• NYT: Leon Fleisher, 92, Dies; Spellbinding Pianist Using One Hand or Tw

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    I never gave his the attention I now think it does

    NYT: Leon Fleisher, 92, Dies; Spellbinding Pianist Using One Hand or Two https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/arts/music/leon-fleisher-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

    By Allan Kozinn

    Leon Fleisher, a leading American pianist in the 1950s
    and early '60s who was forced by an injury to his right
    hand to channel his career into conducting, teaching and
    mastering the left-hand repertoire, died on Sunday in
    Baltimore. He was 92.

    His death, in a hospice, was confirmed by his son Julian,
    who said that Mr. Fleisher had been teaching and
    conducting master classes online as recently as last
    week.

    Mr. Fleisher came to believe that his career-altering
    malady, focal dystonia, was caused by overpracticing--
    "seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory," as he told
    The New York Times in 1996--and for 30 years he tried
    virtually any cure that looked promising: shots of
    lidocaine, rehabilitation therapy, psychotherapy, shock
    treatments, Rolfing, EST. At times, he said, he was so
    despondent that he considered suicide.

    But he realized that the musicality and incisiveness that
    had been so widely admired in his early years could be
    mined in other ways. Joining the faculty of the Peabody
    Conservatory, in Baltimore, in 1959, he devoted himself
    more fully to teaching, both there and at the Tanglewood
    Music Center, where he was artistic director from 1986 to
    1997.

    He made his way through the estimable left-hand catalog
    of works composed by Ravel, Prokofiev and many others for
    the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (the brother of the
    philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), who had lost his right
    arm during World War I, and commissioned new left-hand
    works from American composers. He helped start the
    Theater Chamber Players in Washington. And he began
    conducting.

    Eventually, a combination of Rolfing--a deep massage
    technique--and Botox injections provided sufficient
    relief that he was able to resume his career as a
    two-handed pianist in 1995. He continued to play recitals
    and concertos and to make recordings until last year.

    Mr. Fleisher pointed out after his comeback that he was
    not fully cured and never would be. But he acknowledged
    late in life that the incapacitation of his right hand in
    1964 had given him a far more varied musical life than he
    might have had if he had been able to pursue a
    conventional career as a virtuoso pianist.

    That realization is implicit in the title of his
    autobiography, "My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers
    in Music" (2010), which he wrote with the music critic
    Anne Midgette.

    Early in his career as a pianist Mr. Fleisher produced a
    warm, sharply etched and thoughtfully contoured sound
    that was ideally suited to 19th-century Viennese classics
    --Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, most notably--but
    that also yielded illuminating readings of Rachmaninoff,
    Debussy and Liszt and of contemporary American composers
    like Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.

    His recordings of the Brahms and Beethoven piano
    concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra,
    made from 1958 to 1963, are considered among the most
    vivid and moving accounts of those works.

    In the 1990s, he recorded spellbinding performances of
    the peaks of the left-hand repertoire, including
    concertos by Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten, chamber music
    by Korngold and Schmidt, and solo works by Saint-Saëns,
    Godowsky and Bach (Brahms's left-hand arrangement of the
    Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin).

    Even after he returned to recording two-hand works, on
    the albums "Two Hands" (2004) and "The Journey" (2006),
    he continued to revisit the left-hand works that had kept
    him going for three decades.

    His album "All the Things You Are" (2014) included not
    only left-hand arrangements of Gershwin's "The Man I
    Love" and the Jerome Kern song that gave the collection
    its title, but also pieces composed for Mr. Fleisher by
    George Perle and Leon Kirchner, and a spacious
    reconsideration of the Bach-Brahms Chaconne.

    At 4, Playing by Ear

    Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928,
    to Isidore and Bertha Fleisher. His parents, Jewish
    immigrants--his father was from Odessa, then in Russia,
    now in Ukraine; his mother was from Poland--each
    managed one of the family's two hat shops.

    Leon was drawn to the piano from an early age. Though he
    showed little interest when an older brother, Raymond,
    was given piano lessons, Leon would go to the piano when
    Raymond went out to play after his lessons and repeat, by
    ear, everything he had heard. He was 4 years old.

