CLOSE TO ABSOLUTE

was exactly what I felt while listening to this performance: J.S. Bach, Concerto no.5 In f-minor for harpsichord and strings (Bwv 1056) – Largo Maria João Pires, Piano Orchestre De Paris, conducted by Riccardo Chailly

I felt so. You listen to and feel for yourself! And here I am now, almost speechless! Not many times it happened to me in my life so far. Maria's performance of Bach brought me close to Absolute. Not many things can bring me so close to. . . , but she's great, she's been one of these "things". Her instrument plus complete her! Just listen to. . .

Still lost for words I am gonna stretch for an indefinite while my silence about this woman. For she is an epitome of Woman. Not mistakenly with a capital W. For most of our gender fellows cry & sob & bawl & howl. . . as doing little of anything, as being chronically on the outs with all and everything, as. . .
Maria is a mom of the six; Maria is a wife, and she loves, and cares for, and she is a great artist, and she teaches. . .

Let me borrow from an amazing DAVID PATRICK STEARNS' interview with her
http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/?s=Maria+Joao+Pires 
where one may read:
DPS: But certainly you’ve spent a lot of time alone as a student practicing.
MJP: I never did it because I had no time. I was always very busy with other things. . . I had children very early and I had to take care of everything. I never had much time for the piano. I was always an amateur somehow. I did the career. . . it was not on purpose. It was not wanted and it was not very natural.
DPS: But you have such a natural facility for piano.
MJP: I don’t think so. I have small hands. Many technical problems – not many but some. Of course I found my own body language with the piano and my own way of getting out of my problems but they’re still problems. The other thing is I don’t really like to play concerts. I don’t like to be onstage. That’s not a comfortable thing for me.
DPS: And recordings?
MJP: I love that!. .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
DPS: I know the past ten years of your life haven’t been easy. . .
MJP: The others also haven’t been easy! [laughs] I don’t believe that life can be easy. I had some difficult and violent experiences in life and I feel that came to teach me something that I had to learn that was very urgent. One of them was my project in Portugal. I learned a lot and I learned a good lesson that everybody has to learn in life. Struggling and fighting is not the solution. The solution is the step back, observe, know why and understand why and then see the reasons it happened. And I was a fighter all my life. I think now I’m much less.
DPS: Your father was a Buddhist. . .
MJP: No, my grandfather. My father died before I was born, just two weeks before I was born.
DPS: Your life has been hard.
MJP: I grew up in a family with my brother and sisters and my mother. And with our grandfather, who was Buddhist and that was very strange in that moment. But my father lived until he was 30 or 32 years old in China and Japan. He studied the philosophy. Much later I studied Buddhism; I was over 40 years old. I have a very strong relationship to that philosophy. But I don’t like to say I’m a Buddhist. When you say what you are, you’re already setting certain limitations. Even just saying that you’re American gives yourself a limit, no? But what you are is a human being. Before anything I’m a human being.

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