A more dramatic retirement from performing than Glenn Gould's!

[Nessie Russell <nessierussell@YAHOO.CA>]

I am sure most GG fans have seen this.  I am wondering
what people think of this.  We know GG had a distaste
for concerts.  What would he have thought of this?



Agence France-Presse - 28 July 2003



A French concert pianist ended his career Friday by
hiring a
helicopter to drop a worn-out piano into a lake in the
south of the
country.

François-René Duchable played Beethoven's Third piano
concerto and
Saint-Saëns' Second to an audience of 2,000 before the
instrument was
consigned to the depths of the lake of la Colmiane
near Nice in
southeast France.

He said he was retiring at the age of 51 to "change
his life", far
from tours with a perpetual eye on the time. The
gesture, he said,
was to show that everything was over, to get rid of
the weight of a
career.

"It was a purification by water," he said.

Purification by fire follows on August 31 at the
Provençal village of
Mazauges. Duchable will play at a festival whose
organizers have
been "friends since 1984" and will end the evening by
burning the
clothes he performed in.

"I leave with a real exaltation, a great freedom for
what will
follow," he declared as he prepared to bury the
stage-life once and
for all.

Duchable sees himself as a "man of nature" and never
liked his life
as a concert pianist, or the world of music, let alone
the public
that came to hear him.

"How could I like one percent of the public since we
know that 99
percent of people have no access to classical music? I
cannot feel
love for a public that despises others. People think
being a musician
reflects a passion. It doesn't. My profession has
never brought me
happiness," he said.

"My love of music has never been in question. I reject
money, the
tinsel, this rigid, dusty world, a whole system in
which I have never
been at home."

Duchable said from now on he wants to "live a more
personal, tranquil
existence, rediscover calm and solitude," to divide
his time between
his beloved sport of cycling, pottery, about which he
knows little or
nothing, and perhaps learning other musical
instruments.

"I want to do much more interesting things than keep
on doing for 30
years what I have been doing for the last 30."

"I have held on for 35 years," he said, recalling his
first concert
given when he was 16.

If he does return to the keyboard, it will be in
circumstances of his
own choosing and at his own rhythm, in hospitals,
schools, prisons
and asylums.

The pianist said he might also cooperate with actors
and sound and
light artists to offer another approach to classical
music and plans
to conduct master classes in Switzerland and Paris.






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