I think that I last posted this piece four years ago, with Gilels as the soloist. I am posting it again, this time with George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra and with Fleisher as the soloist. This is a monumental work of 19th century German Romanticism. I hope that you enjoy it.
Leon Fleisher
July 23, 1928 – August 2, 2020
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.
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.
In 1945, at the Ravinia summer festival in Illinois, Mr. Fleisher played the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor — 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.
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.
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 1965 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. This was the beginning of a career-altering malady – focal dystonia, presumably caused by over-practicing, seven or eight hours a day.
“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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
Johannes Brahms
May 7, 1833 – April 3,1897
Brahms was the son of a lower middle-class family. He was born in Hamburg of the early 19th century; a scruffy port city filled with exotic traders and seedy traffickers alike. Although in an earlier era, it had been home to a number of fine musicians, it was, at the midpoint of the 19th century, as unseemly and unlikely a place for a future legend to arise as one might imagine. Although admittedly he was no child prodigy, he occasionally likened himself to the young Mozart. Brahms would tell listeners on later occasions that his father, a trained musician himself, often arranged Brahms’s early concerts in the public bars of the town. Bars of that place and era doubled as houses of ill-repute; it was an entirely shocking inverse portrait of Brahms’ life overlaid by evoking the measure of natural and wholesome adoration Wolfgang’s father’s evidenced for his child in securing him appointments to all the finest courts of Europe.
Brahms’s importance to German culture was significant even in his own day. He was a composer made for Vienna of the Belle Époque. He cast an exceedingly large shadow: stretching from his training in the traditions of the Classical era into the later-still Romantic era. Although of modest origins, Brahms connects together a number of rich threads in the musical world.
He is remembered for his abilities as a composer and musician. Certainly, his requiems, cantatas, and symphonies are now considered fundamental listening. Over the course of his career, however, he became the defender of the traditional Classical style and his legacy is the imprint of his influence on the style and substance of his fellow composers. This was a struggle not easily nor early attained.
Brahms did not achieve success in his youth. As a performing pianist and as a composer, he made his living playing in cafes and composing hack-works for local performing groups. His father had wanted him to become an orchestral musician, but Brahms soon demonstrated a clear preference and talent for the pianoforte and, at age seven, he began studies with a pupil of Eduard Marxen, and eventually with Marxen himself. Marxen’s deep understanding and fondness for the music of Bach and Beethoven influenced Brahms to a commitment toward the traditional styles of the mid-nineteenth century, and a lasting rejection of later nineteenth century modernism as represented by the music of Wagner and Liszt.
While still in his early twenties, Brahms met Joseph Joachim, the renowned violinist and the two became fast friends and often made joint concert tours through Europe. Through Joachim, Brahms met Franz Liszt, and also Robert and Clara Schumann (who were to have perhaps the most profound influence on his musical and composing career). He remained close to the Schumanns, and spent much time with them, especially during Robert’s decline into serious mental illness. After the death of Robert he remained close to Clara. Initially he was very much in love with Clara, fourteen years his senior, though she did not return his love. However they remained close friends for the remainder of her life. She premiered many of his compositions on her frequent concert tours. An affair with Agnes Siebold in 1858 at age 25 was the closest he would ever come to marriage.
Brahms had hoped to secure a permanent conducting position, or conservatory appointment, but though he secured several positions in various places, each failed for some reason, and he never succeeded in this ambition. In 1868 he settled permanently in Vienna, where he had established a wide circle of friends among the most famous and successful musical and cultural figures of his time.
The premier of his German Requiem in 1869, more than any of his previous works established his reputation as a significant composer. Throughout his career he composed prolifically for almost all instrumental combinations, as well as works for piano, chorus and solo voice. Many still appear regularly on today’s concert programs. Most popular today perhaps are his German Requiem, his four symphonies, the Alto Rhapsody, and his chamber music. Brahms died at age 64 in Vienna, on April 3, 1897, of cancer of the liver, only a few months after the death of his dear friend, Clara Schumann.