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O autor sabe como captar o interesse do leitor, começando com uma estória:
"On the 27th of January, 1975, a seventeen-year-old German girl named Vera Brandes stepped out onto the vast stage of the Cologne opera house. The auditorium was empty, and lit only by the dim green glow of the emergency exit sign, but this was the most exciting day of Vera’s life. She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Opera House to host a late-night concert of improvised jazz by the American pianist Keith Jarrett. The concert was a sellout, and in just a few hours, Jarrett would stride out in front of 1,400 people, sit down at the Bösendorfer piano, and without sheet music or rehearsal would begin to play.Quando cheguei aqui parei e fiquei maravilhado.
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But that afternoon, Vera Brandes was introducing Keith Jarrett and his producer Manfred Eicher to the piano—and it wasn’t going well.
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“Keith played a few notes,” recalls Brandes. “Then Eicher played a few notes. They didn’t say anything. They circled the instrument several times and then tried a few keys. Then after a long silence, Manfred came to me and said, ‘If you don’t get another piano, Keith can’t play tonight.’.
Vera Brandes was stunned. She knew that Jarrett had requested a specific instrument and the Opera House had agreed to provide it. What she hadn’t realized was that, caring little for late-night jazz, they’d failed and didn’t even know it. The administrative staff had gone home, the piano movers hadn’t been able to find the Bösendorfer piano that had been requested, and so they had instead installed, as Brandes recalls, “this tiny little Bösendorfer, that was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn’t work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable.”
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Brandes tried everything to find a replacement. She even rounded up friends to push a grand piano through the streets of Cologne, but it was raining hard, and the local piano tuner warned her that the substitute piano would never survive the trip. Instead, he worked to fix up the little instrument that was onstage already. Yet he could do nothing about the muffled bass notes, the plinky high notes, and the simple fact that the piano —“a small piano, like half a piano”—just didn’t make a loud enough sound to reach the balconies of the vast auditorium.
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Understandably, Jarrett didn’t want to perform. He left and went to wait in his car, leaving Brandes to anticipate the arrival of 1,400 soon-to-be furious concertgoers. The best day of her life had suddenly become the worst; her enthusiasm for jazz and her precocious entrepreneurial spirit brought the prospect of utter humiliation. Desperate, she caught up with Jarrett and through the window of his car, she begged him to play. The young pianist looked out at the bedraggled German teenager standing in the rain and took pity on her. “Never forget,” Jarrett said. “Only for you.”
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A few hours later, as midnight approached, Jarrett walked out to the unplayable piano in front of a packed concert hall, and began.
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“The minute he played the first note, everybody knew this was magic,” recalls Brandes.
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That night’s performance began with a simple chiming series of notes, then quickly gained complexity as it moved by turns between dynamism and a languid, soothing tone. It was beautiful and strange, and it is enormously popular: the Köln Concert album has sold 3.5 million copies."
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Há cerca de 10 anos o meu amigo Eduardo apresentou-me Keith Jarreth e foi amor à primeira vista. E o Köln Concert é pura magia que aprendi a apreciar como companhia durante muitas horas de trabalho ou de viagem.
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Ontem de manhã bem cedo, durante uma caminhada matinal debaixo de chuva miudinha junto aos esteiros de Estarreja, fiz uma ligação entre esta estória e as PME.
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Continua.
