Blood Harmonies

Joshua Bell busking out a little Bach for Maxidus…

To me, this clip is both unbelievably uplifting, and yet somehow tragic as well. First there is the obvious top note, where the sublime Joshua Bell meets the transcendental Bach. But running underneath, there’s also the relentless rhythm of rush-hours the world over, in which everyone is too fraught and harassed to spot beauty, never mind engage with it before their third cuppa.

At first, it’s heartbreaking to watch the commuters shuttling past, but then there’s the woman who stops and makes me wish I could be more like her. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve bumped into inspirational talents in London (quite literally recently in the case of Sir Ian McEwan, when we collided on Waterloo station and kind of spun each other off kilter. There was that split second moment when I saw him clock that I’d recognised him. He smiled, and there was my cue. But all I could think of was, OMG, you’re Ian McEwan, I don’t believe it! So instead I went for a deranged return-of-smile and hurtled myself star-struck along the platform. But this woman in Washington she just jumps right in there, and actually draws Joshua to her…If you listen to the end, and hear the statistics of what happened that morning, it’s not hard to imagine she will also have been a highlight of Joshua Bell’s day too.

Perfect as it is, this isn’t the only such uber-busking example out there. Recently I was in Toronto, and so listening to Classical 96.3 FM and they were talking about a short film that was showing in the Toronto Film Festival, which recreated the Joshua Bell experiment, only in the Paris Metro, with the violinist Renaud Capuçon. I’ve fired off a barrage of emails, trying to track down how to order a copy of this film, but no luck so far.

I’m very interested to see an extended clip of this experiment playing out in Paris, as from early on in writing Blood Harmonies, I knew I would include a Paris busking scene involving a priceless Guarneri, which all goes very badly wrong. So if anyone knows how/where to get a copy of 7:57 AM-PM, I’d be very grateful to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 11:21 and is filed under It's dark o'clock in the morning again. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.