Musical farewell to the homeless pianist of the Hospital Clínic

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 himself 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 an emotional ceremony 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 and left more than one speechless.

As Abel Coll, the founder of Pianos Vius, the entity responsible for placing pianos in hospitals or nursing homes for spontaneous pianists. Coll has opted for My way, due to the evident connections with the freedom with which Atanazov lived. He has described it as optimistic, cheerful, with a great 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 immense power of music because without the piano, I surely would not have approached him and would have turned away," he states. With one of Chopin's waltzes and Mozart's Turkish March, young Mauricio has created a portrait of El Drago as a lover of classical music, a super-cultured individual, adjectives that break down 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 El Drago as the person who taught her to smile. Like the other artists who have performed, the young pianist explained the day she met him. She hadn't played for five years and gathered the courage to enter the Clínic, sit down, touch the keys, and leave again. There was a second time, and while she was playing and singing, she noticed a man with "messy 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 they never got to do. "It's one of the lessons he leaves me, to live without leaving anything undone," he said.

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A piece from the soundtrack of the movie has come out for Pilar Martos

For Pilar Martos, a piece from the soundtrack of the film Interstellar has emerged, 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 for the honoree "it went far away, he got lost in the void, he went through it, and he found a way to give us back beauty 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 manager of La Troballa, who recalled the displeasure and rage Atanazov felt when his bags, which he always carried with him and in which he kept the money he dreamed of using to buy a keyboard so as not to depend on community pianos, were stolen. "He said he didn't understand life without being in love and music was for him illusion, spark," recalls Alonso, who concluded the event with a cinematic: "Play it again, Drago!".