Picture a hospital: the bustle of harried doctors and nurses, time dragging for lonely patients, and the pervasive sadness of a place for the sick and dying.
And suddenly, there’s music — live, classical music, the sounds of masters like Johannes Brahms and Giuseppe Verdi — to make it all a bit more bearable.
These unannounced flash concerts are staged by an organization called Music for the Soul, and on this particular day at Alvarez Hospital in Buenos Aires the artists are 70 musicians, a choir, two sopranos and a tenor.
They perform for free, and most of the time with musicians they meet for the first time right then and there.
The network was created in Argentina five years ago and now operates in 10 countries.
It is made up of professionals from prestigious orchestras who donate their time and passion to share the soothing power of music.
The organization boasts more than 2,000 performers and has given about 300 concerts in a format that has inspired similar programs in Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Italy, France and Israel.
The force behind it all was a young orchestra flutist named Eugenia Rubio, who died of cancer aged 24.
She asked colleagues to play for her as doctors tried to keep her comfortable in the final months of her life.
“Eugenia was my partner and although this idea was born of suffering, we realized that music is a magic channel that allows people to forget their pain, their loneliness, their incapacity,” said Jorge Bergero, founder of the project and cellist for the orchestra of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.
After Rubio died, “we decided to carry on with 10 musicians and today there are more than 2,000 of us,” he said.
The organization’s Web site allows musicians to volunteer and hospitals to request concerts. The only pre-requisite is that the musicians be professionals.
“I come to sing out of selfishness because it helps my spirit as well. It is my best therapy,” soprano Soledad de la Rosa said.
In the main lobby of the hospital in a lower-middle class neighborhood, applause and shouts of “bravo” ring out with the last notes of Verdi’s La Traviata.
The idea is not to disturb the routine of the hospital, but that is a tough task when the walls are reverberating with the lively sounds of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.
“Music has a healing effect, because it is related to spirituality, and in patients who are approaching the end of their lives it allows them to reconnect with joy, happiness and emotion. It is absolutely therapeutic,” said Ana Maria Soriano, director of palliative care in the hospital’s cancer ward.
When the concert ends, eight musicians and two singers head off through the hallways of the hospital to hold smaller performances in patients’ rooms.
“Play another, please,” said a man named Daniel.
He is 68 years old and has been an invalid for two.
“It is a joy for the soul. Classical music is better than any kind of medicine,” he said.
Further back in the room a young woman leans down toward her sick grandmother and together they make as if they were dancing to the music of Verdi.
Then, as if an invisible conductor waved an imaginary baton, the intimate concert ends and with a sigh a nurse says: “We are a hospital again.”
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