Bach to Brooklyn - NYTimes.com on day true story
When she first tied up an old steel barge next to the Brooklyn Bridge 35 years ago, curious longshoremen noted tiny, mop-haired Olga Bloom coming and going with a violin, mysterious as a Magritte figure. But Ms. Bloom soon charmed the men into hefting a grand piano aboard. She repaid them with what was one of her first classical musicales by the fireplace tucked in the wood-paneled coffee barge.
"Uncompromising music," Ms. Bloom sternly told me back then at the invention of what would evolve into Bargemusic, now one of the city's premier venues for chamber music. Audiences of 150 bob gently with the river, and the Manhattan skyline gleams beyond the notes.
Olga Bloom's legacy resounds beyond her. She died on Thanksgiving Day at the age of 92 after a life of fine melody and dedicated labor. She played Bach every morning and fought across the years to protect dock space and financing for what seemed a zany dream when I first met her.
"Every thought, every feeling, every act of ours is thrown out into the universe," Ms. Bloom explained to me years later when she was getting ready to retire after a dockside run that grew to more than 200 concerts a year.
A trained violinist married to a symphony musician, she gambled her widow's mite, convinced the coffee barge would entice riverside listeners. Ms. Bloom was mourned Sunday by Mark Peskanov, a concert violinist she chose as her successor as Bargemusic director. Light from the sunset cut into the barge as he played a Bach sonata she cherished.
The Brooklyn waterfront Ms. Bloom helped revive boomed with life beyond adagio notes of mourning. Here was the "uncompromising music" Olga Bloom always demanded, sounding a measure of her good life.
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