Word: paravicini
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Three hours to go before the evening's performance and something isn't right. Sitting at a grand piano in St. George's concert hall in Bristol, England, on May 12, Derek Paravicini tears through a rehearsal of The Flight of the Bumblebee, his fingers skittering across the piano keys. The musicians in the Emerald Ensemble orchestra feed off his energy and manage to keep up the pace, but it all sounds a bit off. After several stops and starts, the conductor discovers the problem: the orchestra and the star have been practicing different versions of the same piece...
...other concert, any other pianist, and Rimsky-Korsakov's interlude would have been cut from the playlist. But not tonight. Because Paravicini has a musical memory that's closer to hard drive than human: he can play virtually any tune, in any style, in any key, after hearing it just once, even if it was years ago. The 27-year-old pianist is blind and severely learning disabled; he can't tie his own shoelaces or butter a piece of bread. Yet his musical gifts appear almost unlimited. With rehearsals over, Paravicini and his longtime teacher Adam Ockelford go into...
...Ockelford, a music psychologist and director at the Royal National Institute of the Blind in London. "But for them, it's just a blend of sounds. For Derek, it's all separate - like being able to hear six conversations at once, in six different languages, and understand them all." Paravicini, who lives in a boarding school for the blind where he receives round-the-clock care, is one of a handful of recognized savants, unable to carry out the most basic everyday tasks, but a bona fide genius at the keyboard. Born 14 weeks premature, he weighed only...
...twists soon enter the plot of The Mousetrap with the arrival of Mr. Paravicini (played by the lively Peter Pappas) and Detective Sergeant Trotter (Ian Thornley). Trotter fears a murder will take place at the manor because of a notebook indicating the manor found at the scene of the London murder and is out to prevent...
...STANDOUTS in a generally fine cast are Davis Goodman as the effeminate Wren and Sam Bloomfield as Mr. Paravicini. Goodman minces marvelously through his role as the child-like homosexual, and Bloomfield, clad in an elegant dinner jacket and bedizened with rings, gives a superbly controlled performance as the uninvited guest. Also good is Mark Howard, appropriately manic as Detective Sergeant Trotter. Nancy Abrams makes a stony-faced Mrs. Boyle, although her carefully accented syllables sound too much like metered poetry...