With Both Hands, Leon Fleisher At the Piano from NY Times January 11, 1996
Leon Fleisher is preparing to do something he has not done in a New York concert hall for 30 years: play a piano concerto with both his hands. With the Orchestra of St. Luke's supporting him and Andre Previn on the podium, he is to play the Mozart Concerto in A (K. 414) on Saturday evening at Carnegie Hall. Over the last nine months, he has performed the work in Washington, Cleveland and at Tanglewood.
"The experience has been very positive," Mr. Fleisher, 67, said of those performances. "It's a matter of learning how to get closer to one's goals and ideals, not only in a musical sense, but in the sense of figuring out how the muscles are reacting and working. It's going to take time to get back to the point where it's all purely reflexive again, but it gives me great joy that I can go this far."
Probably the most famously debilitated musician of our time, Mr. Fleisher had been widely praised for the eloquence and power of his performances in the late 1950's and early 60's, and was considered a major contender among the younger generation of American pianists. But by 1965 he found himself unable to control his right hand, apparently because his intense practicing -- "seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory," as he puts it -- damaged his muscles. His attempt to work through the first signs of the problem by practicing even harder left him with a severe case of repetitive stress injury.
Mr. Fleisher did the predictable things: he withdrew from the stage (there was not much choice), sought medical help, which at first was unsuccessful, and went into a depression before realizing that the musicality that had been so widely admired could find other forms of expression.
He threw himself more fully into teaching at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where he lives, and he began performing the repertory for left hand alone. He helped start the Theater Chamber Players of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in 1968, and has since been conducting.
But reclaiming the two-hand piano repertory has remained Mr. Fleisher's goal, and this run of Mozart performances is not his first attempt at a pianistic rebirth. In 1982, two years after undergoing surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, he performed Franck's Symphonic Variations in a televised concert with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Other performances were planned, but Mr. Fleisher, in pain, canceled them.
"The procedure afforded me enough freedom and control to play the Franck or a Chopin Nocturne," he said, "but I realized that it was not the answer. What I think was not understood by doctors who concern themselves with musical injuries, but might well be understood by sports doctors, is that the working of the muscles must not only be preceded but also followed by stretching. Because when you work a muscle, you contract it, and unless you stretch it out afterward, it will remain slightly in a state of contraction. When you start again the next day, you're starting from a more contracted state than the day before, and if you keep going that way, the flexibility of your muscles becomes increasingly limited."
What has made Mr. Fleisher's comeback possible is a technique called Rolfing, a massaging technique developed in 1940 by Ida P. Rolf, a biochemist who theorized that people could be fully comfortable physically and psychologically only if their bodies were properly aligned.
"Basically," Mr. Fleisher said, "this Rolfing has been stretching out muscle fibers that haven't been stretched for 30 years. It's a manner of manipulating connective tissue, and it looks like a deep massage in slow motion. It requires active participation on the part of the patient, because when you feel soreness, your tendency is to contract and protect it. But you have to give in to the pain and relax under it. When I started, my muscle fibers felt like petrified rock. Now they are getting progressively softer and more supple and gaining elasticity."
Mr. Fleisher is making his return cautiously. The Mozart performances have been widely spaced, and he has accompanied singers in Schumann song cycles. But he has been privately reclaiming the two-hand solo repertory, and he plans to record some of it -- he would not say which works -- for the Decca/London label in June.
He is not dropping the left-hand repertory, though. Last month he played his first New York solo recital devoted to such works, and he is preparing a new left-hand concerto by William Bolcom. Mr. Bolcom has written two new left-hand concertos that can be played separately or together. The other work is for Gary Graffman, who lost the use of his right hand in 1980. Mr. Fleisher and Mr. Graffman are to give the premiere of the duo version, called "Gaea," with the Baltimore Symphony in April in Baltimore and at Carnegie Hall.
Mr. Fleisher says that in recent years he has cut down on private teaching, opting instead for the class coaching preferred by his own teacher, Artur Schnabel. It is a question of efficiency, in part: the students learn 10 to 12 times more repertory, he says, and they get used to performing for critical listeners.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Fleisher's teaching takes the physicality of piano playing into account. He insists that his students stretch properly, and at one point he had them take beginning ballet classes.
"The basic nature of music is horizontal," he said. "It moves through time. But our experience, as performers, is very vertical. In order to produce this irresistible horizontal sweep, we pianists sit hunched over the keyboard, pressing down these 88 levers six-sixteenths of an inch. And it occurred to me that dance was the answer.
"I also realized that if I told my students to take beginners' ballet, I would have to do it myself, so I did. And it makes a tremendous difference in their awareness of the physical aspects of music."
He also wants his students -- and all young pianists -- to consider what happened to him when thinking about their careers.
"There is no question," he said, "that what happened was a result of a very stupid kind of overwork. It was an attempt to build muscles, and it was my own stupidity. But kids fall into this, and there are many reasons for it. They are bombarded with the perfection they hear on recordings. They want to be able to produce the kind of sound that Horowitz had.
"That was a wonderful sound, but they don't realize that Horowitz had his technician working very hard on his piano, and that the piano itself helped. And these kids come to a dead hall, with a dead piano, and when they try to make these Horowitz sounds, they brutalize themselves."
In Mr. Fleisher's view, pianists today work their fingers too hard, and rely too little on their upper arm muscles.
"There are some who blame this on the German school of piano playing, or the Russian school or the French school," he said. "But the historical reason for the problem is not what's important now. The important thing is that pianists think carefully about what they're doing, both musically and physically."
