Is he one of the very best collaborative pianists in the world?
A distinct feature of powerful friendships is that great friends admire each other greatly.
With our great friends, we identify in each other with some important personal things (such as features, qualities, and capacities) which we treasure, praise, perhaps even emulate. We reflect on these wonderful things, endlessly impressed and happy that our friend possesses them. Whether they are intellectual, moral, educational, or corporeal, we wish to see these characteristics preserved, cultivated, refined, displayed. We keep telling our friend how great they are at them.
Because they represent our friend at their best, these characteristics also enrich our own personal identities and lives as lessons in conduct and distinction. We approach them as peaks of our experience, summits of our understanding. We also feel the need to tell others about our friend so that they too may admire and praise our friend’s knowledge, virtue, skill, beauty, or experience. Social high esteem for our friend makes us happy since we feel they are the best and we want everybody to believe it too.
Sometimes of course we exaggerate and, in response, we are asked to be more measured in our praise. Yet it is very hard to temper that most excited voice of enthusiasm for a dear friend, the exhilarating sense that nothing compares to their abundance, and our desire to honor and celebrate it. If we believe that a friend can do, display, contribute, achieve something extraordinary, we feel fortunate to have them as friend, and we want many people to admire them as well.
Since Dr. Pantelis Polychronidis is my other self, I often see his musical and educational qualities in a most enthusiastic way, and it is then that I consider him one of the very best collaborative pianists in the world. I am not stating a fact, I am declaring how proud I feel of my accomplished friend, and more than ever I do so today, on his birthday.
8 May 2020
Piano Poetry Pantelis Politics 