Pianist Leon Fleisher, the San Francisco-born virtuoso who forged a dynamic performing career during the 1950s and ’60s before being sidelined by a mysterious injury to his right hand, died on Sunday, Aug. 2, at a hospice in Baltimore. He was 92.
Fleisher was a formidable and sensitive interpreter of the music of Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert and other composers. As a teenager, he made an impressive debut with the San Francisco Symphony under Pierre Monteux in Liszt’s demanding Second Piano Concerto.
In 1964, when he was just 36, the fingers of his right hand began to curl under themselves, leaving him unable to perform.
“I’d been a fan of Greek mythology as a boy,” Fleisher said in a 2004 interview with The Chronicle. “And when this happened, I thought, ‘Well, when the gods go after you, they know just where to strike.’ ”
In the aftermath of his injury, Fleisher devoted his unquenchable energy to finding alternative ways of pursuing a musical career.
He cultivated and mastered the piano repertoire for left hand alone. He threw himself into teaching, joining the faculty of Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he served as a mentor for several generations of pianists. He developed a sideline as a conductor.
Through it all, Fleisher kept trying every possible avenue for recovery from an injury that was subsequently diagnosed as focal dystonia. He tried Botox injections, Rolfing, and a variety of psychological and physical therapies.
He eventually returned to performing with both hands, and although he never regained the full scope of his keyboard powers, his later appearances were often infused with a craggy dramatic force and fierce intelligence that compensated for any technical weaknesses.
The big showpieces that had formed the cornerstone of Fleisher’s early career remained problematic, as his 1996 performance of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas made clear. But in more intimate and cannily chosen music, Fleisher remained a soulful and authoritative interpreter.
He was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and took up the piano as a small boy. When he was just 5, he liked to recall, his mother forced her way backstage after a recital by Sergei Rachmaninoff so her budding virtuoso could meet the great Russian pianist and composer.
Fleisher gave his first public recital a year later, and when he made his professional debut at 14 with the Symphony, the reactions were ecstatic. In his review for The Chronicle, music critic Alfred Frankenstein described young Fleisher as “a grand musician and colossal pianist, one who has every device of keyboard craftsmanship literally at his fingertips, whose playing is rich and warm-hearted and intense both with intellect and with feeling.” Monteux publicly described him as “the pianistic find of the century.”
In the subsequent decades, he made a series of recordings with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra of concertos by Brahms and Beethoven that remain influential. Since 2000, Fleisher made intermittent appearances in San Francisco, performing concertos of Hindemith and Beethoven with the Symphony and giving solo recitals that combined Romantic and contemporary repertoire.
“The German composers reached pinnacles of inspiration and human expressivity that cannot be denied,” Fleisher told a Chronicle interviewer in 2019. “But, of course, we can’t just live in the past. We have to look at and encourage the music of our time, and be of our time.”
The occasion for that interview was a belated celebration of his 90th birthday presented by San Francisco Performances, a combined concert and speaking engagement at which Fleisher appeared alongside a former student, pianist Jonathan Biss.
In 2010, Fleisher published a memoir, “My Nine Lives,” co-written with music critic Anne Midgette. Among the plaudits awarded him during his lifetime were the Kennedy Center Honors, which he received in 2007.
Fleisher is survived by his wife, Katherine; five children; and two grandchildren.