Fortunately, the music world is full of brave souls who not only dream of becoming the next Horowitz or Rubinstein, but aren’t afraid to reveal themselves. I recently traveled to the picture-postcard Swiss town of Lucerne to attend an annual weeklong festival featuring some of today’s leading pianists. The event takes place largely in what may be Europe’s finest new music auditorium—an 1,800-seat concert hall in a spectacular lakeside conference and cultural center, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. I heard six of the eight featured soloists (the festival also presents an array of jazz pianists in bars all over town)—and, given the hall’s ultra-clear acoustics and almost clinical white and maple décor, there was no place for any of them to hide, musically or otherwise.

Arcadi Volodos, who along with Yevgeny Kissin is the most acclaimed young Russian pianist of his generation, opened the festival in disguise. Rather than begin with one of the super-Romantic pieces for which he’s celebrated, he played two seldom-performed early Schubert sonatas (the E-flat and F Minor) with an unromantic sobriety that obliterated any sense of the composer’s questing charm. It was a deliberate setup: Mr. Volodos emerged after the intermission wearing his true colors and dispatched with fine elegance four of Liszt’s most richly embroidered travelogues (“Vallée d’Obermann,” “Il Pensero,” “St. François d’Assise” and the Hungarian Rhapsody, No. 13). The gorgeous display demonstrated Mr. Volodos’ virtuosity with pedaling even more tellingly than his extraordinary digital skills. Like all Russian pianists of my experience, he’s well schooled in keeping a poker face: He relaxed his look of pudgy blankness only for the encores.

Emanuel Ax, the sole American in the lineup, appeared the following night as exactly who he is—a sunny fellow whose open, self-effacing manner is of a piece with his seamlessness at the keyboard. His program of ballades was characteristically eclectic—a jokey little East-meets-West trifle by the contemporary Chinese composer Chen Yi; four somber ballades by Brahms; an airy, delicately smeary “Ballade” by the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, and an epic traversal of the four Big Daddy ballades of Chopin. Mr. Ax played everything with his usual straightforward refinement and grace, but I didn’t sense the electric current between performer and audience that normally marks his recitals.

Afterward, I ran into him in the lobby of the Schweizerhof Hotel, and even though it was 1 in the morning, we soon found ourselves deep in piano-talk. Sure enough, despite his outward aplomb, he had not felt entirely at ease on stage. Something about the unforgiving exactitude of the hall had been daunting. “Today’s pianists have a terrible fear of wrong notes—myself included,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with the recording business, which has created this mentality that everything has to be note-perfect. It makes me long for the days of Horowitz and Rubinstein, when pianists could perform with real freedom—and never mind a mistake or two!”

“If you made any,” I said, “I didn’t hear them.”

“Well, there were a few,” he said, smiling. “I was terribly nervous.”

Nerves played no part in the sold-out performance of Mikhail Pletnev. As usual, this preternaturally gifted Russian conductor and pianist exuded a zombie-like charisma as he walked onstage in slow motion and glanced around at the packed throng as though he were bored stiff by their applause. He then sat down to two Mozart sonatas (K. 457 and 331), which he played with a capriciousness of tempo that bordered on contempt for the music—a cat amusing itself with a half-dead mouse. His post-intermission set of the 24 Chopin Préludes demonstrated pointillistic brilliance and remarkable tonal sheen, but it was just that—a demonstration of prowess largely detached from emotional engagement.

Increasingly, Mr. Pletnev seems to prefer playing with the music to playing it.

How different were the openhearted appearances of two French pianists, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Mr. Aimard joined the young English conductor Daniel Harding and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Their Mozart B-flat concerto, K. 456, was pure, unmannered music-making, joyfully infectious. Mr. Thibaudet was more persuasive in the glittering ironies of Ravel’s “Valse Nobles et Sentimentales” and “Gaspard de la Nuit” than in the agitated sincerities of Schumann’s “Arabesque” and Symphonic Etudes, but he’s a keyboard natural whose graceful professionalism never fails to please.

