Musical farewell to the homeless pianist of the Clínic Hospital

BarcelonaMusic could not be missed, and even less so the piano that accompanied him for so many days to bid farewell to Dragomir Atanazov, a man who managed to escape the ugliness and sadness of living on the street and transformed when he played the black and white keys. Atanazov, elDrago, was born in 1972 in Bulgaria and died prematurely this April in Barcelona, no longer as a homeless person but in the home of a foster family. In a moving event at the workshop-store La Troballa, which Arrels Fundació has on Ample street in the Catalan capital, where he had spent so many hours working, six pianists wanted to pay tribute to the street pianist who played at the Hospital Clínic and Sant Pau, leaving more than one astonished.

As Abel Coll, the founder of Pianos Vius, the organization responsible for placing pianos in hospitals or nursing homes for spontaneous pianists. Coll has decided on My way, due to the evident connections with the freedom with which Atanazov lived. He has described him as optimistic, cheerful, with a tremendous sensitivity that he transmitted even in those first videos that the public posted on social media and that amazed him. "El Drago opened my eyes and showed me the tremendous power of music because without the piano, surely, I would not have approached him and would have turned away from him," he states. With one of Chopin's waltzes and Mozart's Turkish Dance, young Mauricio has created a portrait of Drago as a lover of classical music, a super cultured person, qualifiers that shatter stereotypes.

It is thanks to Atanazov's passion that Coll gifted a piano to La Troballa, which has been the center of the tribute. From pianist to pianist, Míriam Vallès has evoked Drago as the person who taught her to smile. Like the rest of the artists who have played, the young pianist has recounted the day she met him. She hadn't played for five years and she gathered the courage to enter the Clínic, sit down, play the keys, and leave again. There was a second time and while she was playing and singing, she noticed a man with "matted hair and two large plastic bags" stop beside her and listen attentively. They ended up playing together, as with Manuel Agudo Rodríguez, a young master's student at the University of Barcelona, with whom he reviewed the Beatles' discography and planned to share projects that never came to fruition. "It's one of the lessons he leaves me, to live without leaving anything undone," he said.

Obsession with clean nails

A piece from the soundtrack of the film " has come out for Pilar Martos.

Pilar Martos has a piece from the soundtrack of the film Interstellar, the odyssey of a group of astronauts who travel through a black hole to find a new home for humanity. The choice, the pianist emphasized, "is not an arbitrary gesture" because the honoree "went far away, got lost in the void, traversed it and found a way to bring us beauty back when he sat at the piano." They say he still had "his heart in Bulgaria".

Atanazov's life journey, like that of so many others, is in a way the story of the piano that sounds at the tribute. "They bought it in Mexico, took it to Paris and, like Drago, it ended up in Barcelona," explained Rocío Alonso, head of Arrels' occupational program and the person in charge of La Troballa, who recalled the disgust and anger Atanazov felt when his bags were stolen, bags in which he kept the money he dreamed of using to buy a keyboard so he wouldn't depend on community pianos. "He said he didn't understand life without being in love and music was for him illusion, a spark," recalls Alonso, who concluded the event with a cinematic: "Play it again, Drago".