STAFF

The Washington Post

staff

Leon Fleisher, sublime pianist undaunted by mysterious hand malady, dies at 92 - The Washington Post

Leon Fleisher, the brilliant American pianist who was in his 30s when fingers in his right hand suddenly stopped working — a fateful twist that cut short his playing career — and for three decades was one of the great enigmas of the classical-music world, died Aug. 2 at a hospice care center in Baltimore. He was 92.

The cause was cancer, said his son Julian Fleisher, a singer-songwriter and producer.

Mr. Fleisher’s mysterious hand malady — eventually diagnosed as a neurological disorder called focal dystonia — was a dramatic and harrowing turn of events for a onetime child prodigy who had spent his 20s on the post-World War II vanguard of young American pianists.

At 24, Mr. Fleisher became the first American to win the piano competition established by Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, one of the world’s premier musical contests. That victory launched a major new phase of his career. He performed in leading concert halls and became the preferred soloist of George Szell, the formidable conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. His recordings with Szell remain benchmarks for their clarity, precision and sheer expressive musicality; Brahms’s first piano concerto was a touchstone.

At that pinnacle, Mr. Fleisher began noticing trouble that led to a cramping in the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand. Redoubling his practice efforts only worsened the problem. On the eve of a historic tour of the Soviet Union with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1965, Mr. Fleisher realized that he wasn’t able to play at the required level. He canceled the tour and his other upcoming concerts.

The abrupt loss of movement sent him reeling, triggering a depression and a desperate quest to identify and cure what ailed him. “I tried everything from acupuncture to Zen Buddhism,” he later said.

He only gradually surmounted his malaise through a career metamorphosis. He learned the surprisingly large repertory for left-hand piano — and he staged the first of his halting comebacks in 1982 after regaining some use of his right hand. He remained, in critical estimation, a pianist of sublime musical intelligence whether playing with one hand or two. But he also gained renown off the stage as a conductor and an influential teacher.

His work with the baton led him to explore musical pathways he never would have followed as a pianist. As co-founder in 1968 of the Theater Chamber Players in Washington, long the resident chamber ensemble at the Kennedy Center, he performed contemporary chamber music; as music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra and then associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, he learned a wide range of orchestral classics.

His group master classes at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, coupled with a stint at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, produced several generations of leading pianists, including André Watts, Yefim Bronfman and Jonathan Biss. Mr. Fleisher said his physical limitations forced him to think more profoundly about music, to put into words the technique and nuance that before had been instinctive. “Prior to my problems,” he once said, “I would sit down and play to show my students what to do.”

In the classical-music world, he became regarded as a guru, known for his ability to untangle pianistic problems, for his inspiration, and for a series of adages including “Practice less, think more.”

“One of the problems with young musicians today,” he said in his 2010 memoir, “My Nine Lives,” “is that they come in with such a sense of high seriousness. The idea of how great this music is tends to fill them with awe. But so much of what we do is about these guys just having fun. That earthiness is a very important part of life.”

Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928, the second son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Isidor, was a milliner. His mother, the former Bertha Mittelman, had great ambitions for her children and insisted on piano lessons for her oldest son, Raymond.

Leon listened in to the lessons, sat down and played them more skillfully than his brother and was soon recognized by his first teachers as a major talent.

When he outstripped the teaching abilities of his early mentors, his mother and former San Francisco Symphony music director Alfred Hertz decided he should study with the eminent pianist Artur Schnabel. Schnabel didn’t work with children — he did not want to waste time on basics — but 9-year-old Leon was slipped into a dinner party at the Hertzes’ home and presented for a de facto audition. On the spot, Schnabel made an exception to his policy and admitted him to his class at Lake Como in Italy.

Mr. Fleisher’s mother accompanied her son across the Atlantic, then found them a place to live in Manhattan when Schnabel decided to leave for New York amid the approaching world war in Europe. In 1944, 16-year-old Leon made a rousing solo debut at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, and guest conductor Pierre Monteux dubbed him the “pianistic find of the century.”

New York Times music critic Noel Straus, marveling at the pianist’s delicate power and the seeming ease of his mastery of an onerous Brahms concerto, called him “one of the most remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists.”

