Reminder: Leon Fleisher tonight at 7:30!* (Oops -- the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Musical Heritage tribute, that is)

*"Tonight" meaning Monday, the 24th of May (though if you've missed it, you haven't necessarily missed it -- see below)

[HINT: Eventually, if you stick it out, we've even got a spot o' music!]

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The Brahms waltzes in their full four-handed glory (near the end of the post)

TUESDAY UPDATE: The CMS Fleisher tribute was absolutely swell in all sorts of ways, most hilariously for pianist Jonathan Biss's story of earning -- though through no fault of his own, really -- his old teacher's withering scorn at LF's 2007 Kennedy Center Honors event. When the recording is posted, it should turn up in the link for all the Chamber Music Society Heritage programs. LATEST WORD is that as of Friday, May 28, the Fleisher Heritage program can be accessed at this link.

Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)

We hear LF, age 28, play No. 1 in B and (at 0:47) No. 2 in E from Brahms's solo version of his delectable Op. 39 set of 16 four-hand-piano mini-waltzes, recorded in Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City, in August 1956.

by Ken

Big-time apologies. The last four or five days have been a strange time for me, with closer to three days than two without Internet, phone, or e-mail access. Still, by later yesterday it should have been possible for me to get up, in more timely fashion, the intended reminder about the latest installment in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Musical Heritage series, devoted to Leon Fleisher -- again, tonight (Monday) at 7:30. If the timing is just right, you might still be able to register. Happily, even if you can't, we know now that all of CMS's Heritage programs can be accessed online.

Even I was surprised, when I went looking for the post that contained the CMS Musical Heritage link (which turned out to be from April 4, the day before the Pablo Casals tribute) and tried searching by "Leon Fleisher," to see how many SC posts that turned up. Mostly, of course, they pertain to the initial, physically unencumbered part of LF's career, when with his remarkable pianistic capabilities and his preternaturally early full-blown musical maturity, it seemed like he could do anything that can be done at a keyboard.

Pardon me for saying it again, but it still hits home for me that the recordings LF made with George Szell of the combined seven piano concertos of Beethoven and Brahms (with a fine assortment of others, like Schumann and Grieg, thrown in as a bonus) have for some six decades remained pretty much continuously available in the recorded-music medium-of-the-day, and through all those decades have remained part of the elite circle of best-ever recordings of some of the most-recorded works in the repertory.


WHO COULD HAVE IMAGINED THAT LF'S CAREER WAS
GOING TO TAKE A MARKEDLY DIFFERENT DIRECTION?

Even if Brahms's new work-in-progress was going to be a piano concerto rather than a symphony, he still had to create forms for it

aka Part 2 of "More 'pre-post' than 'tease': If our sights are set on Brahms's First Symphony, why are we listening to his First Piano Concerto? (Part 1)" -- also now variously updated

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: The promised after-post, "As promised, here's a proper quick-sampling of the three Brahms piano quartets," is up now

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Now comes with a box at the end: "(SPOILER ALERT!) THE PATH TO BRAHMS 1: The series so far"

Hungarian-born George Szell (1897-1970) was past 40 when he first recorded the Brahms D minor Concerto -- in 1938, with no less than the great Artur Schnabel! We see him here c1965, after his recordings of the concerto with Leon Fleisher and Clifford Curzon but before his second recording of it (the one we've been hearing) with Rudolf Serkin.

by Ken

I've left you hanging (from Thursday's "pre-post") with those unidentified Performances A, B, anc C -- plus two "bonus" performances -- of the enormous and enormously complex first movement of the Brahms First Piano Concerto, into which we crashed at the start of our look at the composer's enormously difficult path to the creation of his First Symphony. The young Brahms, you'll recall, flush with the excitement of his "discovery," notably via the gushing seal of approval delivered by Robert Schumann (and now enjoying the warm support of both Robert and Clara Schumann), thought he was on the way to nailing the symphony that would be expected of any touted successor to the line of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and of course Schumann himself.

Somewhere along the line, alas, during the hopeful repurposing-into-a-symphony of a sonata for two pianos of which he'd composed three movements, he found himself faced with an impasse: a first movement growing to supersize which his inner voices told him he couldn't make a symphony of. It doesn't seem to have taken him long, though, to conjure up a Plan C: not a sonata for two pianos, not a symphony, but . . . .

MAYBE, JUST PERHAPS, A PIANO CONCERTO?

Say, can you do this in a symphony?


Emil Gilels, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, June 1972

If you act quickly enough, you may still be able to sign up for the Chamber Music Society's Musical Heritage tribute to Pablo Casals

Next up in the series is Leon Fleisher (on May 24)
Plus: We peek into the wonderful world of the zither

Apologies for the short notice, but if you catch this right away, you may still be able to register (yes, preregistration is required) for the upcoming installment in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's terrific (and free, though of course donations are welcome) Musical Heritage series, this Monday (April 5), from 7:30 to 9pm, this one devoted to one of the most commanding musical figures of the 20th century, Pablo Casals.

