A Brazilian piano legend is playing with both hands for the first time in more than two decades thanks to a pair of bionic gloves.
Brazilian pianist Joao Carlos Martins poses for pictures wearing bionic gloves, at his home in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020. Martins, 79, was for decades Brazil's most acclaimed pianist, but an accident an a degenerative disease forced him to stop playing with both hands since 1998. That changed a few months ago when a new friend came to him with a pair bionic gloves that suit him perfectly. He can now play again with nine out of ten 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.
That might have been his fate, were it not for a designer who believed the pianist’s retirement had come too early. Ubiratã 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 might not recover the speed of the past. I don’t know what result I will get. I’m starting over as though I were an 8-year-old learning,” he said, joined by his poodle Sebastian. His dog’s name, of course, is a tribute to Bach.
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