The taxi ride from the hotel in Manhattan to Brooklyn was a short thirty minutes, although passing by "Ground Zero" was a long and sobering reminder of the fateful day. After dinner at Five Front we headed to the Barge on the East River, an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. The setting was modest with roughly ten rows of ten seats for a capacity of one hundred. Attendance was only about 70 and it was significantly disproportionate to the incredible performance by Dmitri Alexeev.
After six movements of Chant sans Paroles (P. I. Tchaikovsky), Mr. Alexeev played four movements of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 3. The Steinway piano filled the room and from the fourth row, the resonance and brilliance were stunning. After the intermission came Twelve Preludes of Shostakovich and three preludes of Rachmaninov. The standing ovation led to two encores. Dmitri Alexeev was truly incredible. The Russian pianist lived up to a well-deserved reputation. Ray Kurzweil may be right that man-made computers will overtake our biological computing abilities in the next dozen or so years but listening to the thousands of expressive notes played by Mr. Alexeev showed how unique the human mind is. I can not imagine a computer providing any experience like this performance any time soon.
The unsung hero of the evening was Olga Bloom — a very unpretentious 87 year-old former symphony violinist who greeted us as we boarded the barge and offered a glass of wine as. Ms. Bloom bought the barge thirty years ago and turned it into Bargemusic — a concert hall of sorts. Olga manages four concerts per week. The supporters listed in the program numbered more than five-hundred. Olga told us at the break that she thought it was really important to provide a low cost way to enable artists to express themselves and share their musical talents in a public forum. Well said. There are many other unsung heroes in towns and cities around the world who keep the arts alive through the ups and downs of the economy.
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