BY JERRY TALLMER

No, no, Misha Dichter didn’t look at Cipa Glazman once upon a time and say: “We can make beautiful music together,” nor did they say: “The family that plays together stays together,” but they’ve been doing both together for 40 years now as Misha and Cipa Dichter, concert pianists, husband and wife.

J. Henry Fair

I listened to your four hands Mozart CD, said a tongue-and-cheek journalist who knows very little about music. Does one of you play the high notes, and the other play the low?

“Yes, in fact,” was Misha Dichter’s surprising answer. “We try to match the natural range of our voices.” Across the room, by the window looking out on Central Park West, Cipa Dichter nodded agreement.

They had come to New York from opposite sides of the world in the mid-1960s, she from Rio de Janeiro, he from Shanghai by way of Los Angeles, to Juilliard, which was then up on Claremont Avenue.

Shanghai was where Misha Dichter was born on September 27, 1945. I bombed Shanghai that year, that journalist said. From an airplane, that is.

“A critic,” said Dichter dryly. His parents, Lev and Chaya Dichter, originally from Danzig, had spent a lot of time in Warsaw because of Lev Dichter’s lumber business.

So your folks were essentially Polish?

“They were essentially Jews,” said the pianist, “and they got out of Europe in 1939, reaching Shanghai by way of Siberia and Japan.”

In 1947, they and 2-year-old Misha debarked in New York. “But they didn’t like New York, so we moved on to Los Angeles,” where Misha grew up and started on the piano at age 6.

Did it impress his parents?

“They didn’t know what it meant, though they loved folk music.”

Graduation from Beverly Hills High School in 1963 was followed by one year at UCLA, “where I felt my life and music were going nowhere.” He also hated Los Angeles.

One fine day in 1964, who should show up at UCLA but world-famous Kiev-born piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne to conduct a master class. “It was she who rescued me from that city and from what my life was turning into. I knew there was a better city and a better teacher out there, and she was it.”

So when she went back to Juilliard, you transferred there?

“It wasn’t that easy. She didn’t like stealing pupils. I had to convince her.”

Were your folks okay about it?

“They knew she had taught Van Cliburn eight years earlier so that was alright.”

In short, 20-year-old Misha Dichter arrived in New York in 1964, first to an odd little building at the foot of Riverside Drive, then to an apartment on Claremont Avenue to be next door to Juilliard. “And as it turned out, my future wife was living across the street.”

Cipa (short for Tzipora) Glazman was born in Rio on May 20, 1944. Her father, Abraham Glazman, a businessman in menswear, had come from Poland, her mother, Sonia Weizman, from Russia. Cipa won piano competitions while in high school in Rio, much to the pride of her music-loving parents. In 1965, at age 21, Cipa came alone to New York to study at Juilliard, first under Adele Marcus, then under Rosina Lhévinne. “At Juilliard,” says her husband, “everybody was required to join the chorus, and one day in November, with Thanksgiving coming up, I looked to my right, and there was--shall I say--this vision.”

And you said: Will you come to the Thanksgiving dinner?

“Exactly.” And exactly two years and two months later, on January 21, 1968--”

“At Hampshire House,” throws in his slim, good-looking wife--

“--We were married. So the 40th anniversary is this January. And in the summer of 1972, one year after our first child was born, Cipa and I did our first concert together, the Mozart two-piano concerto, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Hollywood Bowl.”

Their first child, Gabriel, is now a clinical psychiatrist; their second, Alexander (or Sascha), “works for a nonprofit organization that helps the Third World.”

As the journalist was scribbling this all down, the Dichter’s telephone rang. Well, it tinkled--a bit of music the journalist knew he knew…but what was it?

“Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini,” said helpful Cipa Dichter.

Ah yes, said the journalist--whose father had in fact adored that piece and all other great music.

Misha Dichter has always had a burgeoning worldwide solo career, but his wife had to put things on hold—without visible resentment—while the boys were in their early years.

“Misha was playing lots of concerts on his own,” she says now. “I wasn’t playing that much. Some during the summer.”

Their duos “became a regular addition to his solos” after that Hollywood Bowl performance, but it wasn’t until after the boys went off to college that her career took wing alongside his.

Had she been bothered by that?

“No! I did play. Did both. It can be done. His solos are not the only thing that’s going on. Our duos are a complement to that.”

Her husband breaks in with: “It really used to make me crazy when the kids were young. I remember, when they were 1 and 3, I was away for three-and-a-half months all over Western Europe. I just felt terrible.”

Alone and unhappy in Paris?

“In fact I did do Paris then, and it was no fun.”

The Dichters had the thrill, just this past September, of giving the world premier performance of giving the two-piano performance of Shostakovich’s 13th or “Babi Yar” Symphony—a sort of demo piece that the composer had submitted on paper to the Soviet censors in hopes that they would okay the entire symphony itself. (They didn’t.) The Dichters’ participation was at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, down at the Battery, in tandem with a reading—or a voicing—by Evgeny Yevtushenko of his own great poem honoring the 15,000 Jews who had been slaughtered by the SS and shoveled into a vast gulf called Babi Yar, just outside Kiev, birthplace of Rosina Lhévinne.

Newly out from the Musical Heritage Society (1710 Highway 35, Oakhurst, New Jersey, 00755), is a 3-part CD of the complete piano works for four hands of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—the hands being those of Misha and Cipa Dichter.

“I started recording 40 years ago,” said Misha Dichter. “This is the first we’ve done together.”

It won’t be the last.