands, which have spent decades learning octaves, trills and things Liszt wrote purely out of spite, had nothing to do. They reached for brakes that were not there. Then they just held on and watched. For the first time in my life, my hands were the audience.

The concerts, thankfully, came with brakes. All three were at De Stag, and I made it to all three upright, which I am counting as my main achievement of the week.

First, Mozart. The Piano Quartet in G minor with Alissa Margulis, Connie Pharoah and Nil Kocamangil, in a concert called Prodigies. Mozart wrote it at twenty-nine. Arriaga, who shared the program, wrote his first string quartet as a teenager. I wrote this blog post at an age I will not be sharing.

Luis Magalhães taking a wide-eyed selfie on the stage of De Stag with the piano behind him
De Stag, two hours before Mozart. This is my relaxed face.
A tub of Haribo KinderMix on a wooden table backstage
Backstage catering, at a festival with a concert called Prodigies. I respect a festival that commits to a theme.
Luis Magalhães at the piano with violin, viola and cello in Mozart's Piano Quartet in G minor at De Stag
Mozart with Alissa Margulis, Connie Pharoah and Nil Kocamangil. Photo Melle Meivogel

Second, Franck. The Piano Quintet, in a concert called Vive la France!, with the Fibonacci Quartet. The program notes promised “no baguettes or berets.” The festival kept its word.

Franck’s quintet is nearly forty minutes of one man having enormous feelings in F minor. Legend says Saint-Saëns played the premiere, hated it, and walked off leaving the manuscript Franck had dedicated to him sitting on the piano. I took my score home. Low bar. Cleared.

The Fibonacci played it like they had nothing to lose, which is the only correct way to play Franck.

Third, Czechmate!, which is the best concert title I have ever played under.

Janáček’s Pohádka with Ella van Poucke. Pohádka means fairy tale. Ella plays the cello the way the Dutch ride bicycles. No hesitation, no wasted movement, and complete confidence that she will arrive exactly where she meant to.

Cellist Ella van Poucke and Luis Magalhães at the piano performing Janáček's Pohádka
Janáček with Ella van Poucke. Photo Melle Meivogel

Then Dvořák. Three Slavonic Dances, four hands, with Caspar Vos.

Four-hand playing is its own kind of traffic. Two people share one bench and one keyboard, and only one of them gets the pedal. That was me. After a few days on that bicycle, it was a relief to work a pedal that does what it is told.

Caspar is also the festival director, which makes sharing a piano bench with him a delicate situation. You smile a lot. You stay strictly on your half of the keyboard.

Luis Magalhães and Caspar Vos laughing while playing four hands at one Steinway
Dvořák with Caspar Vos. Four hands, one bench, zero bicycles. Photo Melle Meivogel

In fairness to the man, his program was excellent. A Dutch premiere of Arthur Foote’s Piano Quintet. Novák’s quintet, which nobody plays. A whole evening of women composers called The Women We Missed. Concerts at breakfast. Bach for Breakfast. Cello for Breakfast. On an island where you get around by bicycle and stop by faith.

And in fairness to me, I am biased. Caspar is one of my dearest friends. I would share a piano bench with him anywhere. I would even share a tandem with him, as long as it has hand brakes.

Then I went back to Madrid.

Madrid has the opposite problem. Nobody cycles. Everybody stops.

You are walking along a perfectly good sidewalk and the person in front of you simply stops. No warning. No signal. No ritardando. They have remembered something, or seen someone, or decided that this exact square meter is where they live now.

In the Netherlands, everything moves and nothing stops. In Madrid, everything stops and you are the only thing still moving.

So I have a plan. I am getting myself a Dutch bicycle. Not to ride it. I am going to park it in the middle of the sidewalk on Gran Vía, stand next to it, completely still, and check my phone.

Finally, I will fit in.

Concert photos by Melle Meivogel for the Schiermonnikoog Festival. The bicycle, the harpoon, the Haribo and the face are mine.