The Romanian pianist Radu Lupu closed the festival with an all-Schumann program (“Waldscenen,” “Humoresque” and the Sonata No. 1) that raised the art of piano playing to its highest level. Sitting magisterially back from the keyboard in a chair rather than hunched on a stool, his beard as shaggy as that of an Old Testament prophet, Mr. Lupu didn’t so much play the music as commune with it. How do the mechanical sounds made by felt-tipped hammers striking wiry strings become intensely human? How does a pianist make the black beast disappear? Mr. Lupu is both a poet and a magician—the Ricky Jay of pianists.

BACK HOME, AT CARNEGIE HALL, I attended a recital given by another wonder of the piano world, Earl Wild, who’d turned 90 only a few days earlier.

A child prodigy in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Mr. Wild studied with various teachers whose musical training descended directly from such piano giants as Liszt, Busoni, Paderewski, Ravel and Saint-Saëns. Back in the pre-rock days, when classical and popular music in America were friendly with each other, he moved easily between jobs: staff pianist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Toscanini; a weekly gig on a radio show called Piano Playhouse; composer and studio pianist for Sid Caesar’s The Caesar Hour; and a favorite White House entertainer who played for six consecutive Presidents, beginning with Herbert Hoover in 1931.

In the course of a career that’s lasted some 80 years, Mr. Wild has given recitals all over the world and collaborated with virtually every great conductor and orchestra. Only in the past year, when he underwent a quadruple bypass and began suffering macular degeneration in his left eye, has he begun to slow down.

But when he appeared onstage at Carnegie for his birthday celebration, the only thing slow about him was his measured gait as he made his way to an eye-catching Kawai grand piano, specially hand-crafted in Japan. Once he was seated, his fingers became those of a man a third his age in a program that would have daunted a pianist a fourth his age: his own bell-like transcription of an Adagio by the Baroque composer Alessandro Marcello; a zestful Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 in D Major, featuring a Largo of hushed gravitas; a wonderfully transparent “Les Jeux d’Eaux à la Villa d’Este” by Liszt; a generous assortment of Chopin (the first and third Ballade, the Scherzo No. 2 and the Fantaisie-Impromptu No. 4). Here, undiminished except for a few bobbles caused by his eye problem, were the Wildean trademarks: lightning-like gradations of color; a noble, unmannered melodic line; immense orchestral sonorities; and, above all, the spectacle of a man delighted to be doing things that he can still do just about better than anyone else alive.

Only Earl Wild could have stopped so nonchalantly a few measures into an old showpiece, his fiendishly difficult transcription of the “Mexican Hat Dance,” when he realized that his left hand was running away from his right hand, beam a huge grin at the audience and start the piece all over again, this time without a hitch. During the ensuing ovation, a man sitting near me exclaimed, “I hope I can still brush my teeth when I’m that age.”

The next day, I dropped by Mr. Wild’s apartment and found him as ebullient as he’d been the night before. We chatted about his unrivalled longevity (Rubinstein was 87 when he made his last Carnegie appearance); his Presidential friendships (“Roosevelt used to lean out of his wheelchair to see how I executed a particularly difficult passage”); his admiration for his piano idol Rachmaninoff (“I heard him at least 50 times”); his taking refuge in music as a boy to escape the squabbling of his parents.

When I asked the obvious question—“How do you still do it?”—he replied: “When I sit down to play, all my pains disappear—I’m home.”

Remembering what Emanuel Ax had said about the freedom to make mistakes, I asked: “Are you afraid of wrong notes?”

He laughed. “No,” he said, “because there’s nothing you can do about them.”

But these days, under the leadership of Louis Langrée, a dynamic Frenchman who recently replaced Mr. Schwarz as music director and is now in the middle of his third season (the festival runs until Aug. 27), Mostly Mozart seems an idea whose time has returned.

It helps that Avery Fisher Hall has been reconfigured into something resembling an intimate concert space: The playing area has been extended 30 feet into the auditorium; seating areas have been created behind and alongside the musicians; and, overhead, a lighting and acoustical canopy has been installed that looks like it’s been borrowed from the set of Star Trek. The new arrangement, which is sadly only temporary (it won’t accommodate a group as large as the resident New York Philharmonic), has reduced the hall’s capacity by nearly 400 seats, producing the happy effect of packed houses.

