Birmingham News Cd Review 3-22-09

March 22, 2009

http://blog.al.com/mhuebner/2009/03/leon_fleisher_cds_offer_glimps.html

Leon Fleisher CDs offer glimpse of early glory Posted by Michael Huebner -- Birmingham News Leon Fleisher's career can be parsed roughly into three periods. Before the pianist, then 36, was stricken with focal dystonia in his right hand during the 1964-65 season, he was on top of the classical music world. Definitive readings of Brahms piano concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were among the string of recordings -- including Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Schumann and Grieg -- yielded from that stellar combination.

Leon Fleisher The ensuing decades of left-hand-only piano music, conducting, teaching and painful therapy led to an important milestone. In 1995, he returned to two-hand performance, performing again with the Cleveland Orchestra. Solo CDs followed -- "Two Hands" in 2004 and "The Journey" in 2006. Two more follow this year. A six-CD set of recordings from 1958 to 1963, available from www.arkivmusic.com, has been remastered and released on Sony. When Fleisher comes to Birmingham this week, he will give listeners the chance to compare the young upstart pianist with a musician who, at age 80, seems to have unlimited destinations. Next Sunday, after soloing in Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand Friday and Saturday with the Alabama Symphony, he will play a solo recital in which three works from those early recordings are programmed. LEON FLEISHER Six-CD set Sony 4 stars out of 5

Schubert. From 1954 comes a 36-year-old Fleisher playing Schubert's B flat major Sonata, D. 960, with unforced beauty and almost religious devotion, from the undulating, ambient bass notes of the opening movement, through the intricate dramas unfolding in the Scherzo and finale. Eight short pieces from Schubert's "Landler," Op. 171, could almost be danceable if not interrupted by Fleisher's rhythmic playfulness and arresting virtuosity. Fleisher will perform both of these works next Sunday.

Debussy, Ravel. Also on next Sunday's program is Ravel's "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales," which, in this 1958 recording, exudes ease and confidence. More noble than sentimental, it never succumbs to impressionistic haziness. Debussy's "Suite Bergamasque," with its famous "Claire de Lune" third movement, is played boldly and securely, bursts of joie de vivre mixed with pointillistic dryness.

Liszt, Weber. A recording from 1959 reveals Fleisher's overwhelming strength and stamina. Liszt's Sonata in B minor surges from a lyrical, endearing calm in the Andante to a wild, nearly demonic temperament in the finale. So unfettered is Fleisher's dynamic range in this album, the origins of his future physical maladies can easily be imagined. Mozart. Two piano sonatas are combined with the Rondo in D major in performances from 1958 and 1959. Although performed with metronomic regularity, Fleisher makes these pieces breathe with his architectural vision, swelling and ebbing dynamics and cascading arpeggios and scales. Copland, Sessions, Kirchner, Rorem. In 1962, Fleisher was providing living composers with performances of a lifetime. The recipients on this recording were a diverse group whose music ranged from pillars of dissonance to nostalgic tenderness. No composer is treated less worthily than any other, but Copland, in his more adventurous mode in the Piano Sonata, is given a particularly vibrant reading. More melancholy writing pervades Rorem's "Three Barcarolles," Fleisher performing them with haunting beauty.

Brahms. The Juilliard String Quartet could not have asked for a more communicative collaborator than Fleisher for Brahms' Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, recorded in 1962. Impeccable ensemble, grace, drama and, most important, unanimity of musical vision, make this a treasured component of a historic set. The pitfalls of the set are obvious and expected. Half-century-old recording equipment and techniques put listeners in a what-if-this-was-digital mode, and occasional tape splices interrupt the flow. Get past that, and listen to Fleisher during his first heyday. Then hear him next weekend in his third.