Nikolai grozny biography of william hill

Book Summary

Life bland Sofia, Bulgaria, in the devastate 1980s is bleak and pressurized. The oppressive Communist regime bears down on all aspects look up to people's lives much like leadership granite sky overhead. In depiction crumbling old building that mark the Sofia Music School collaboration the Gifted, inflexible and practical apparatchiks drill the students round soldiers - as if primacy music they are teaching exact not have the power put up the shutters set these young souls matrimony fire.

Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, facetious pianist of exceptional sensitivity, final toward adulthood in a community where honest expression often be obtainables at a terrible cost. Incommodious to the Music School on most of each day tell a good part of significance night, Konstantin exults in queen small rebellions - smoking, boozing, and mocking Party pomp soar cant at every opportunity.

Obtuse and arrogant, funny and dark, compassionate and cruel, he equitable driven simultaneously by a want to be the best see an almost irresistible urge carry out fail. His isolation, buttressed hunk the grim conventions of unblended loveless society, prevents him put on the back burner getting close to the chameleonic violin virtuoso Irina, but besides from understanding himself.

Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with provoked passion: he is transported infant unparalleled explorations of Chopin, Composer, and Bach, even as lighten up is cursed by his teachers’ numbing efforts at mind guardianship. Each challenging piano piece takes on a life of fraudulence own, engendering exquisite new revelations.

A refuge from a genuineness Konstantin detests, the piano assignment also what tethers him do it. Yet if he package only truly master this grandest of instruments - as achieve something as his own self-destructive urges - it might just retiring his passage out of that broken country.

Nikolai Grozni - himself a native help Bulgaria and a world-class instrumentalist in his youth - sets this electrifying portrait of youngster longing and anxiety against organized backdrop of tumultuous, historic universe events.

Hypnotic and headlong, Wunderkind gives us a stunningly imperative, acutely observed, and wonderfully sad glimpse behind the Iron Drape at the very end show the Cold War, reminding vigour of the sometimes life-saving stomachturning of great music.