Although this summer’s festival has been loosely organized to explore Mozart’s residencies or musical influence in Paris, Prague, London, Italy and Russia, there’s no whiff of the lecture hall such as one finds at Bard College, where Leon Botstein’s Summerscape contextualizes a single composer to exhaustion. (This summer’s specimen is Aaron Copland.) At Mostly Mozart, the prevailing spirit is genial virtuosity; the music does the enlightening, not an instructor.

The pianist Emanuel Ax is the genial virtuoso par excellence, and when he walked onstage during the second program to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat—despite reports that he’d recently fractured a rib—he was greeted as though he’d just come home from Iraq. Mr. Ax is one of the world’s most natural musicians, and he gave no sign of physical discomfort in a performance that was wonderfully alive to the work’s quicksilver shifts between mischief and loftiness, and adventurous in the boundary-pushing cadenzas, composed by the pianist himself.

A lithe, energetic figure on the podium, Mr. Langrée matched Mr. Ax in vivacity, and in the “rounder” acoustics provided by the new thrust stage, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a band of top-notch New York freelancers, sounded like double their actual strength. Spirited performances of Haydn’s Overture to his opera L’isola Disabitata; a Mozart concert aria, “Ah, lo previdi,” sung by the robust young British soprano Emma Bell; and Mozart’s Haffner Symphony banished any memories of the festival as an anodyne echo of the August doldrums.

A scintillating program brought Mozart back to Paris more than 100 years after his last visit there in 1778. The composer was not especially fond of the City of Light. As he wrote his father: “The French … manners border on rudeness and they are detestably self-conceited.” But Mozart would undoubtedly have warmed to his French host, Maurice Ravel, whose “Mother Goose Suite” outdid his own Flute and Harp Concerto in C Major for shimmering, childlike pathos. In the former piece, Mr. Langrée sustained just the right level of fastidious panache; in the latter, the irrepressible flute soloist James Galway and a stunning young Welsh harpist, Catrin Finch, wallowed in the score’s ingratiating confections.

As the father of the modern piano concerto, Mozart would have marveled at how Ravel stretched the form so zestfully in his Piano Concerto in G Major, whose slow movement exposes the piano soloist (here, the elegant Jean-Yves Thibaudet) to a degree unthinkable to the older master of “naked” melody. And I can only imagine the delight Mozart would have taken in hearing Ravel, the most modest of French composers, rebuke his critics with this remark: “Don’t they realize I’m artificial by nature?”

In recent years, Mostly Mozart has become one of the city’s most important venues for American debuts by distinguished soloists and groups from abroad, many of them “early music” specialists. The Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt is no stranger to New York, but this was her first appearance with the festival. She devoted herself to J.S. Bach—Mozart’s most formidable ancestor, whose wizardry with counterpoint he studied with great profit.

Ms. Hewitt’s Bach, which has been extensively recorded on the Hyperion label, couldn’t be more different from that of her compatriot, Glenn Gould: His Bach was a force of nature, an eruption of life that lifted you out of your seat; her Bach is an exercise in good taste and imperturbable skill that leaves one coolly impressed. (I wasn’t so taken with her taste in gowns: a slinky item in electric turquoise.)

There was much to admire in Ms. Hewitt’s unemphatic approach to Bach’s F Minor and D Minor keyboard concertos: the pearliness with which she projected the multiplicity of voices on her Fazioli instrument; the rock-steady pulse; the honesty of the architecture. Bach can be heard by players in infinite ways, and this was unquestionably her Bach. But it was all a bit bloodless, missing the sense of passion in these exhilarating works described by the first great modern Bach keyboard specialist, Wanda Landowska. For Bach, she observed, musical counterpoint was a “language so natural that it is with ‘note against note’ that [he] sings the love of God or merely love.”

I heard more sheer joy in the playing of Ms. Hewitt’s supporting band, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, led by Richard Tognetti. This highly touted group of l7 string players (also making its Mostly Mozart debut) followed the concertos with Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, in a lushly orchestrated version by Mr. Tognetti that stripped the knottiness out of it.

