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Alfredo Perl was born in Chile and is best
known for his Beethoven. He has performed the
Beethoven cycle of sonatas in Santiago,
Moscow and London.
Uploaded in honor of HH's birthday...
from excellent DVD of Chopin music. See and
order it at www.opusarte.com
this Chopin piece is used in the new halo 3
battle scene commercial (showing UNSC marine
fighting alongside the Master Chief):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5UcMCXns2k
There is one that came to him through an
evening of dismal rain—it casts the soul
into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had
left him in good health one morning to go
shopping in Palma for things we needed at our
"encampment." The rain came in overflowing
torrents. We made three leagues in six hours,
only to return in the middle of a flood. We
got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having
been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard
of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick
one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was
as though congealed in a kind of quiet
desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his
wonderful prelude.
Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then
said with a bewildered air and a strange
tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead."
When he recovered his spirits and saw the
state we were in, he was ill, picturing the
dangers we had been through, but he confessed
to me that while waiting for us he had seen
it all in a dream, and no longer
distinguishing the dream from reality, he
became calm and drowsy.
While playing the piano, persuaded that he
was dead himself, he saw himself drown in a
lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a
regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made
him listen to the sound of the drops of water
indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he
denied having heard it. He was even angry
that I should interpret this in terms of
imitative sounds. He protested with all his
might—and he was right to—against the
childishness of such aural imitations.
His genius was filled with the mysterious
sounds of nature, but transformed into
sublime equivalents in musical thought, and
not through slavish imitation of the actual
external sounds. His composition of that
night was surely filled with raindrops,
resounding clearly on the tiles of the
Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in
his imagination and in his song into tears
falling upon his heart from the sky.
- George Sand
Tags : Chopin Perl raindrop Piano Music halo3 classical opus arte opusarte music |
