Does Milton Babbitt like listening to his own music? Ravel now, and even Billie Holiday, leave me indifferent. Yet performers - at least classical ones - remain the same, keeping up their enthusiasm, year after year, for the few old chestnuts. John Browning, Gary Graffman, back in the days when we all Had Time, played to me alone for hours as I sipped vodka martinis; they needed no booze to enhance a manifest ecstasy in controlling that winged horse (the grand piano, a tree skinned alive and lacquered), an ecstasy provoked by other people's music.