Before your eyes travel too far down these columns only to lift at the arrival of the inevitable question, "But where's David?", here's a warning: David Helfgott does not do interviews.
His wife, Gillian, does.
It is a phone interview, and unfortunately I can describe neither tinkling of ivories in the background nor any of those random mutterings made famous by actor Geoffrey Rush in the 1996 film Shine, based loosely (more on that later) on the life of Helfgott.
You want David, you get someone else's voice.
Still, Gillian is a good talker.
At 76, she is 15 years older than her husband, but says she and David are in good health.
They live on a 2ha lifestyle block near Coffs Harbour in northern New South Wales.
They drink filtered rainwater.
They have a citrus grove and a vegetable garden.
Gillian says David says they live in paradise.
They need a large block of land because Helfgott does not sit down much during the day.
He has an irrepressible energy that requires many outlets, including the neighbours, whom he often visits for a chat and cup of tea.
Some of those neighbours came round earlier this week for a dinner party, during which the pianist (and host) played some fairly loud pieces.
Says Gillian: "The guests who don't come all that often were thrilled, but our regular neighbours . . ."
Helfgott likes to perform, as evidenced by a touring schedule that keeps the couple away from home many weeks of the year.
In October, he will open the Otago Festival of the Arts.
He last played in Dunedin in the late '90s as part of a world tour following the release of Shine.
This year he will perform works by Rachmaninov, Chopin and Franz Liszt, including Liszt's "Sonata in B Minor", one of his favourite pieces of music, says Gillian.
"He grabs any opportunity to play the big Liszt B Minor because it is a piece that has heaven and hell in it and David has experienced both."
Gillian is referring to the 12 years she says Helfgott spent off and on in mental institutions and halfway houses during the 1970s and '80s because of his schizophrenia, a condition purported to have been precipitated by the death in 1969 of his mentor, writer Katherine Susannah Pritchard.
At the time Helfgott was studying at London's Royal College Of Music, where he won the Dannreuther Prize for Best Concerto Performance for his rendition of Rachmaninov's "Third Piano Concerto" (known to many as the "Rach 3").
However, his increasing emotional instability meant he cut short his studies and returned to Australia.
"He had just come out of a terrible halfway house when I met him in 1983 in Perth," Gillian recalls.
The couple were married a year later.
In the quarter of a century since, there have been albums, accolades and acrimony in equal measure.
Critics claim the film and subsequent worldwide promotional tours have elevated Helfgott to a position beyond his playing ability, taking the shine off other, more deserving classical artists.
Some, including Gillian and other promoters, believe Helfgott's pulling power is just what classical music needs, providing a step up for those less familiar with the strains of various composers.
Others contend it is something akin to a circus act; that the music plays second fiddle, and the audience is only there to witness Helfgott's constant tics and murmurings, or perhaps even to get a hug from the performer.
Regardless of all that, last year Helfgott completed five overseas tours.
This year he has been overseas twice, and at the end of August the couple travel to Italy for a festival in Milan before enjoying a three-week holiday near Rome.
After that? Dunedin.
It is a workload that has to be managed, Gillian says.
"If anyone is going to konk out, it's me. David is the first to say he is in a very privileged position. The only responsibility he has in life is performing.
"He doesn't have to think about anything to do with management, accounts, running a property, anything like that. He swims, he sits in his hot spa bath, he practises, he visits friends.
"He'd say he has a charmed life now. He loves flying, because he gets spoilt rotten on the aircraft.
"But we still keep it down to what we consider to be a reasonable workload for him.
But as he says, 'take the concerts away from me and I'd die'."
Gillian describes a typical day in the life of David.
Up about 7.30am, he'll eat, complete some domestic chores, wander around the garden, read.
"He has his favourite television programmes that he watches, particularly nature programmes.
Then he usually swims every day for up to two hours . . .
Usually, in the late afternoon and in the evening, he'll sit at the piano for two to three hours and practise.
He has dinner very late, which people say is very bad for your digestion, then he comes to bed about midnight and he sleeps well - that's when there is a bit of quiet.
"Every sunset he stands outside and looks quietly at the sun setting. He loves nature."
Helfgott also has much empathy for others in mental turmoil, Gillian says, pointing to the pianist's support for a nearby drug and rehabilitation centre known as The Buttery.
