The great virtuoso pianist, Van Cliburn, has passed on. I read his
obituary in The Economist in a state
of shock … that turned to elation for the talent of the man and the joy his
music brought to my life.
How many
numberless hours had I spent spellbound at the sound emanating, soaring, from a
spinning long-play record, during my growing up years! That music spread to the
tingling tips of my being till the world took an irrevocably aurum hue. Unimaginable
emotions welled up within me ignited by that astonishing, that phenomenal power
and intricacy of music.
Years later,
by an inexplicable preordaining of innumerable coincidences, the love for
ornithology and music found kinship with R and on a music drenched evening, I recalled
to him the lost bars of Cliburn’s heart-stirring performance through the gleaming
Grundig, smelling of warmed wax when its lid was lifted, in dad’s room. Too many
years had passed, and I could not recall that heartbeat of opening bars … till
R spoke of Richter and we watched that massive Russian sink his immense hands
into a grand piano and draw from its innards such sinews of golden sound that I
was pinned to my chair, tears smarting from unblinking eyes, the hair on my
nape and upper arms set aflame by a resonating chord! That giant Russian
virtuoso brought back Rachmaninoff’s immeasurably memorable 2nd
Piano Concerto … the very symphony of the air that I was enslaved to during my
teenage years—a recording of Cliburn’s unbelievable performance that conquered
Soviet Russia’s cultural heart.
The flood
gates of emotional attachments need a mere stirring of memory to let loose a
roaring deluge of days gone by … what bliss follows then, ruminating.
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