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.:. Mighty Sebastian Bach At the ornate Sheridan Opera House in tiny Telluride, Colorado it's standing room only. Some hoity chamber music ensemble from L.A. has fled here into the cool mountains with their flutes and violins, their oboes, cellos, and whatnot to playa plaintive sonata or two, a ticklish concerto for harpsichord. There's danger in listening to Bach played live before your eyesthe music would transport you but the musicians cannot. The harpsichordist hovering over his keys in a wicked way. Violinists screwing up their faces as if in anguish. Balding cellist bored as he saws away. All of them, you see, are inescapably human, inescapably fleshy, like you and the fellows to the left and right of you. What anchors our bodies are. So you bless the A Minor solo for flute and the flutist, a woman so clearly taken by the lilting line of Bach she follows completely, her slim arms ascending, peaking as her whole body sways under the silver flute her lips kiss as she is lifted, 22 inescapably, into the dark rafters of the Opera House, seeking release, a way into the cool blue skies above the mountains above the townno longer here, not yet there, but lost above evergreens and lovely snowy peaks-not yet ready, maybe never ready, to descend, slowly, by measures and single notes, to this earth again. 23 ...

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