SAO PAULO — Days before Christmas, acclaimed pianist Joao Carlos Martins ran to a Sao Paulo bar to show off his new gloves to friends. They were seemingly magical, enabling the 79-year-old to play songs with both hands for the first time in 21 years.
It sounds too good to be true, but the proof is in the playing. Sitting at his Petrof piano in his penthouse, Martins reels off Frederic Chopin’s nocturnes with aplomb. Before the gloves, he could only play songs slowly with his thumbs and, sometimes, his index fingers.
The Brazilian classical pianist and conductor, one of the great interpreters of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, announced his retirement last March after more than 20 surgeries — on his arms, fingers and brain — to stop pains from a degenerative disease and a series of accidents. Limited hand movement left him working mostly as a conductor since the early 2000s.
“After I lost my tools, my hands, and couldn’t play the piano, it was 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 neoprene-covered 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 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 Sumare, 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.
