‘Magic’ gloves lets piano legend play again

Plays for first time in more than 2 decades

SAO PAULO, Jan 28, (AP): A few days before Christmas, renowned pianist Joao Carlos Martins summoned his friends to a Sao Paulo bar so he could show off the best gift he’d received in years: a new pair of bionic gloves that are letting the 79-year-old play with both hands for the first time in more than two decades.

Considered one of the great interpreters of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, the Brazilian classical pianist and conductor had retired last March after 24 surgeries trying to stop pains from a degenerative disease and a series of accidents. His limitations had forced him to work mostly as a conductor since the early 2000s.

But since the closing days of 2019, friends have been returning to Martins’ downtown penthouse to hear him bring Frédéric Chopin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his favorite Bach back to life at his Petrof piano.

Before the gloves, which were especially developed for him, the pianist could only play songs slowly with his thumbs and, sometimes, his index fingers. “After I lost my tools, my hands, and couldn’t play the piano, it was as if there was a corpse inside my chest,” Martins told The Associated Press.

Martins’ health problems date back to 1965. He famously rebounded after every setback – nerve damage in his arm inflicted during a soccer match in New York, a mugger hitting him over the head with a metal pipe while he toured in Bulgaria, and more. But even friends expected the latest surgery, on his left hand, to mark the end of his days on the piano bench.

That might have been his fate, were it not for a designer who believed the pianist’s retirement had come too early. Ubirata Bizarro Costa created neoprenecovered bionic gloves that bump Martins’ fingers upward after they depress the keys, and which are held together by a carbon fiber board.

“I did the first models based on images

Prosecutors have said DNA evidence recovered from the girl’s pajama pants was linked to Maraj. The girl’s younger brother also testified at the trial that he witnessed one assault.

Maraj’s attorney appealed conviction in 2018, claiming that there was jury misconduct. The judge ruled in October that the defense did not meet the necessary burden of his hands, but those were far from ideal,” Costa said. “I approached the maestro at the end of a concert in my city of Sumaré, in the Sao Paulo countryside. He quickly noticed they wouldn’t work, but then he invited me to his house to develop the project.”

Costa and Martins spent the subsequent months testing several prototypes. The perfect match came in December, and cost only about 500 Brazilians reals ($125) to build. Now Martins never takes off his new gloves, even when going to bed.

“I might not recover the speed of the past. I don’t know what result I will get. I’m starting over as though I were an 8-year-old learning,” he said, joined by his poodle Sebastian. His dog’s name, of course, is a tribute to Bach. The pianist’s return was first reported by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Reporter Ricardo Kotscho said Martins hurried to the bar near his home before Christmas “like a boy who got a new toy.”

Solutions

Martins said he has received more than 100 gadgets in the last 50 years as miraculous solutions to his hand problems. None worked well or long enough.

“But these gloves do. I can even tune them accordingly,” he said, showing how he can rearrange the glove’s internal pads to play at a faster or slower tempo. “That doesn’t mean it’s all sorted. The muscle atrophy plays a role. Sometimes I try to play a speedy one and get depressed because it just doesn’t happen yet.”

The “extender gloves”, as their inventor calls them, gave Martins a goal: Play the piano again at New York’s Carnegie Hall in October, when he is scheduled to conduct a concert celebrating the 60th anniversary of his first appearance there.

Martins, meantime, is practicing early in the morning and late at night, to the delight of his neighbors, until he can interpret an entire Bach concert perfectly. of proof.

Maraj said in court Monday that he had an alcohol problem and asked for a “second chance.” One of his attorneys said he suffered from health issues including hypertension, gout and anemia and requested the minimum sentence of 10 years to life.

Maraj’s appellate attorney, Stephen Scaring, said he plans to appeal the judge’s

“It could take one, two years. I will keep pushing until that happens,” he said. “I won’t give up.”

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Broadway producer Margo Lion, who helped bring the Tony Award-winning musicals “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Hairspray” to the stage and also worked on Tony Kushner’s two-part classic “Angels in America”, has died at age 75. Her son, Matthew Nemeth, told The Associated Press that she died at a Manhattan hospital days after suffering a brain aneurysm.

A Baltimore native, Lion was a proud independent producer who sometimes offered personal possessions as collateral in her determination to stage a show. She started out as an apprentice at the Music-Theater Group in the 1970s and a few years later began looking into the life of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, the basis for “Jelly’s Last Jam”, which premiered on Broadway in 1992 and starred Gregory Hines. A decade later, she had enormous success with “Hairspray”, the Tony-winning smash that was adapted from the John Waters comedy. Lyon had seen the film on video in 1998 and quickly thought it ideal for Broadway, drawn in part to the story because it was set in Baltimore.

“I wanted to do something joyful, something celebratory, like the shows I remembered when I was a kid,’’ Lion told The New York Times in 2002. “Halfway through (the video), I literally said: ‘Yes, this is it. I found it.’”

Lion was among the producers of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika” and brought in George C. Wolfe to direct, his first Broadway show. Her other credits include August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” and “Elaine Stritch at Liberty”. In 2009, Barack Obama appointed her to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

decision. (AP)

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When critics and subjects of their criticism meet there can be tense moments – especially when a new streaming service’s high-profile project, “The Morning Show”, is at issue.

That was the case when Mimi Leder, executive producer of the Apple TV Plus series, was queried about her comment last November that “Apple haters” were responsible for some of the show’s negative reviews. “Looking out at this sea of MacBooks, do you still think we’re a bunch of Apple haters who want to see Apple fail?” a member of the Television Critics Association said to Leder during a Q&A promotional panel Sunday that included stars Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup.

“No, I don’t,” replied Leder, a veteran, Emmy-winning director whose credits include “The Leftovers” and “ER”.

“I think we were a new show, I think people didn’t know what to expect,” Leder said. “There were a lot of expectations on the show, and I’m really glad and happy that people have responded to the show so powerfully, and kind of with great vigor.”

When Leder, whose initial remarks about reviewers came during a media conference in Los Angeles, was asked by another critic about them, Witherspoon spoke up. She and Aniston also are executive producers on the series, which follows the upheaval at a network morning show after an anchor, played by Steve Carell, is fired for alleged sexual misconduct. (AP)