Thursday, 17 November 2011

Respecting Purity and Power.

I decided to upload a version of Elgar’s Nimrod from YouTube – the piece with the power to move Natalia Luis-Bassa and me equally, it would seem. Being post-midnight, I decided I would have to play it quietly out of deference to my neighbour, and that just wasn’t right.

I have great respect for the purity and power inherent in certain pieces of instrumental music, and Nimrod is one of them. It has to be played with sufficient volume that the crescendo shakes you from your foundations and lifts you to the heights, before laying you gently down to rest. For me, it’s about getting there, making it through, finding the Holy Grail. Maybe it’s even about finding or making the ideal love, I wouldn’t know.

Playing Nimrod quietly would have been disrespectful, and I couldn’t do that to it. I turned it off.

You can hear it here if you want to.

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