Elisha married, settled down, played well. Then doubt set in. What would he do when the sporting life was over? In his spare time, he sat for a law degree. The longer it took, the more lost he felt. One night, after 15 years' silence, he phoned his piano teacher. Having strayed farther from the music crucible than any prodigy before him, Elisha had decided to find his way back.

"I called Pnina at 11 o'clock at night," he relates. We are sitting at a taverna table in the middle of a village square in Kouklios, where Richard the Lionheart rested on his way to the Crusades. He and I had been talking, on and off, for several days and Elisha is slowly shedding an intense shyness. A tweet beeps on my phone informing me that he has a recital in New York next month. 

"So I called Pnina," he continues, "and I said, I want to talk. She said, come round. Now. So we talked, drank tea, smoked cigarettes. I didn't know what to do next."

Salzman, Palestine-born, had confined her career to Israel after a beloved brother was killed in its war of independence. A prize-winning student of the French master Alfred Cortot, she played more concertos with the Israel Philharmonic than any other soloist and was known as "Israel's first lady of the piano", a national treasure in her seventies. "I started taking her on dates," grins Elisha. "I took her to the movies, to restaurants. We talked. One evening she said to me, come to Tel Hai."

Tel Hai is an international summer course in the Galilee. At the opening event, Elisha heard a student, 17 years old, play the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto. Smitten, he took her out for a walk. "She was a troubled person, her brother had died." All night long, they shared dreams and sorrows. "We went to her room and lay at right angles on two beds, head to head, talking, talking. In the morning I said to her, you are going to marry my brother. She did. They are together still today."