JOSHUA BELL Ljudi među nama
Joshua Bell Washington Post's social experiment

Metro stanica, hladnog januarskog jutra 2007. godine. Čovjek na violini svira Bachovo djelo nekih 45 minuta. Za to vrijeme, približno 2.000 ljudi prođe stanicom, većina na svom putu na posao.

3 minute nakon što je počeo sviranje, sredovječan čovjek uočava muzičara koji svira. On usporava korake, zaustavlja se par sekundi, a zatim žurno odlazi kud je namjerio.

4 minute kasnije: Violinista prima svoj prvi dolar: žena baca novčić u šešir, te bez zastajkivanja, nastavlja hod.

6 minuta kasnije: Mladi čovjek se naginje nad ogradom kako bi ga poslušao, zatim pogleda na ručni sat i nastavlja žureći.

10 minuta kasnije: 3-ro godišnji dječak se zaustavlja. ali ga majka odvlači žureći. Malac zastaje da ponovno pogleda violinistu, no majka ga vuče i oboje odlaze žureći. Nekoliko druge djece je ponovilo ovu radnju. Svaki roditelj, bez izuzetka, prisililo je svoje dijete da nastavi hodati.

45 minuta kasnije: Glazbenik svira bez prestanka. Samo 6 ljudi se zaustavilo i poslušalo ga, na kratko. Nekih 20-tak ljudi je dalo novac, ali je nastavilo hodati nepromijenjenim ritmom. Svirač je sakupio ukupno $32.

1 sat kasnije: Glazbenik završava svirku i nastupa tišina. Nitko to ne primjećuje. Nitko ne plješće, niti daje bilo kakvo priznanje.

Prava istina:
Nitko nije znao da je muzičar u stvari bio Joshua Bell, jedan od najvećih glazbenika današnjice na svijetu. Svirao je jedan od najzahtjevnijih komada ikada napisanih, na violini vrijednoj $ 3.5 milijuna (US dolara). Samo dva dana prije ovoga, Joshua Bell je rasprodao koncertnu dvoranu u Bostonu gdje je prosječna cijena sjedala $100.

Ovo je istinita priča. Inkognito svirka Joshue Bella na stanici metroa je organizirao Washington Post kao dio sociološkog eksperimenta o percepciji, ukusu i ljudskim prioritetima. Postavlja se pitanje: "Da li u uobičajenom okruženju, u nepogodno vrijeme, uopće prepoznajemo ljepotu? Da li stanemo da tu ljepotu cijenimo? Prepoznajemo li talent u neočekivanom kontekstu? Koliko snobova ima među nama koji idu na koncert plaćajući basnoslovne iznose, a to isto ne prepoznaje u drugim prigodama?"

Jedan mogući zaključak ovog eksperimenta bi mogao biti: Ako nemamo niti trenutak vremena da zastanemo i poslušamo jednog od najboljih glazbenika na svijetu, koji svira jedan od najljepših komada ikada stvorenih, na jednom od najljepših instrumenata ikada načinjenih...

KOLIKO TEK MNOŠTVO DRUGIH STVARI PROPUŠTAMO?

Autor priloga: Časlav Vujotić Podgorica, Crna Gora vujotic@gmail.com

Ova priča ima i svoj nastavak. Ponukan gornjim tekstom, kontaktirao sam Joshua Bella. Poslao sam mu e-mail poruku sadržaja:

Dear Joshua,
I hope this message will get your attention. I am Dragutin Matosevic, from Bosnia & Herzegovina, owner and editor of music related web portal - Barikada - World Of Music (www.old.barikada.com).
Good friend of mine from Montenegro forwarded to me beautiful story which involved you - Washington Post's social experiment.
That is very sad story, but might teach each of us to be much better human beings. Although that described event occurred in 2007, that is still vital and very interesting.
http://www.old.barikada.com/svastara/2009/2009-12-18_joshua_bell.php
I would like to add to already posted article and your statement regarding that experiment. What are your experiences of it? What are you suggesting to an ordinary people?
Thanks in advance.
Kindest regards from Bosnia and Herzegovina,
D r a g u t i n

Evo i odgovora koji je stigao od Jane Covner, Press Representative Joshua Bella:

Dear Mr. Matosevic,
What you have posted to your site is a shortened version of a 10,000 word article that won the Pulitzer Prize.
The entire article is attached for your reference.
What Mr. Bell learned was: "I realize that when I play before an audience, people are coming as willing participants. To enjoy music, or art, one must be an active partipant and engaged in the experience."
Hope that will suffice.
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season!
Sincerely,
Jane Covner
Press Representative / JAG Entertainment

Za sve vas koji volite znati više slijedi integralan tekst koji opisuje događaj iz metroa:

April 15, 2007 - Beauty out of context
Joshua Bell's subway debut a muted affair. But why?
By Gene Weingarten Of The Washington Post

He emerged from the Metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin.

Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on a Friday in the middle of the capital city's morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Each passerby had a quick choice to make: Do you stop and listen? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the subway in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

Ask the expert

Hang on, we'll get you some expert help.

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

''Let's assume,'' Slatkin said, ''that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician. … Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe … but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.''

So, a crowd would gather?

''Oh, yes.''

And how much will he make?

''About $150.''

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

''How'd I do?''

We'll tell you in a minute.

''Well, who was the musician?''

Joshua Bell.

''No!''

Who is he?

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. This week he won the coveted Avery Fisher Prize for accomplished U.S. musicians, an honor he now has in common with Yo-Yo Ma and Midori.

Bell was first pitched this idea of playing in the Metro shortly before Christmas, over coffee at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.

''Here's what I'm thinking,'' Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. ''I'm thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music … ''

He smiled.

'' ... on Kreisler's violin.''

It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick -- and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august. He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also appeared on ''Sesame Street,'' done late-night talk TV and performed in feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie ''The Red Violin.'' (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, ''plays like a god.''

When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said:

''Uh, a stunt?''

Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it … unseemly?

Bell drained his cup.

''Sounds like fun,'' he said.

So it begins

To get to the Metro from his hotel, a distance of three blocks, Bell took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.

He always performs on the same instrument and ruled out using another for this gig.

Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's ''golden period,'' toward the end of his career. When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. ''He made this to perfect thickness at all parts,'' Bell says, pivoting it. ''If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound.'' No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.

The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood.

''This has never been refinished,'' Bell said. ''That's his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula.''

All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill of a day in January, Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant.

As Metro stations go, L'Enfant Plaza is more plebeian than most. At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move, but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball.

Bell decided to begin with ''Chaconne'' from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. He calls it ''not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version.''

He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall -- and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.

Epistomology of a stunt

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears … was he really any good? It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)? We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

''At the beginning,'' Bell says, ''I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me ... ''

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: ''When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.''

With ''Chaconne,'' the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

''It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah ... ''

The word doesn't come easily.

'' ... ignoring me.''

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

''At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cell phone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.'' This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

''It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies,'' he says. ''I was stressing a little.''

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

''When you play for ticket-holders,'' Bell says, ''you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence … ''

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened or, more precisely, what didn't happen on Jan. 12.

Kant took beauty seriously: In his ''Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,'' he argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

''Optimal,'' Guyer said, ''doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right.''

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell played to a thousand unimpressed passersby? ''He would have inferred about them,'' Guyer said, ''absolutely nothing.''

And that's that.

Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's bow first touched the strings.

Rewind

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.

It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: ''You review the past month's expenditures,'' he says, ''forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing.''

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.

Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes. As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of ''Chaconne.'' (''It's the point,'' Bell says, ''where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.'') The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.

Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: ''Whatever it was,'' he says, ''it made me feel at peace.''

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.

After ''Chaconne,'' it is Franz Schubert's ''Ave Maria,'' a musical prayer that became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history. A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

''I had a time crunch,'' recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. ''I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.''

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

''There was a musician,'' Parker says, ''and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time.''

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

''Evan is very smart!''

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Busy is as busy does

If there was one person on that day who was too busy to pay attention to the violinist, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to work. He was at work, at Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, buses tables in a white uniform restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage.

Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was. But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

''You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional,'' Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

''Most people, they play music; they don't feel it,'' Tindley says. ''Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound.''

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

''Where was he, in relation to me?''

''About four feet away.''

''Oh.''

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on Jan. 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that, then what else are we missing?

Finally ...

The cultural hero of the day arrived at L'Enfant Plaza pretty late, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head.

Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of ''Chaconne.''

In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.

Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

''There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza.''

Haven't you seen musicians there before?

''Not like this one.''

What do you mean?

''This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space.''

Really?

''Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.''

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

''Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me.''

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.

When he left, Picarello says, ''I humbly threw in $5.'' It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be.

Does he have regrets about how things worked out?

The postal supervisor considers this.

''No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever.''

Coda

Bell thinks he did his best work of the day in those final few minutes, in the second ''Chaconne.'' And that also was the first time more than one person at a time was listening.

As Picarello stood in the back, Janice Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man playing it has a gift.

Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, ''I really don't want to leave.'' The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for The Washington Post.

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end.

For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

''It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington,'' Furukawa says. ''Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?''

When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.

''Actually,'' Bell said with a laugh, ''that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an OK living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent.''

These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk. Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, ''The Voice of the Violin,'' has received the usual critical acclaim. (''Delicate urgency.'' ''Masterful intimacy.'' ''Unfailingly exquisite.'' ''A musical summit.'' '' … will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.'')

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he was back in the States this week. He had to be. On Tuesday he accepted the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.

Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Tom Shroder contributed to this report.

Interviewer: Dragutin Matošević Tuzla, Bosna i Hercegovina info@barikada.com




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