The Orchestra of Strangers

The hall was dying, and Tomas Hale had decided to make it sing once more before it went.

Aldridge Hall had been his great mistake. Twenty years ago he had been a conductor with a name, a man invited to stand in front of famous orchestras in famous cities; and then, at the height of it, he had poured everything he owned and a great deal that he did not into the dream of his own concert hall, a beautiful old building with perfect, impossible acoustics, and the dream had bankrupted him slowly and then all at once. Now the bank owned the hall, the demolition order was signed, and Tomas owned almost nothing but a baton, a worn black coat, and six weeks before the wreckers came. He had decided to spend those six weeks putting on one final concert. It was the only thing he knew how to do, and he wanted the building to die with music in it rather than silence.

No professional orchestra would play for a bankrupt conductor in a condemned hall for no fee. So Tomas had put a handwritten notice in the window of the shuttered box office and in the window of the corner shop down the road: *Amateur musicians wanted for one final concert. No pay. No audition. Bring your instrument and whatever you have.* He had not expected anyone. On the first evening, eleven people came.