The best musicians do more than play the notes.
Take Leon Fleisher, whose performance Sunday afternoon at Ted Mann Concert Hall, in the season-opening concert of the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, will rank among the highlights of the year -- any year.
When the pianist (who has decried the current administration's "systematic shredding" of the Constitution) was named a 2007 Kennedy Center honoree, he considered boycotting the White House reception that preceded the culminating gala. In the end, he wore a peace symbol around his neck and a purple ribbon on his lapel -- a contrapuntal gesture worthy of Bach.
"The purpose of music," wrote Fleisher in a Washington Post op-ed, "is to communicate from the heart to the heart. Beethoven's vision of music as a force capable of reconciling us to each other and to the world may today seem remote, but that renders it an ever more crucial ideal for which to strive."
That the octogenarian Fleisher, whose career as a two-handed pianist was interrupted for more than 35 years by focal dystonia, is not done striving was evident from his playing Sunday. Preferring the camaraderie of collective music-making to the rigors of a solo recital, he shared the first half of the program with his wife, the excellent Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, who took the primo (treble) part in two extraordinary four-hand works: Schubert's tragic F-minor Fantasie, with its stuttering theme and crushing close, and Ravel's "La Valse" (arranged by Lucien Garban), in which -- coincidence? -- a proud civilization whirls to its doom.
After intermission came Brahms' A-major Piano Quartet, Op. 26 -- the composer's longest chamber work. Some find it long-winded; Fleisher, plainly, is not among them. Together with violinist Young-Nam Kim, violist Sally Chisholm and cellist Anthony Ross, all stellar Chamber Music Society regulars, he refused to hurry through this entrancing music.
Artur Schnabel, Fleisher's teacher, heard Brahms play the piano part of his G-minor Piano Quartet, the companion piece to Op. 26. More than half a century afterwards, Schnabel recalled the "creative vitality and wonderful carefreeness" of the composer's playing. Fifty years from now, the younger listeners at Sunday's concert may well praise Fleisher's pianism in similar terms. The prize, not unexpectedly, was the rapturous, nocturne-like slow movement, filled with Viennese Innigkeit (inwardness). Even the wrong notes were beautiful.
Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.
