If There Is Much In The Window There Should Be More In The Room

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Remember This Lady?








Remember This Lady? 


You Will After You Hear What She Did.




An unfamiliar name to most people, but this remarkable woman defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a health worker, she sneaked the children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places and found non-Jewish families to adopt them…..






Read more @ 
http://www.auschwitz.dk/sendler.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1950450/Irena-Sendler.html

Monday, January 5, 2015

Sviatoslav Richter. Legendary Concert in London










Sviatoslav Richter. Legendary Concert in London 


Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) was, unquestionably, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

A complicated and temperamental man, Richter strictly avoided being filmed. The circumstances of this Barbican recital were far from ideal: Richter, who was known to cancel concerts at a moment’s notice, was apparently unaware until shortly before the concert that it was to be filmed. After a considerable and heated discussion, he agreed to the filming on the condition that no camera would be in his field of vision. 

This challenge was overcome at the expense of the film crew, who were accustomed to expending thousands of watts of lighting power when televising such an event. Richter insisted on restricting the lighting to a single 40-watt bulb, focused not on him, but on his music. This eccentric lightening was unconventional even without cameras present, but it was his standard practice at concerts, as he wanted to focus maximum attention on the music and de-emphasize the importance of the performer. It also served to mask his use of a score, a practice he implemented in 1979 after a memory lapse at a concert.

When the great Sviatoslav Richter took the stage carrying his own music and accompanied by a page-turner at this recital at London's Barbican Centre in March 1989, he resembled a distracted John Malkovich -- balding, bespectacled, and bored looking -- so unsuspecting members of the audience might have been forgiven for thinking that they were in for a dull evening. 

But though he looked like an accountant performing by the light of a small lamp, Richter played like a god.