Rest in peace, Oscar M. Lopez

MY condolences to the family and associates of Oscar M. Lopez. I am deeply grateful and indebted to him and his family for the trust, kindness and support they so generously bestowed on me over many decades, which started even before I became an investment banker. When I heard of his passing on Saturday, I played Dmitri Shostakovich's "Symphony No. 7," the "Leningrad" as I thought it best captured what he and his family displayed all his professional life, their determination and grit in the face of much adversity, which happened many times and which he faced with steely and wise determination and reality.

As an aside, among the allies during World War 2, it was the Russians who really excelled in producing memorable war-related music and film, something that amazed their American and British allies. Nothing from that era has lasted from the US, the British at best can point to Lord Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's "Henry VIII." The Russians had Eisenstein's film "Alexander Nevsky" and Prokofiev's score for that film and the cantata he made from the music of that film and Shostakovich's "Symphony No. 7" which are still considered classics and great art to today.