Word: handfuls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Until last summer. Pianist de Groot was a two-handed recitalist of solid international reputation. Then, during a recording session, he felt a sudden cramp in his right hand, was barely able to finish playing Liszt's Melancholy Waltz. Although X rays disclosed no abnormality in the hand, neither cortisone nor treatment by a neurologist was able to restore full use to De Groot's fingers. He set about learning what left-hand compositions he could find, soon decided that there were not enough to keep a concert career going...
...that point, De Groot's friend, composer Juriaan Andriessen, announced that he was going to compose a piece for the left hand. As the news spread, other composers volunteered to do the same. Virtually every top Dutch composer is working on a piece for De Groot to be finished before February, in time for a new radio series. The new works will nearly triple the left-hand repertory...
...exhausts both the old and the new repertories, he sees an almost endless future in recording. Under the name "Guy Sherwood," for instance, he appears in a radio series on which he plays numbers such as Kitten on the Keys, for which he has deftly recorded first the left-hand part, then the right-hand part (played with the left hand). When the whole thing is glued together, De Groot sounds like his old two-handed self playing like sixty...
...Although some left-hand pieces are written as mere musical oddities, most are commissioned or written by handicapped pianists, e.g., Hungary's famed Geza Zichy (1849-1924), who lost his arm in a hunting accident, but developed into such a virtuoso that he played three-hand recitals with Liszt; Vienna-born Paul Wittgenstein, who lost an arm in World War I, and commissioned Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, Britten's Diversions on a Theme...
Cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a boatswain's hand, as the sun rises on a new era in underwater communication: if radio waves can penetrate water to communicate with submarines, they may eventually be usable with different instrumentation for detection of submarines, which are now immune from anything but surface sighting and chance encounters with short-range sound devices...