Word: left-hand
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...world, Swedes are rich and getting richer. They own more cars per capita than any country in Europe. The Conservatives gamely demanded that both taxes and pensions be slashed. The Liberals could bring themselves to demand only tax cuts; social benefits, they said, should be left untouched. "You can have either left-hand or right-hand traffic in a country," said Socialist Premier Tage Erlander, whose country is the last in continental Europe where traffic still follows the British custom and keeps left. "Whoever insists on driving in the middle of the road will find life riskier than he supposed...
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...
...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...