Martha Argerich

Back when I was living just outside of NYC and Chriso had an even more intense job, with an even crazier boss, sh often had tickets to events that would otherwise have been out of my reach, which is how I happened to see Martha Argerich in concert.
Utterly thrilling.
What a fascinating woman.
The NYTimes discusses a new DVD of an interview with Miss Argerich.
This struck me: Ms. Argerich recalls her first musical epiphany. She was 6, at a concert with her mother, listening to Claudio Arrau play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. The trills in the second movement gave her goose bumps. “I was dozing off, and suddenly,” she says with a sharp intake of breath, experienced “an electric shock.” Ms. Argerich refuses to play the concerto, she says, because “I’m afraid what would happen, it’s so important to me.”
At 9, before performing a Mozart concerto, she knelt down and thought, “If I hit one wrong note, I’ll die.” That sense of perfection stayed with her.
Note, I am NOT claiming that I ever felt that sense of purpose about anything.
But I have, at points in my life, thought that what I was doing was important.
And lately, I have felt that I am pulled further and further from what matters and swamped in the trivial, and I just don't want to do it anymore.
I am not being melodramatic to say I don't have enough time or energy, I don't have enough VOICE, I don't have enough LIFE to waste.
And that is why, for all the whining I have done in the past few weeks, I'm really not as angst-ridden as my poverty of expression might imply, I'm really good with the decisions Himself and I are on the verge of making.

I am going to get to the core of my life, I am going to do what is crucial, and try to edit out the rest.