Great Woman & Piano

Manhattan's Town Hall was cold and empty one morning last week, as a small, dark-haired woman deposited her mink coat and shawl on a stage table, set up her metronome, covered her shoulders with a sweater, and sat down at the concert grand. For the next two hours she worked from page to page of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, starting at dead-slow tempo, one hand at a time, working up to half tempo, patiently repeating certain figures again and again, uncovering little melodies hidden in the passagework, testing the spaces between chords for the precise measure of silence. Finally, humming cheerfully to herself, she went back and played it up to tempo, pouring out the great music in a liquid cascade that, even in the lonely practice session, glowed with an inner radiance. Brazil's great but little-publicized Pianist Guiomar Novaë's, 59, was getting in shape to wind up her latest U.S. tour.

Why should a seasoned performer—many call her the world's best woman pianist&151;work so painstakingly over a familiar piece of music? "Ah," says Pianist Novaë's, with a knowing smile. "This is New York. You have the best artists here." But there was more to it than that. "I always play a piece differently. I always discover something different in it, and I wonder, why haven't I thought of this before? Art is a most subtle thing. Ourselves, we don't understand it always."

Guiomar Novaë's began to understand it at four, when she played marches for her kindergarten class in São Paulo. By the time she was 14, and already well rounded in arts and languages, the Brazilian government had recognized her as a blazing prodigy, sent her to Paris, where she studied with the great Pedagogue Isidor Philipp. Back home in Brazil, her life was filled with many things besides her music: she married happily, and had a son and daughter; she took up the cause of woman's suffrage, helped out promising young musicians. She would have done more ("I would have liked to study singing and painting"), but there was no time. For no matter how much she wished to stay at home, "I felt some power that always pushed me. This power, this inspiration, was always there to make me play." She went on tours of Europe, North America and the Latin countries, always making special trips to hinterland communities, places where "people are hungry for music."

At week's end. Pianist Novaë's was back in Town Hall, where her fans were so mu sic hungry that extra chairs had to be put on the stage for the audience. Dressed in regal black, Pianist Novaë's floated her music from the first pearly notes of a Bach-Siloti Prelude, gathered excitement with Beethoven's "Waldstein" and steeped Schumann's Kinderscenen and three Chopin pieces in reflective romanticism. She wound up with three works by her prolific countryman, Villa-Lobos. When the stormy applause finally abated, Guiomar Novaë's got ready to go home for a family Christmas in São Paulo.