A review of the concert on October 7, 2006 by Richard Scheinin.
When Leon Fleisher played Bach the other night, he seemed to be doing it from a position of age and well-earned perspective. The music was calm, wise and unhurried. The hall grew very quiet.
_Sheep May Safely Graze_, from Cantata No. 208, emerged from under the pianist’s fingers like an old folk song. The B-flat Major Capriccio (“On the Departure of a Brother”) went gently down into the music’s roots; the little fugue at the end seemed to be sending up tendrils, each enfolding the next.
And when Fleisher played _Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire_, there was the sense of his really loving the song, which he probably has played since he was a boy. Listening to him play the perfect melody was like hearing an old jazz musician play _Stella by Starlight_ with simplicity and pure understanding.
All this was happening Saturday at Le Petit Trianon, where the Bay Area’s Steinway Society presented Fleisher to open its new season of recitals. Fleisher, who also performed Sunday, is a legend and by far the biggest name the group has ever snared, yet the little hall was at least a quarter empty.
From my point of view, this is to the everlasting shame of San Jose, the nation’s 10th largest city. But it didn’t seem to faze Fleisher who, at 78, has had bigger things to worry about in his life.
In case you haven’t heard the story, the San Francisco native (his father was a hat maker on Geary Street) was a prodigy, studying with Artur Schnabel at 9, debuting with the San Francisco Symphony at 14 and with the New York Philharmonic at 16. That was in 1944. His career sailed through the ’50s; his recordings of the Brahms concertos with conductor George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were hailed as definitive.
But in 1964, while Fleisher was on a European tour, the outer two fingers of his right hand began to clench, curl and freeze as he played. He gave up all performing for a while, became a master of the literature written for the left hand alone, and took up new careers as a conductor and, especially, as a conservatory teacher of piano.
Now flash forward four decades: Several years ago, Fleisher discovered that his neurological condition, known as focal dystonia, was treatable with injections of botox to the muscle mass of his right forearm.
He headed up a campaign called “Freedom to Play,” a dystonia awareness initiative of the Chicago-based Dystonia Medical Research Foundation; became a role model for the many musicians suffering from dystonia; started recording again; and went back on the road — performing with two hands.
Which brings us back to Saturday night at Le Petit Trianon, where Fleisher performed Stravinsky’s Serenade in A, written in the 1920s, during the composer’s neo-classical period, as a sort of tribute to the 18th century _Nachtmusik_ tradition.
Fleisher dug into the two-handed opening: the sound of bells ringing, reverberating, dying away. Then came discrete phrases, each a quiet fade-out. This was interior music and Fleisher, one of the great piano pedagogues, clearly had thought it all through, taken it apart note by note, and rebuilt it as poetry.
A short descending phrase in the right hand came to a halt, rubbing up against a dissonance in the left. Every detail was audible, the music contemplative, sounding as if it had been composed around 4 a.m. in a state of heightened awareness.
Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, which closed the first half of the program, had a similar feeling. Time seemed to slow down and each note to expand, with Fleisher examining every one from the inside. Occasionally, the pianist would glance up, wide-eyed, at the yellowed sheet music in front of him.
At moments like this, the recital felt like a giant meditation, and the audience didn’t seem sure how to respond. Fleisher wasn’t offering the usual, zillion-noted Rachmaninoff transcriptions of Schubert. He was offering haiku.
He also was presenting a smartly paced program, with ample technical challenges amid periods of respite. No longer a hyper-virtuoso, Fleisher had some slips and moments of instability. But mostly, this was powerful stuff, solidly played and, above all, profoundly conceived.
After intermission, Fleisher was joined by pianist Katherine Jacobson, his wife and colleague at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, for a couple of rounds of four-hand performance.
Sharing the keyboard, with Fleisher playing secondo (bass) and Jacobson primo (treble), they performed Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor, D. 940. Fleisher installed the basement plumbing while long-fingered Jacobson built the structure above, light as a feather. It was a convivial performance with a rosy enough glow, but nothing especially magical was happening.
Likewise, Ravel’s _La Valse_ was a charmer, though this roughish romp didn’t really conjure up the decadent, absinthe mists of a Parisian ballroom.
I’ll keep my memories of the program’s first half, of Fleisher, alone, in his world.