    His mother soon decided that Leon, rather than Raymond,
    should study piano. She made her intentions for her
    younger son clear: He would be either the first Jewish
    president of the United States or a concert pianist.

    So devoted was his mother to Leon's musical training that
    after two weeks of kindergarten, during which he objected
    strenuously to nap time, she withdrew him from public
    school and hired tutors so that he could devote his time
    to practicing the piano. She also found ways of bringing
    him to the attention of two San Francisco conductors,
    Pierre Monteux and Alfred Hertz, who in turn persuaded
    the pianist Artur Schnabel to take Leon on as a student
    in 1938, when he was 9, despite Schnabel's policy of not
    teaching children.

    By then Leon had already played a few concerts, but
    Schnabel's single condition for teaching him was that
    there be no more concerts. Schnabel relaxed the rule in
    1944 and allowed his teenage pupil to play the Brahms
    Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with Monteux and the San
    Francisco Symphony and then with the New York
    Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, also with Monteux
    conducting.

    Noel Strauss, reviewing the Carnegie Hall performance for
    The Times, wrote that Mr. Fleisher, making his New York
    debut, had "established himself as one of the most
    remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American
    keyboard artists."

    In 1945, at the Ravinia summer festival in Illinois, Mr.
    Fleisher played the Brahms again--it became one of his
    signature pieces--as well as the Liszt Concerto No. 2
    in A, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago
    Symphony Orchestra. The next summer at Ravinia, he
    performed four concertos under the direction of William
    Steinberg and Szell, who soon engaged Mr. Fleisher to
    perform with the Cleveland Orchestra, which Szell took
    over later that year.

    By 1949, however, though he had played with many of the
    major American orchestras and had given recitals across
    the country, engagements began to dry up for Mr.
    Fleisher. The next year he moved to Paris and remained in
    Europe until 1958, relocating first to the Netherlands
    and then to Italy.

    As an expatriate, Mr. Fleisher became the first American
    to win the gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth Competition
    in Brussels, in 1952. The victory led to a long list of
    engagements in Europe and revived interest in him among
    American orchestras, managers and concert promoters.

    When Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were signed to a
    new recording contract with the Epic label in 1954, he
    invited Mr. Fleisher to be his main soloist for
    recordings of the great piano concertos.

    'Always More to Attain'

    It was shortly after his return to the United States, in
    the late 1950s, that Mr. Fleisher accepted an offer to
    teach at the Peabody Conservatory, though he continued to
    pursue a heavy performing and recording schedule.

    "I was driven, if anything, even harder by all of my
    successes," he wrote in his memoir. "There was always
    more to attain, and more to achieve, and more musical
    depths to plumb, and lurking behind it all, the
    terrifying risk of failure."

    Failure was not far away. During the winter of 1963, he
    noticed what he described as laziness in his right index
    finger, as well as "a creeping numbness" in his right
    hand. By the summer, the fourth and fifth fingers of his
    right hand had begun to curl toward his palm.

    The timing was disastrous. He had planned to celebrate
    the 20th anniversary of his New York debut with a busy
    season that included 20 performances in New York alone
    and a spring 1964 tour of the Soviet Union, in which he
    was to be the soloist in Mozart's Concerto No. 25 in C
    (K. 503) with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra.

    Shortly before the tour, Mr. Fleisher performed the
    Mozart in Cleveland. Szell noted the strain Mr. Fleisher
    was under and told him that he did not feel he could
    undertake the tour. The pianist Grant Johannesen traveled
    with the orchestra instead.

    "The initial problem was a very stupid kind of overwork,"
    Mr. Fleisher said in 1996, cautioning young pianists
    against following his path. "I see kids still falling
    into this, and there are many reasons for it. The
    perfection that they're bombarded with from recordings.
    The kind of sound a [Vladimir] Horowitz produced, which
    is wonderful, but people don't realize that he had his
    technician work very hard on the piano, so the piano
    itself helped. So when kids go to an acoustically dead
    hall, and get a dead piano, and try to make these
    Horowitz kinds of sounds, they end up brutalizing
    themselves."

