Watching him listen to music when others play is no less absorbing. Head in hands, he emits the keep-off concentration of a big cat on the hunt. He forms, at the festival, an unlikely friendship with Mahan Esfahani, an Iranian harpichordist.

"I want success," Elisha tells me, one night in the back of a car, "of course I do. And I hope to achieve it. But I will not do what others do to get there. I must be myself."

I tell him I don't think he could be anything else. Never, in two centuries of organised sport and culture, has a major player crossed from one to the other, and back. Elisha Abas is a human bridge between two discrete forms of high performance. An artist of the highest calibre, he is the product of a family story of invention and betrayal, achievement and despair. At the piano, oblivious to the world, he seems to unite disparities of the cerebral and the spiritual, the spiritual and the physical, the physical and the political. On the island of Aphrodite, ripped down the middle by malice and obduracy, he gives a glimpse of the power of music to heal the gash within.