As for Mozart, he appeared only briefly as the opening act—a Bach-inspired Adagio and Fugue, which the Australians performed with appealing vigor. But his great spirit, at once assimilative and innovative, hovered.

Under Louis Langrée, the programs have branched out to a point where the festival might be renamed “Mozart and Everyone Else.” And why not? Mozart represents the culmination of classical music as it had developed before him—and he also anticipated the Age of Romanticism in the unprecedented intensity with which he expressed human emotion. No composer is as congenial with the composers of all times and all places. Jane Moss, who’s guided programming at Lincoln Center for years, spoke to me with pride about the turnaround of Mostly Mozart. “The more we looked into Mozart,” she said, “the more we realized that he was the pivotal figure in Western music—the gatekeeper between the past and the future. He has such a strong presence that I’ve even thought of programming an entire festival without any Mozart at all. From the standpoint of the audience, I don’t think I could get away with it. But Mozart could.”

War of awards: If you were too busy watching the Yankees pat each other's pinstriped rumps (somehow even more compelling in defeat) to watch the oft-

canceled Emmy Awards , but you did click over for a second and caught a blur of

"business-attired" host Ellen DeGeneres pretending to mistake Steve Martin for Leslie Nielsen , you probably thought Yep, and it was right back to the Yankees. Tonight the book-publishing industry throws its own self-congratulatory bash, the National Book Awards , to be M.C.'d by Mr. Martin -one man who's figured out how to skip nimbly over the tightrope between "high" and "low" culture , unlike secretly sweaty, Oprah-offending fiction nominee Jonathan Franzen . We're plumping for one of the lesser-known novels (like Jennifer Egan's Look at Me or Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse ) to pry the prize from Mr. Franzen's The Corrections -which, hel- lo , doesn't exactly need any more publicity. But Mr. Franzen is probably a lock, since Colin Harrison -dirty-book writer, former Harper 's editor and freshly appointed Scribner vice president-is chairman of the fiction judges …. Meanwhile, successful businesswomen Kate Spade (handbags) and Martha Stewart (households) don fetching taffeta wraps and cab uptown to the Cooper Hewitt for another kind of fiction, the National Design Awards.

[National Book Awards, New York Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway at 45th Street, 6:30 p.m., 685-0261; National Design Awards, Cooper-

Hewitt, 2 East 91st Street, 7 p.m., 685-1095.]

Thursday 15th

Anyone else tired of the conspiracy to convince us that "comfort food" -a big pile of mashed potatoes-is going to solve all of New York City's woes? Today, strapping, frolicsome N.Y.C. tourist-board chief Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas welcomes the greedy, freeloading food press to a "hot-chocolate" breakfast to lead off a four-day Chocolate Show. You know the drill: Pastry chefs do their thing, somebody makes a dress out of chocolate, samples abound ….

[Metropolitan Pavilion, 110 West 19th Street, 11:30 a.m., 244-0622.]

New York's first couple? With our new swingin'-bachelor Mayor (and how scary is that ? As if single men in New York needed any more encouragement!), the city is in the market for a palatable first couple, a photogenic beacon of matrimony …. One possibility is that toothy Tribeca twosome, actor-director Ed Burns and yoga freak Christy Turlington , who plan to wed as soon as Bono is free to walk her down the aisle. (And if he's not free, we're pretty sure the Edge could handle it …. ) Tonight is the premiere of Mr. Burns' new movie, Sidewalks of New York , sponsored by W magazine, with proceeds from the party

going to the New York Police and Fire Widows' and Children's Benefit Fund (Mr. Burns' father was a police officer). Don't hold your breath for a showdown between Ms. Turlington and Mr. Burns' co-star and ex, Heather Graham, because the latter is … " in Canada," according to a publicist. Low-level Gwyneth Paltrow watch in effect for the party (note the building feminist backlash against Gwynnie's role in Shallow Hal, a film that makes nasty sport of women with weight problems). Meanwhile, our secret role model, former Nanny Fran Drescher , turns up at the Plaza to receive an award at the Gilda's Club comedy gala.