UPDATE: As of Friday, April 9, CMS's Casals Musical Heritage program can be viewed here (with links to all the other CMS Musical Heritage programs).

by Ken

Here's how the CMS blurb puts it:

The great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) stands alone as arguably the most influential and universally revered instrumentalist of all time. The first cellist in history to recognize Bach's Six Solo Suites as great music, and the first to record them, is only one of the musical milestones of this extraordinary man, who not only dominated cello playing for more than half a century, but also served as an uncompromising and indisputable voice of social conscience. In this exploration of Casals the musician and the man, cellist and CMS Artistic Director David Finckel leads a panel of distinguished musicians -- Dmitri Atapine, Arnold Steinhardt, Jaime Laredo, and Timothy Eddy -- who, either through direct contact or inherited influence, have been changed by the art of Casals forever.

This is going a long ways, "arguably the most influential and universally revered instrumentalist of all time," but I'm not inclined to disagree, even though strictly as a cellist he was a long way from a favorite of mine. Still, the moral as well as musical force is undeniable, and so is the influence, not just among the vast number of musicians who came in direct contact with him, notably at his annual summer festivals, but among pretty much all the others, who were influenced by -- and, yes, revered -- him at a distance.


I SHOULD HAVE HAD THE SENSE TO SOUND AN EARLIER
ALERT (NOT JUST GET MYSELF SIGNED UP PRONTO!)

Revisiting our musical glimpse into the sublime, Part 1

If what follows looks familiar, these are the performances we heard last week -- except now with the performers identified



Leon Fleisher, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded Mar. 3-4, 1961

Emil Gilels, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded Mar.-Apr. 1968

Emil Gilels, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig, cond. EMI, recorded Apr. 30-May 1, 1957

by Ken

This was supposed to be a ridiculously easy post, before I let it grow in my head -- as I so often do -- into something larger, and something important enough to me that I despair of being able to get it right.

So just to be clear, while we're on the subject of Beethoven's one and only opera, Fidelio, I interrupted this thread last week to share a piece of music that had come at me from an unexpected direction ("Found Music Dept.: When music that pops into your path grabs hold and won't let go"). It's a piece I know about as well as I know my own name, and yet I don't think I'd ever heard it in quite this way: as a prime example of Beethoven's singular ability to give us a musical glimpse into the sublime.


MAYBE I FELT I HAD TO EXPLAIN WHAT I MEAN
BY "A MUSICAL GLIMPSE INTO THE SUBLIME"

Here's the key -- or is it?

Piano Trio: 
i. Allegro moderato -- opening

Arthur Rubinstein, piano; Jascha Heifetz, violn; Emanuel Feuermann, cello. RCA-BMG, recorded in Holllywood, Sept. 12-13, 1941

Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Itzhak Perlman, violin; Lynn Harrell, cello. EMI, recorded in New York, c1979

UPDATE: If you looked at this post before 10pm ET/7pm PT, you saw only the Ashkenazy-Perlman-Harrell clip, and in fact originally the whole first movement. When I went back to edit it to include just the opening, I was disheartened by how namby-pamby the performance is. (I actually thought the EMI CDs contained a different one, and then I figured how far wrong could we go with this one? I learned.) Most of my CD versions are on a hard-to-get-at shelf, so as an add-on I chose a much grander performance that happened also to be more readily at hand.

by Ken

This piece suddenly popped into my head this afternoon, and I couldn't have been happier that it did. So we're going to hear it tomorrow. Meanwhile it set me to thinking about other works in the same key, with the realization (I'm sure not for the first time, but then, who remembers?) that it's hard to find others of the same character.


SOME OTHER WORKS IN THE SAME KEY

Fleshing out our sound picture of Leon Fleisher

RAVEL: Sonatine
i. Modéré
ii. Mouvement de menuet
iii. Animé

Leon Fleisher, piano. Epic-Sony, recorded July 14-16, 1958

by Ken

In Friday night's "Leon Fleisher postscript" -- a "postscript," that is, to the previous week's post on "Schubert's mighty Wanderer Fantasy," in which Fleisher had been featured -- we heard a bit of perhaps unexpected repertory from Fleisher, Debussy's "Clair de lune," from a 1958 Debussy-Ravel LP. I suggested we might hear the complete Suite bergamasque, from which "Clair de lune" derives, but I thought instead we'd hear Ravel's Sonatine.


FLEISHER 2.0: THE ONE-HANDED PIANIST

In April 2012 I wrote about a pleasant evening at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at which Fleisher had shared the bill with a very different sort of pianist but a longtime colleague, Gilbert Kalish, who had served with him as faculty chairman during Fleisher's long stint as artistic director of one of the country's prestigious music-education programs, the summer Tanglewood Music Center.

