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SYMPHONY REVIEW
October 5, 2005
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By Jeff Dunn
Hands were a recurring motif in Wednesday's San Francisco Symphony concert.
Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt's hands, with and without baton, worked
marvels. Pianist Leon Fleisher's playing, with and without the right hand, offered
mixed results. And thousands of clapping hands, with enthusiasm and without
hesitation, refused to let Blomstedt leave Davies Hall after a powerful performance
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
The evening opened with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 in A. Blomstedt, without
baton, caressed this music with his strikingly long fingers, gentle sweeps of the back
of his hands, and a panoply of other patented gestures in a superbly nuanced
accompaniment. Fleisher, meanwhile, presented a thoughtful, measured and
respectful interpretation of Mozart's deceptively simple notes.
Fleisher, a San Francisco native, is an enormously respected teacher and musician. In
his heyday, he was considered by many to be one of the world's greatest pianists,
with ambition to match. Tragically, in 1962, his career was nearly ended by what is
now called focal dystonia, a nervous disorder characterized by uncontrollable signals
from the brain causing specific muscles to contract. In Fleisher's case, it was the
fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand that received the brunt of the affliction.
Refusing to be defeated, Fleisher retooled himself in a niche market as a performer of
left-hand concertos. Then, in the mid 1990s, his right hand was rehabilitated through
Rolfing of what Fleisher described as his “wood-like” right-arm muscles and shots of
Botox to block the debilitating brain signals. He began playing two-handed concertos
again.
In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 2003, Fleisher confided that his right
hand was most successful playing chordal passages, that scales were a challenge, and
that most of Mozart was beyond him. And yet here he was in the A major concerto,
with his pellucid left hand and a right that at best seemed mediocre. The heart
admires, and the ear judges.
Fortunately, Fleisher had a second chance to impress, and did so with the newly published Klaviermusik mit Orchester by Paul Hindemith, a piece commissioned for the left hand only by another ambitious pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in World War I. The piece was too modernistic for the veteran's tastes. Clutching his exclusive rights to the composition, Wittgenstein refused to play it himself or allow others to do so. Only in 2002, when his grandchildren found a manuscript copy in his widow's locked room in Pennsylvania, did this terrific work begin to see the light of day. Written in 1923, it has all the verve of one of Hindemith's greatest masterpieces, the Kammermusik No. 1 of 1921. Loaded with catchy, toe-tapping tunelets in three of the four movements (played without breaks), it features an extended and gorgeous English horn melody in the slower third movement, performed Wednesday by Julie Ann Giacobassi. Hindemith's piece is really a concerto for orchestra, with the piano as one of its members. The lack of obviously virtuoso passages did not hide the difficulty, nor the beauty, of the music, which Fleisher carried off with aplomb. San Francisco was blessed with the North American premiere of this top-drawer discovery. It is hoped a recording will soon follow. For the second half of the concert, Blomstedt returned. This time, his hand held a baton. With the famous opening of Beethoven's Fifth symphony, however, it was revealed as no baton but a cudgel. Only the swiftness of tempo mitigated the brutality of gesture in the first movement. This mellowed into firmness, still with fairly brisk pacing in the subsequent movements, and burst into glory in the magnificently handled transition to the finale. Even though Blomstedt observed the now discredited repeat of the scherzo and trio in the third movement, interest didn't flag for a second. At the conclusion, Blomstedt and his former band were deservedly rewarded with a standing ovation, all hands, way up.
(Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic
education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and
president of Composers, Inc.)
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Leon Fleisher