    Mr. Fleisher resisted taking up the left-hand repertoire,
    partly because he felt that to do so would be an
    admission that he would never regain the use of his right
    hand. But after two years without playing concerts, he
    reconsidered, agreeing to play both Ravel's Concerto for
    the Left Hand and Benjamin Britten's left-hand work
    "Diversions" with Seiji Ozawa and the Toronto Symphony in
    1967.

    The next year, with the pianist and composer Dina Koston,
    he started the Theater Chamber Players, a flexible
    chamber group meant to present both contemporary music
    and classics.

    The ensemble--initially based at the Washington Theater
    Club, later at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
    History and ultimately at the Kennedy Center in
    Washington--provided an opportunity for Mr. Fleisher
    both to play and to conduct. And an invitation to be
    music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra in
    Maryland, a semiprofessional community group, gave him a
    chance to work on the symphonic repertoire.

    Soon he was guest-conducting around the country--his
    debut at the head of a professional orchestra took place
    at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival in 1970--and
    in 1973 he became associate conductor of the Baltimore
    Symphony Orchestra.

    Mr. Fleisher held that post for only five years, but he
    maintained a close relationship with the orchestra
    thereafter. When the ensemble was preparing to inaugurate
    the new Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in 1982, its music
    director, Sergiu Comissiona, invited him to be the
    opening-night soloist.

    A Two-Hand Return

    Having recently had an operation to relieve carpal tunnel
    syndrome, Mr. Fleisher began to regain the use of his
    right hand, if only partly and inconsistently. But he
    felt he could make the jump back to two-handed playing,
    using the televised opening of Meyerhoff Hall as the
    occasion for his comeback.

    In a bold moment, he told the orchestra that he would
    play Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. But as the
    occasion drew near, he decided to play Franck's Symphonic
    Variations instead, a shorter and less pianistically
    exposed work.

    Most listeners thought the performance went well. But Mr.
    Fleisher was not satisfied. In his view, the amount of
    effort he had expended working to control his right hand
    precluded the kind of interpretive depth he had hoped
    for, and he dropped plans for a broader return to
    two-handed playing.

    Shortly after the Baltimore performance, Mr. Fleisher
    married Katherine Jacobson, a pianist who had been a
    student of his at Peabody. His two previous marriages--
    to Dorothy Druzinsky and Rikki Rosenthal--ended in
    divorce.

    Ms. Jacobson survives him, as do his children from his
    first marriage, Deborah, Richard and Leah Fleisher; his
    children from his second marriage, Julian and Paula
    Fleisher; and two grandchildren.

    In 1991, Mr. Fleisher found a doctor who was
    experimenting with Botox injections for injuries like
    his. At first he found that the injections loosened up
    his still-cramped fourth and fifth fingers, to the point
    where he could play. But the injections wore off, and he
    was still looking for a permanent cure.

    Having tried Rolfing in the 1970s, he decided to try
    again in 1994. This time he found that a regimen of
    Rolfing and Botox injections was enough to keep him in
    playing trim.

    As an experiment, he played Mozart's Piano Concerto No.
    12 (K. 414) with the Theater Chamber Players in April
    1995, and with the Cleveland Orchestra and at Tanglewood
    shortly thereafter.

    "Nothing felt sweeter than the feeling of those notes
    falling into place," he wrote in his memoir, "the right
    hand singing, the left hand balancing it on the lower
    part of the keyboard, and the piece growing into
    something whole and complete, a dream become reality."

    Mr. Fleisher cautiously reclaimed the repertoire he had
    been unable to play for more than 30 years, building his
    recital programs with both two-hand and left-hand works
    and playing programs of piano four-hand works with his
    wife.

    Mr. Fleisher was made a commander of the Order of Arts
    and Letters by the French government in 2006 and received
    a Kennedy Center Honor the next year. A film about his
    struggle with focal dystonia, "Two Hands," directed by
    Nathaniel Kahn, was nominated for an Academy Award for
    best short documentary in 2006.

    Toward the end of his life, Mr. Fleisher spoke about the
    level of despair he had felt when he was unable to use
    his right hand. But having regained that ability he was
    philosophical about the challenges life presents.

    "There are forces out there," he told The International
    Herald Tribune in 2007, "and if you keep yourself open to
    them, if you go along with them, there are wondrous
    surprises."

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