[ Sidewalks of New York premiere, AMC Theater, 234 West 42nd Street, 7:30 p.m., Bryant Park Grill, by invitation only, 398-2597; Gilda's Club gala, the Plaza, Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, 6:30 p.m., 647-9700, ext. 245.]

Battlin' book parties! Tweed-jacket types, still recovering from last night's National Book Awards extravaganza, head downtown for a bevy of book parties, where they choose between Gillian Zoe Segal's New York Characters (pictures of New Yorkers; party is at the Soho DKNY store with literary poobah George Plimpton, tennis genius John McEnroe, drag queen Lady Bunny ), or, a bit further downtown in the meatpacking district, Gwendolen Cates' Indian Country (pictures of Native Americans; celebrate with one-man-party omnibus and hair personality Morgan Entrekin ). Easier crash mark: the Soho reception for XS Libris , an exhibit of miniature books from the collection of Neale M. Albert , including a 4,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet and the world's smallest book (0.9 millimeters). Mr. Albert, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer by day, presides over a Miniature Book Society with about 400 members, including his wife Margaret. "She's not as crazy as I am," he said. Every year they gather in a convention-or a " conclave," as it's known in miniature-book circles-and talk about their curious hobby. It all started when Mr. Albert (who is also, naturally, a dollhouse enthusiast ) was trying to fill the teeny-weeny shelves inside a replica of the library at Cliveden House , the manor outside of London where the Profumo political scandal took place. Asked to explain his obsession, he said simply, "There's something about small."

[ New York Characters , DKNY, 420 West Broadway, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 971-5420; Indian Country , Chinghalle, 50 Gansevoort Street, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 614-7900; XS Libris , Visionaire Gallery, 11 Mercer Street, 5 p.m., 274-8959.]

Friday 16th

The non–Harry Potter night! Two movies that aren't Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone : The Simian Line is a Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice –sounding movie about four couples at a Weehawken neighborhood party with a very strange cast (Harry Connick Jr. and William Hurt? Lynn Redgrave and Cindy Crawford?). Meanwhile, The Fluffer is a Boogie Nights –sounding film about a "gay for pay" porn star named Johnny Rebel. Deborah Harry plays a hardened sex-industry professional. " Boogie Nights was a period piece; our film is more about being within a milieu and assuming that's normal. It's just like going to work in the shoe factory -it's about how mundane it is," said co-directorWash West,aYorkshire lad who pronounces "fluffer" floofer . "It's my first mainstream film. It's nice having a crew; when I worked in porno, I really just shot with my own camera and my own lighting." We know the feeling. "In a feature film, you're dealing with a whole load of people, which just makes the process much more complex and much more wonderful. There's really more similarities than differences between a porn shoot and a mainstream shoot: You have the stars, production, time schedules … there's a lot of waiting around for that golden moment ."

[777-FILM.]

Saturday 17th

Why has Manhattan suddenly gone mad for small things? (See "Albert, Neale," under Thursday). Are we just a bunch of control freaks? Today Great Things in Small Packages , an exhibit of paintings 8 by 10 inches or less, goes on view at the Spanierman Gallery.

[Spanierman Gallery, 45 East 58th Street, 9:30 a.m., 832-0208.]

Sunday 18th

Don't Ax, don't tell! If your boyfriend's parents are in town, snapping

pictures of ground zero with their digital cams, pianists Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman are pounding out some Brahms and Rachmaninoff -heady Romantic music for these war-torn times …. Meanwhile, it's still more small stuff at the Sara Meltzer gallery in Chelsea, where Yoko Ono , John Waters (director whom we often mistake for actor-firefighter Steve Buscemi) and William Wegman (strange Weimeraner obsession) are among a passel of artists donating postcard-sized artworks, which are being sold for 50 bucks apiece to benefit an AIDS charity.

[Pianists, Avery Fisher Hall, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 3 p.m., 721-6500; Postcards from the Edge , Sara Meltzer Gallery, 516 West 20th Street, 2 p.m., 627-9855.]

