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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"There are so few notes," the pianist Leon Fleisher said, "but so many implications." The setting was a recent master class at Carnegie Hall. Fleisher, the master in question, was leading four young musicians through the mystical landscapes of the late sonatas of Schubert. He was speaking about the Andante movement of Schubert's B-Flat-Major Sonata, but he might as well have been describing Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier," or Brahms's Intermezzos, or any other music in which a smattering of notes conveys a world of feeling. "There are so few notes, but the implications go back billions of years," Fleisher went on. "You have to be like the Hubble Space Telescope, which sees stars as old as the universe. The stars are dead, but their light is reaching us just now."
Fleisher is seventy-five, but he looks an eternal, grizzled, professorial sixty. He is one of the incorruptible legends of his profession; some time ago, students took to calling him the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of the piano." Working with him on the Schubert sonata was Inon Barnatan, a twenty-five-year-old Israeli pianist with a clean-cut look. Barnatan smiled nervously and looked at the keyboard. How do you make notes sound like ten-billion-year-old stars? He tried again. He had been playing with exceptional stylishness; he obtained a hypnotic...
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