Like Schnabel, Mr. Fleisher became a major exponent of the German and Viennese classics, although as he aged he strayed into territory that his teacher eschewed or downright ignored, from French composers to, worst of all, Rachmaninoff, whose emotion and pyrotechnics Schnabel disdained.

So pervasive was Schnabel’s influence that Mr. Fleisher grew somewhat dependent on it. Needing to set off on his own path, he spent a period drifting in his teen years before ending up in Paris to begin forging his own identity as an artist. In 1951, he married Dorothy Druzinsky, known as Dot, who came from a noted family of harpists.

The next year, still living in Paris, Mr. Fleisher was encouraged to take part in the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Music Competition, and he impressed a lineup of judges that included pianist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/12/21/concert-pianist-arthur-rubinstein-dies-at-95/17f6739e-d5d5-447c-bb6d-416cca13d1ea/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Arthur Rubinstein</a>.

Despite his flourishing career, with Szell among others, Mr. Fleisher learned that he was technically unemployed when he was turned down for a credit card at a major department store. He addressed this failing by taking up his job at Peabody in 1959. Three years later, he divorced Dot and married Risselle Rosenthal, a young Baltimorean known as Rikki.

Mr. Fleisher was at the height of his career when he began noticing difficulties with his right hand. “It began as a sense of laziness in my right index finger, a slight sluggishness in its response when I wanted to play a trill,” he wrote in “Nine Lives.” “It continued as a growing sense of clumsiness and a feeling that my fingers weren’t doing what I wanted them to do. . . . I had probably been overworking my hand for years, ever since I started stepping up my practicing in the wake of the Queen Elisabeth Competition.”

Increasingly desolate, he leaned heavily on his second wife for emotional support. He also grew a beard and pony tail. “I was too chicken to buy a Harley,” he later quipped to a reporter, “so I bought a Vespa.”

As he struggled to find direction, Mr. Fleisher threw himself into teaching and conducting as well as learning the repertory for left-hand piano — most famously Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, as well as other works written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, whose right arm was amputated after a combat injury in World War I. But he always blamed the stress surrounding his hand problems for the end of his second marriage.

Several new chapters in his life seemed to be opening by the early 1980s. He met and married Katherine Jacobson, who had been one of his Peabody students, and his hand seemed to improve through surgery for carpal-tunnel syndrome and other regimens. He decided he was ready for a full-fledged comeback, which he scheduled with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when it opened its new Meyerhoff Hall in 1982.

The event was televised live and made news across the country. But as he prepared for the event, Mr. Fleisher was forced to realize that his hand wasn’t where it needed to be. He managed to get through the evening, but his dream of a true rebound seemed over.

He later quipped that it was “an evening of pretense.”

In 1984, he became the artistic director of the Tanglewood Music Center, the training academy for gifted musicians held at the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He held the position for 13 years, until he resigned amid a rift between BSO music director Seiji Ozawa and a number of the center’s administrators.

Meanwhile, in 1991, Mr. Fleisher had his first Botox shot in another attempt to cure his hand. He saw some improvement from this treatment and from a massage technique called Rolfing that is designed to release stress stored in the body’s connective tissues.

By the mid-1990s, he was cautiously attempting a few two-handed performances — first with his own chamber ensemble and, in 1995, with the Cleveland Orchestra. His 2004 recording “Two Hands,” which moves gradually into pieces of extraordinary complexity, was enthusiastically received, and he continued to play concerts all over the world.

Besides his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Deborah, Richard and Leah; two children from his second marriage, Paula and Julian; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Fleisher was the subject of Nathaniel Kahn’s Oscar-nominated documentary short “Two Hands” (2006). His awards and honors included the Kennedy Center Honors in 2007. Uncertain about accepting the honor under a political administration he did not support, he wrote an open letter to The Washington Post, protesting the Bush White House’s policies regarding the  Iraq War, torture of prisoners and other decisions that he said amounted to a “systematic shredding of our nation’s Constitution [that] have left us weak and shamed at home and in the world.”

The letter, which detailed his inner struggle about whether to accept the honor, stirred a certain amount of controversy, but made him even more of a hero in the eyes of many of his younger students.