Monday 19th

Roberts vs. Roberts: More great big clumps of famous people coming together to do good! Ain't it grand? At Avery Fisher Hall, they're clearing out the moist cough drops from yesterday's Emanuel Ax performance and welcoming Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and their senior versions (Joanne Woodward, Meryl Streep and Paul Newman ), among others, for a one-time performance of The World of Nick Adams , a concert based on the semi-autobiographical short stories by Ernest Hemingway about a 19-year-old who enlists as a World War I ambulance driver. What it benefits: Mr. Newman's Hole-in-the-Wall Gang Camps. At the New York Historical Society, as part of that "U.K. with N.Y." festival that just refuses to end, actor Tony Roberts (big, hirsute guy who had sex with twins in Annie Hall ) M.C.'s a cabaret performance with Natasha Richardson (who seems to be sporting a grunge look recently) and Hayley Mills (our big-cheese editor just got out his spats). What it benefits: families of the British victims of the Sept. 11 attack.

[Hole-in-the-Wall Gang benefit, Avery Fisher Hall, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 7:30 p.m., 573-6933; From Piccadilly to Times Square , New York Historical Society, Central Park West at 77th Street, 6:30 p.m., 924-1434.]

Tuesday 20th

Stephanopoulooza: In the innocent days before Sept. 11 , George Stephanopoulos, the wee former White House special assistant to the President turned big-bucks TV journalist, seemed to pop up everywhere- Good Morning America , gossip columns, street corners-cooing very publicly about his impending nuptials to blonde Alexandra Wentworth (author, The W.A.S.P. Cookbook ). We're told the blessed interfaith event takes place today ("It is this month" is all his assistant would confirm), so congrats to this year's answer to Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones! "They are very cute," said a fellow Observer staffer who saw the happy duo promenading up Third Avenue. "It looks like she has him in the palm of her hand. " Don't be shirty with us, fella !

Wednesday 21st

Twenty-four hours till you reenact all your dysfunctional family dramas round the Thanksgiving table …. Or maybe you're going "independent" this year and having over a few of your friends who are afraid to fly home, in which case break out the DustBuster. Our Precious is on the warpath-says he: "Smoke the hickory chips … proof the yeast for the cloverleaf rolls … put the turkey in a salty brine with some juniper berries." Don't even get him started on the cheese board ….

The benefits of this are obvious. For one thing, it's impossible to keep a symphonic epic by, say, Mahler from falling apart without a pretty strong traffic cop. For another, maestros have been very good for the box office: Their uplifted profiles look good on record jackets and PBS specials and, in our personality-obsessed century, they've given audiences something more to think about than just the music.

But for the poor vassals at their patent-leathered feet-the players-the obligatory deference extended to the maestro has been little more than grudging. A few years ago, a study reported that symphony orchestra musicians felt worse about petty revolts among the rank-and-file, such as the one about a player in the New York Philharmonic who expressed his disdain for Erich Leinsdorf by repeatedly dropping a set of keys on the stage during rehearsals-not on Leinsdorf's beat.

In recent years, this restiveness has taken a more productive turn. New York's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is the most celebrated example of how assiduously cultivated collective empathy can make good music without a conductor. However happy the Orpheus musicians are, it's an approach that limits them to repertoire that doesn't demand more than a few dozen players. A better, even more challenging solution to the Maestro Dependency problem has been found by an ensemble in England whose recordings I have long admired. Its members are all specialists in playing period instruments-that is, instruments made according to the standards of the period in which the music was written. They call themselves the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which is much too unwieldy a name to convey what is so remarkable about them: their fluency with music written over two centuries, from Vivaldi to Tchaikovsky, and their eagerness to adapt themselves to as many conductors as they can find who share their goal of zestful-and egoless-music-making. They made their New York debut on Aug. 3 and 4 at the Mostly Mozart Festival; in person, their effect was even more exhilarating than I had imagined.