Preview: A Leon Fleisher postscript

Leon Fleisher plays a piece we've heard a lot (most recently endorsed by mezzo Susan Graham!),"Clair de lune" from Debussy's Suite bergamasque, from this July 1956 Epic Debussy-Ravel LP.

by Ken

No, no, Fleisher hasn't died -- at least not that I know. What I mean in the post title is a "postscript" to last week's post, in which we did a sort of hare-and-tortoise journey, "Adding Schubert's mighty Wanderer to our roster of musical fantasies," with the then-35-year-old Leon Fleisher as our "hare" and the ripely matured 78-year-old Arthur Rubinstein as our "tortoise."

I mentioned last week that Sony Classical has just put out a Complete Album Collection with little CD reproductions of all of Fleisher's LPs as well as CDs for Sony and its predecessor labels, Columbia Masterworks and Epic. And I mentioned that I was watching the mailbox for my copy.

It arrived Tuesday, by which time I had finished tinkering with Sunday's post. (If you haven't looked at it since last Sunday, you might want to take another peek.) In playing with the set, I was startled to realize that the 1963 record we were drawing on, a coupling of the Wanderer Fantasy with Schubert's A major Sonata, D. 664 was the last "normal" record Fleisher made at the eight-year mark of his association with Columbia and Epic. It wasn't planned that way, of course. But the loss of his use of his right hand put an end to that part of his career.

I was reminded too that Fleisher had begun his association with Columbia with an earlier Schubert LP, containing perhaps the grandest of the three immensely scaled breakthrough piano sonatas that turned out to be the composer's last, coupled with eight of the 12 tiny German dances of D. 790. (Until now the Ländler we've heard have mostly been the souped-up ones from Mahler's First and Ninth Symphonies -- see the December 2012 preview post "Do I hear a Ländler?")

SCHUBERT: Ländler (12), D. 790:
No. 1 in D [1:11]
No. 3 in D [0:34]
No. 4 in D [0:33]
No. 5 in B minor [1:07]
No. 6 in G-sharp minor [0:42]
No. 7 in A-flat [0:59]
No. 8 in A-flat minor [1:15]
No. 11 in A-flat [0:53]

Leon Fleisher, piano. Columbia-Sony, recorded July 27-39, 1954, and May 4, 1955


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

We're going to  hear some fairly random excerpts from the Fleisher box, including (I'm thinking) the whole of the Suite bergamasque.

#

Adding Schubert's mighty "Wanderer" to our roster of musical fantasies

Clifford Curzon plays the first two sections of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, in a 1949 Decca recording. You'll find the rest of the performance below.

by Ken

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated "Fantasy Week at Sunday Classics" with a fantastic roundup that included the Choral Fantasy (for piano, soloists, chorus, and orchestra) of Beethoven, the Hungarian Fantasia (for piano and orchestra) of Liszt, and the Scottish Fantasy (for violin and orchestra) of Max Bruch. Of course there are lots of other musical fantasies, or fantasias (as I pointed out, we distinguish between the two words in English, but it's a distinction that doesn't exist in the standard "musical" languages -- Italian, French, and German), but it occurred to me at the time that we were missing one obviously important one.

So this week we add to our fantasy roste Schubert's C major Fantasy, D. 760, more familiarly known as the Wanderer Fantasy, for piano solo (at least until Franz Liszt got his hands on it). It's a piece whose rhythmically driven opening, once heard, seems to me unlikely to be forgotten.

SCHUBERT: Wanderer Fantasy (Fantasy in C), D. 760:
Opening, part 1



Mikhail Rudy, piano. EMI, recorded c1987

But immediately Schubert turns the same material into something very different, and then returns to the original driven mode, and then back, and then . . . .

In the piano concertos, we hear Beethoven in hard-fought sort-of-harmony with the universe

No less than Van Cliburn introduces the piano-playing Serkins, Rudolf (1903-1991) and Peter (born 1947), playing Schubert's four-hand Military March in G, D. 733, No. 2, on the occasion of Serkin père's 85th birthday in 1988, from a 1988 concert featuring 26 pianists, issued by VAI.

"Rudolf Serkin was once asked, jokingly of course, if Beethoven had composed the Choral Fantasy for Marlboro. The piece has everything Marlboro could have wanted for its final concert: an orchestra in which everyone could play; solos within the orchestra; ensemble playing among various instruments; piano solo; and a chorus for everyone else in the Marlboro community. Rudolf Serkin responded, with his characteristic smile, 'No, Beethoven didn't compose it for Marlboro.... But he approves.'"

-- from a 2000 Amazon.com comment by Christopher Serkin
on a two-CD Marlboro Festival 50th-anniversary release

by Ken

What Christopher Serkin, a distinguished law professor, discreetly doesn't mention here -- though his last name is certainly suggestive -- is that Rudolf Serkin, a co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival who was for decades its presiding artistic spirit -- was his grandfather, and Peter Serkin, whom he later mentions conducts the Choral Fantasy performance included in this Marlboro anniversary issue, is his uncle. (Peter Serkin, while a dramatically different sort of musician from his father, established himself at an early age as one of the leading pianists of his generation. It's kind of weird, for me at least, to think that young Peter is now in his 60s.)


NOT MANY PEOPLE TAKE THE CHORAL FANTASY SERIOUSLY