"Because David was in a mental wilderness - not through drugs or alcohol - because he has had that battle, he has a huge empathy with others.
"The way he runs up to the residents there and hugs them and kisses them and chats to them, they have tears in their eyes. A lot of those people probably haven't had a good hug for a long time."
Gillian has been out walking early on the morning we speak.
She says it has been a bit cold, requiring her to don a pair of New Zealand-made gloves, the fabric of which includes possum.
Though the animals are protected across the Tasman, in New Zealand they fare less well.
Helfgott, the performer, has also found himself the target of more than a few pot shots over the years.
Harsh words have been written.
Reviewing a recent performance at a small jazz club in Greenwich Village, critic Steve Smith wrote in the April 9 edition of the New York Times:
"Criticising Mr Helfgott's playing from a technical perspective is as thankless a task now as it was in 1997, and for the same reasons.
"Behavioural tics like constant vocalising could be overlooked; inconsistency in his playing could not.
"Mr Helfgott dispatched fiery runs with an estimable facility but seemed ill at ease or distracted in gentler passages.
"Individual moments stood out - some for technical flash, others for what felt like emotional gravity - but failed to cohere into longer narratives."
A Boston Globe review of Helfgott's opening performance at the Boston Symphony Hall in March 1997 described his playing as "being without phrasing, form, harmonic understanding, differentiation of style and often basic accuracy; worst of all, it was without emotional content."
"The sad fact," wrote Globe critic Richard Dyer, "is that David Helfgott should not have been in Symphony Hall last night, and neither should the rest of us."
And Time Magazine reviewer Jesse Birnbaum described Helfgott as "scarcely more than a pathetic sideshow attraction, put on display by his promoters and his wife for the delight of the undiscerning, if adoring, audiences who found Shine so moving."
Ouch.
Gillian counters by pointing to audience numbers: "In Melbourne, when David played there just a couple of weeks ago, there were nearly 1600 people and a lot of them were young.
"They would have been in their early teens when Shine was released. So he's drawing a new audience. The ultimate test is the audience.
"David just very nicely says, 'Darling, as far as I know, there has never been a statue erected to a critic'.
"They resent the fact there was a film made about David - Geoffrey Rush won an academy award for it; it's one of the most successful Australian films, it's in the top five money-earners - and here he is packing out concert halls.
"How dare he introduce people who know nothing about classical music to come and listen to classical music."
Before meeting Helfgott, Gillian had a successful career in astrology.
She established an astrology school in Perth, toured Australia and New Zealand and published articles on the subject.
Since her marriage to Helfgott in 1984, she has managed his career.
In 1996, she wrote a book, Love You To Bits and Pieces: A Life with David Helfgott.
It has since sold 250,000 copies.
Yet if she has been hurt by any accusations of exploitation, Gillian hides her feelings well.
She seems more amused.
"Yeah, right. Let them come and do my job for four weeks and they'll understand. I adore David and we have a wonderful life, but he is extremely time-consuming [read hard work].
"They said he had agents that exploited him. That is just nonsense. The promoters are now very close friends, they've been so supportive of David the whole way through.
"The people who make those sorts of comments know nothing about our lives. It just makes me laugh."
There are family issues also.
In the movie Shine, Helfgott's father, Peter, is presented as an oppressive family ruler, a key contributor to David's mental slide.
However, in her 1998 book David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine, Helfgott's older sister, Margaret, remembers her father as a benevolent man far removed from the abusive tyrant of the film.
She also claims her brother's schizophrenia is the result of a genetic condition that also affected their sister, Hannah, who died in a Melbourne mental institution in 1989.
Says Gillian: "As [director] Scott Hicks said, Shine was inspired by David's life.
"He never said it was absolutely factual . . . but David said it was true to the essence of his life and felt it was a very fair portrayal of his father.
"There are five siblings. Shine is the story of David's life, it's not Margaret's life. We are getting on well with her now.
"We've worked hard to mend it ... she wants to see the father in some way and she has the right to feel how she feels but she doesn't have the right to denigrate David's story."
And so the conversation winds up.
Gillian, effervescent despite the occasional sour note, says she is looking forward to sampling some Central Otago pinot noirs when in Dunedin.
She thinks they are great value. And in that, wine is like music. It's a matter of taste.
