There is something about the medical profession that pushes a good number of its practitioners towards humanism. There have always been medical writers, like the orthopedic and trauma surgeon Fernando Sáez Aldana. «The practice of medicine is very close to human nature. you stand … in front of it and you have to dig into its depths.
He knows this very well, after four decades of profession dotted with literature, stealing time from one and the other. “I have always said that medicine was my wife and literature my lover.” A multiple relationship in which there was still room for another suitor, music, which was actually in Sáez Aldana’s life from the very beginning. Since they gave him, at the age of 11, his first LP. “I remember it perfectly, it was a Beethoven Ninth edited by Belter.”
Now, retired, the Riojan gains in freedom… and also in production. Five books in four years bear witness. Among them four in the ‘Ma non troppo’ publishing house, four unique and practical approaches to the world of classical music. The last one, still hot from the press, is titled ‘The Pearls of Classical Music’ and is based on a simple idea: one hundred composers from all eras, one hundred annotated pieces to guide the reader in listening, almost minute by minute.
“You don’t enjoy what you don’t know,” explains the author. «And it’s a shame. Due to ignorance, there are many prejudices against classical music, especially among young people. There is the preconceived idea that “it’s stupid, that it’s something difficult to understand.” And it is not, nor is it difficult to enjoy.
Hence the book, which can be a gateway for “anyone who wants to get closer, wants to become interested in this music and doesn’t know how.”
Known and less
Sáez Aldana’s is, as it could not be less, its own journey. «I have let myself be carried away by my personal tastes. Although I have tried to have a significant sample of eras, styles and composers, in the end there are always preferences. And so, in the selection there is “everything.” “Very well-known things, and others that I didn’t even know before I started writing the book.”
And so, between the famous (and famously false) ‘Albinoni’s Adagio’ and ending in Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera’, runs a path of a hundred stops. In each of them, Sáez Aldana makes a short introduction to the author and the form, and then walks the listener through the piece. All prefaced by Pablo Sainz-Villegas. “I can only thank him for his generosity as a person, in addition to the extraordinary artist that he is.”
#Argentina
