Pianist Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928. Last night San Francisco Performances (SFP) celebrated his nonagenarian status by hosting his very first appearance under that organization’s auspices. He was joined by one of his students at the Curtis Institute of Music, Jonathan Biss, making his eleventh SFP appearance. In addition, his program included the latest in an impressive series of efforts to perform concertos with chamber music accompaniment. The chamber musicians for the occasion were the members of the Telegraph Quartet (violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw), along with bassist Charles Chandler. This was Telegraph’s third SFP appearance and probably Chandler’s first.
Telegraph Quartet members Jeremiah Shaw, Joseph Maile, Pei-Ling Lin, and Eric Chin (from their San Francisco Performances event page from earlier this season)
My own encounters with Fleisher always seemed to involve the intense seriousness of his demeanor. Much of that seriousness may have resulted from his battle with focal dystonia, through which he lost the use of his right hand in 1964. However, during the Nineties he gradually recovered the use of that hand through combined therapies of Botox injections and Rolfing; and only one of last night’s selections was played by his left hand alone. At the same time his personality seems to have mellowed, particularly when it came to recalling his past in San Francisco, which involved his working with two conductors associated with the San Francisco Symphony, Alfred Hertz and Pierre Monteux.
He used his reminiscing to build up audience support for his announcement of a program change. Fleisher had just given a splendid account of “L.H.” (the standard abbreviation “left hand” in piano scores), which Leon Kirchner composed for Fleisher in 1995 and may be one of the best examples of how thoroughly dazzling virtuosity does not have to depend on a tonal center. After that demanding undertaking, Fleisher felt a need to beg off from his commitment to follow the Kirchner selection with Johannes Brahms’ left-hand arrangement of the concluding Chaconne movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 partita for solo violin in D minor. (Both of these pieces constituted the first two tracks of Fleisher’s All the Things You Are album, but with the Bach arrangement leading off the album.) The program change involved replacing Brahms with two Debussy selections (“La puerta del Vino” from the second book of Claude Debussy’s preludes for solo piano and “Clair de lune” from Suite bergamasque) and one by Frédéric Chopin (the D-flat major nocturne, Opus 27, Number 2).
Fleisher’s other solo offering took place at the very beginning of the program, Egon Petri’s arrangement of “Sheep may safely graze,” the soprano aria (“Schafe können sicher weiden”) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 208 cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (the lively hunt is all my heart's desire). This was followed by Jonathan Biss’ first solo offering on the program, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 109 piano sonata in E major. I have to confess that this juxtaposition had a strong personal impact on my listening dispositions. It is almost impossible to enumerate the available recordings of Opus 109, and I can barely keep track of the ones in my personal collection. However, among all of those alternatives, the one that has remained by favorite for many years has been a 1954 recording, probably made from a recital in Berkeley presenting Beethoven’s last three sonatas, featuring the pianist (as some may have guessed by now) Egon Petri!
Before explaining my disappointment with Biss’ account, I would like to evoke one of my own personal memories of Fleisher. It involves a Piano Master Class that he gave at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) in October of 2008. As might be guessed, Fleisher had acute perception through which he could call a student’s attention to the most subtle of details. However, on this particular occasion, his insights regarding “micro-level” details were complemented with the need to take on the “macro-level.” He asked one of the students to look at the wall of the performing space beyond the piano. He then asked the student to imagine that the wall on the side of the performing space was covered with all the pages of the sheet music. (As I recall, he made a joke about not trying this with a Wagner opera.)
Clearly, this thought-experiment had to contend with unrealistic powers of visual acuity. Nevertheless, this was Fleisher’s way of reminding the student that, no matter how much attention is given to every last detail, one must always have one’s own clear thoughts about how each of those details contributes to the whole. Biss’ Beethoven performance last night never seemed to grasp that sense of the whole. He had clearly mastered the details with impressive precision; but the relations of parts to the whole were hopelessly obscured, if they existed at all. This observation was particularly critical, since Fleisher’s own account of “L.H.” left a deep impression on the macro-level that exquisitely complemented all of the rich micro-level embellishing passages (all this taking place, I must repeat, in the absence of any strong tonal center). Biss’ own account of Kirchner, “Interlude II,” was somewhat more satisfying; but the piece itself was on a much shorter durational scale.
The program concluded with the concerto offering, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 414 in A major. As had been the case last month, when the Calidore String Quartet provided the “orchestral accompaniment” for Inon Barnatan’s performance of keyboard concertos by Bach, the spirit of a collegium musicum was alive and well in last night’s Mozart offering. These were performers that were clearly enjoying each other’s company in the process of appreciating what made this concerto tick, even in the absence of the requisite oboes and horn. (The bassoon parts were optional.) That appreciation then spilled off the stage and into the audience area, gently persuading the attentive listeners that, as had been the case with Fleisher’s coaching at SFCM, music always “works its magic” at both the “micro-level” and the “macro-level.”
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