Maurice Ravel; Sergei Prokofiev; Benjamin Britten - Piano Concertos for the Left Hand (Leon Fleisher)

Information

Composer: Maurice Ravel; Sergei Prokofiev; Benjamin Britten

• Ravel - Piano Concerto in D major for the Left Hand
• Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No. 4 in B-flat major for the Left Hand, Op. 53
• Britten - Diversions for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra, Op. 21

Leon Fleisher, piano

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Seiji Ozawa, conductor

Date: 1992

Label: Sony

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Review

Two functioning hands would seem to be the minimum basic requirement for a concert career, but fortunately musical history says otherwise. When the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, brother of the philosopher Ludwig, lost his right arm serving with the Austrian army in World War I, he reacted with logical positivism: he commissioned several leading composers to write works for the left hand alone.

Warfare has not claimed any pianistic right arms lately, but various mysterious maladies such as carpal tunnel syndrome, progressive degeneration of the nerves and repetitive stress syndrome have struck a number of pianists, most prominently Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher. Graffman, a dazzling stylist whose troubles began when he first sprained the fourth finger on his right hand while playing an unresponsive instrument in Berlin, has been a left- handed pianist since 1979. Fleisher, a towering performer whose 1958-62 cycle of Beethoven concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra remains a pinnacle of modern recordings, first noticed a loss of feeling in his right hand at the peak of his career in 1964. A year later, at age 38, he ! was incapable of using it at the keyboard, and he ceased performing his full repertoire.

Surgery at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital in 1981 brought Fleisher some temporary relief, and in 1982 he made a two-fisted comeback, playing Franck’s Symphonic Variations in Baltimore. But the treatment didn’t last. Other careers beckoned, including teaching at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and conducting, but the music world lamented what might have been.

Now, on a new CD, Fleisher has put Wittgenstein’s and his own misfortune to good use, playing three of the pieces commissioned by the Austrian. The Ravel Concerto in D Major is so powerfully conceived and artfully composed that its limitation is hardly apparent; in many ways it is superior to the same composer’s two-handed Concerto in G Major. Fleisher digs into the dark, angst- ridden work, plumbing its depths with the unimpaired musical intelligence that has always marked his playing. (Would that his accompanists, Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, were on the same wavelength.) He sprints through Prokofiev’s steely Concerto No. 4 with aplomb and turns in a glittering performance of Britten’s infrequently heard but urbane and witty Diversions for Piano and Orchestra.

Happily, the recording is just the first of what promises to be Fleisher’s complete traversal of the left-hand repertoire, including solo pieces, chamber music and other concertos by the likes of Scriabin, Saint-Saens, Hindemith and Richard Strauss — virtually unknown music by major composers that fully deserves wider hearing. A virtue of necessity, perhaps. But what a virtue.

— Michael Walsh

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Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended the Paris Conservatoire. After leaving the conservatoire, he found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles.

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Sergei Prokofiev (27 April [O.S. 15 April] 1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. He studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory where his teachers included Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Tcherepnin. His works include such widely heard pieces as Lieutenant Kijé, Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, as well as seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas.

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Benjamin Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was a leading British composer, pianist and conductor. Trained at the Royal College of Music, he gained early acclaim with Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and achieved international prominence with the opera Peter Grimes (1945). His major stage works include Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and Death in Venice, alongside innovative church parables such as Curlew River. Co-founder of the Aldeburgh Festival, he also composed celebrated song cycles, choral works including the War Requiem, and notable orchestral and chamber music.

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Leon Fleisher (23 July 1928 – 2 August 2020) was a pianist, conductor and teacher. Born in San Francisco, he began studying with Artur Schnabel at the age of nine. He became widely recognized for his interpretations of concertos by Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven, particularly in recordings with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1964, focal dystonia caused the loss of use of his right hand, leading him to focus on left-hand repertoire before later regaining partial mobility. He also taught for more than six decades at institutions including the Peabody Institute and the Curtis Institute of Music.

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