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At a recent concert in Washington, D.C., I had the pleasure of hearing a young pianist from Tbilisi, Georgia, named Dudana Mazmanishvili. Her playing of works by Beethoven, Schubert, Llwellyn, and Balakirev was extraordinary, marked by an exquisitely varied delicacy of touch and a sense of utterly individual authority, and evoking emotions encompassing, it seemed, everything from exultation to despair. But a big part of what made the performance so moving was her passionately physical engagement with the piano.

So great was the impact of this performance that after it I felt I had not really known until then what a piano was. In the crowd on the way out, I happened to overhear a woman who evidently had a similar reaction. But she expressed it differently, remarking to her companion that she wanted “to know the make of that piano.”

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