This underhand form of theft, known as rubato, is one way that soloists individualise a piece of music. It is the bottom rung on the ladder of playing alone, the first liberty taken with a composer’s text. Great artists surmount such petty acts of larceny as a master burglar would scorn shoplifting. They have no need for subterfuge or sleight-of-hand. They enter through the front door and rearrange the diamond display in the window without anyone noticing the alteration until they are gone. What virtuosi do is take hold of time and create an illusion that, imitatio Dei, they control it. They can stop time in its tracks, restore our dreams of youth and defy the march of death. Theirs are the hands on the clock-face of our lives. That is why, know it or not, we lose heads and hearts to master musicians – because they can spring us from the deadly treadmill of daily concerns and transport us to a realm where time is defeated.

I once knew a violinist who made time stand still in the space between two notes. He was not the only one to do so. Kreisler, my father’s idol, could do it at will and Jascha Heifetz, the ice-eyed technician, could do anything he liked with a violin. Kreisler would stop time for love and Heifetz for show, but the musician I knew stopped time as an act of power, to exert his will upon the world. Unrecorded, his mastery is known only to me. Pitching my ear to Peter Stemp, I hear it again. In a sea of routinely articulated sounds, the boy picks out another open G and fixes it in the firmament, just so. This is neither a cheap stunt, nor a clever imitation. Stemp could not have copied Kreisler or Heifetz from a recording, because their time-stopping was hallucinatory, unconveyable on vinyl.

What’s more, he has something that only my violinist possessed – he sustains the illusion of motionlessness beyond the resumption of motion, as if keeping a pianist’s pedal-foot on a fiddle chord. Does this make sense? My violinist made time stop the way a maharishi seems to transcend the force of gravity; however, instead of bumping to earth after a second’s levitation, he would leave the sound hanging in the air, or the imagination, until he, and he alone, was ready and willing to let it down. That was the source of his power: the rest flowed from that device.