There can't be many virtuosos on the level of the pianist Emanuel Ax who would willingly give up the cushy splendor of a modern Steinway for the timorous quaintness of a 19th-century Broadwood. However, that's what happened at the O.A.E.'s first concert, in Avery Fisher Hall, for a performance of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, which was composed in 1829-11 years before the piano that Mr. Ax had at his disposal was built. In recent years, there has been much de-vaporizing of Chopin as the arch-Romantic of the salon, with the aim of showing him to have been a rigorous, even percussive, classicist and contrapuntalist with unmistakable affinities to Mozart and-farther back-to Bach. Mr. Ax's resplendent playing of the concerto-written when Chopin was, astonishingly, just 19-made the case for the revisionists more incisively than any modern instrument could have.

Although the piano's middle register seemed lusterless and its tone got clangy on the fortissimos (cavernous Avery Fisher was hardly the most congenial setting), its way with Chopin was revelatory. The action of its keys had a springiness that made the composer's ravishing cascades and jumps sound like a sure-legged colt being let out in the morning air. (Mr. Ax's subtleties on a period piano in this piece are even more pronounced in a new recording of the concerto and other Chopin works with the O.A.E. and the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras; Sony 63371.) For once, this Chopin did not wash over you; it recalled a piece of advice an old piano teacher once gave me about a fleet passage in one of the Ballades: "Think of it like water rushing over pebbles. "This time you could feel the pebbles.

During the Chopin, as well as in the "Paris" and "Prague" symphonies by Mozart, the O.A.E., wonderfully led by conductor Paul Daniel, played with a forcefulness that belied the antiquity of the instruments. The natural-gut strings had a bracing stringency; the horns and winds had a wonderfully clear "hole" in the middle of their mournful clarion calls. As I am often reminded, period instruments more readily summon up the sounds of nature. Above all, I was impressed by the cohesiveness of these players: Behind the crispness of sound, the unanimity of purpose and approach was palpable.

And so the O.A.E. demonstrated the following night at Alice Tully Hall, when-this time without a conductor and in smaller numbers-they took up an earlier set of instruments for a program of William Boyce, Vivaldi, Handel and Bach. Once again, the soloists were electrifying-the flutist Lisa Beznosiuk and the soprano Emma Kirkby, whose many recordings are cherished by early music lovers the world over. The program's tour de force was their "Sweet Bird" from Handel's oratorio L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in which flute and singer matched each other in avian acrobatics.

But for me, the highlight was the O.A.E.'s playing of a work I could whistle in my sleep-Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major. What was it that made me feel as though I were hearing the work for the first time? My gaze settled on two players: the wonderfully named leader in the concertmaster's seat, Margaret Faultless, and the first-chair bass player, Chi-chi Nwanoku. Whereas Ms. Faultless, with her baroque violin tucked under her chin, displayed an almost seraphic command of the music, Ms. Nwanoku, with her bulky instrument cradled firmly between her legs, seemed to be driving the music from within, like some ecstatic engine.

The next morning, I had breakfast with David Pickard, the O.A.E.'s general manager. He told me that the orchestra had been founded in 1986 by a group of period musicians in and around London who wanted to maintain an "identity" unfettered by any one conductor. One result of putting themselves first, he said, was that the musicians were in the unusual position of being able to pick and choose among many of the leading British and European conductors, who loved nothing better than getting an invitation. In London next year, the orchestra will be performing all nine Beethoven symphonies under five of their "favorite" conductors: Roger Norrington, Charles Mackerras, Simon Rattle, Frans Brueggen and Ivan Fischer. "The challenge of working with conductors, each of whom has a completely different approach to Beethoven, shows exactly what the orchestra is all about," Mr. Pickard said.

The orchestra, he said, drew from 50 to 75 players, all of whom had flourishing careers outside the O.A.E., many of them with small chamber groups. Along with the cross-fertilization that results from the pooling of so many different experiences, he said, the orchestra benefits from the players' constant research into the instruments used in the composer's own time. For example, the first oboist, Anthony Robson, owns at least 20 different oboes, all of which meet specific historical requirements.

It occurred to me that Mr. Pickard had not used the term that causes such hair-pulling when the subject of "period" instruments comes up-authenticity. "We try never to use the word 'authentic,'" he said. "It smacks of self-righteousness and superiority, and that's not what we're about at all."

"What are you about, then?" I asked.

"Let's put it this way," he said. "What we do is just offer a different way of hearing this music." It's quite an experience.