“I am nearly 80 years old,” he wrote, “and have been making music for almost all of that time, sustained by the belief that, in the words that Beethoven inscribed in his copy of the ‘Missa Solemnis,’ the purpose of music 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.”

Midgette, a former Washington Post classical music critic, co-wrote Leon Fleisher’s 2010 memoir, “My Nine Lives.”

Anne Midgette was the chief classical music critic. She left The Post in November 2019. 

Anne Midgette

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/theatre/music_theatre

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/theatre/music_theatre/opera

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music/musical_genre/jazz_music

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/theatre

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music/musical_genre/classical_music

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/theatre/music_theatre/musical

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/music/musical_genre

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment

client-blocklists/Client List: Morgan Stanley KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Amazon KWs - EXCLUDE ALL 

client-blocklists/Client List: Becton Dickinson KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/CLIENT LIST: Nomura KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Boeing KWs 2021- INCLUDE ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Exxon Mobil  - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/GEICO KWs - INCLUDES ANY_4.26.21

client-blocklists/Client List: T. Rowe Price KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Microsoft KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/T. Rowe Price KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/B2_Arts & Entertainment_legacyaux_btb

advertising/B2_Asian Lifestyle Content_legacyaux_im0

advertising/B2_Baby Content_legacyaux_gnp

client-blocklists/HBO KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: ExxonMobil 03312021 KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Ford/Lincoln KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Bank of America KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/WaPo: Combined Disaster Keyword List - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs 2 - EXCLUDES ALL - 12.23.20

advertising/B2_Cancer_legacyaux_7f3

advertising/B2_Classical Music Keywords_legacyaux_zev

advertising/B2_Communities and Subcultures_legacyaux_ry3

advertising/B2_Community Service_legacyaux_h1s

client-blocklists/Client List: Eli Lily KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: IBM KWs ALTERNATE Watson - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Purina KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/Citrix Mindfulness

client-blocklists/BP KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/ CLIENT LIST: AT&T KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/B2_Inspiring Content_legacyaux_UTY

advertising/B2_Lifestyle_legacyaux_ipv

advertising/B2_Music_legacyaux_yzu

advertising/B2_Positive News_legacyaux_hlt

advertising/B2_Shopping_legacyaux_sa6

advertising/B2_Society_legacyaux_0cz

advertising/B2_Men's Grooming_legacyaux_1ve

advertising/B2_Middle East Content_legacyaux_tde

client-blocklists/Client List: KPMG KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Verizon KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Novo Nordisk KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Siemens KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Cisco KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T ALT KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Mercedes KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/FX Excludes All Disney

client-blocklists/Client List: Boeing KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Inpixon KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Aetna KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Google KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Philip Morris KWs - INCLUDES ANY 

client-blocklists/Dupixent neg kws - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Capital One KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 1.4.21

client-blocklists/Bank of America Merrill Lynch KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/CME KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: IBM KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Google PG KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Chase KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Office Depot KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: ETrade KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

Obituaries

The Washington Post Obituaries section has Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia obituaries, appreciations and death notices as well as historical obits and celebrity obituaries.

The Washington Post offers breaking local news, weather and traffic information for the DC, Maryland and Virginia metro areas, plus information about school districts, crime, government, religion, the lottery,restaurant reviews and obituaries.

D.C., Md. & Va.

Best of 2019 Classical Music

Best of 2019: Classic music - The Washington Post

Every year has highs and lows. Sometimes they’re even connected. In 2019, classical music wrestled with topical issues and economic concerns that were reflected in some of the year’s most significant triumphs.

It was the year of new flexible, multiuse performance spaces. In New York, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/along-new-yorks-high-line-a-500-million-effort-to-bring-the-arts-to-everyone/2019/04/21/9cda49b6-5246-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html">the Shed debuted</a> with a goal of bringing a culture of new art to offset the gleaming consumerism of Hudson Yards. In Lenox, Mass., the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/classical-music-needs-more-supporters-tanglewoods-new-buildings-are-there-to-create-them/2019/08/01/c8dc720e-aff8-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html">Linde Center</a> expanded Tanglewood’s offerings to a year-round calendar. And in Washington, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/does-the-kennedy-center-have-a-vision-for-its-elegant-but-awkward-new-annex/2019/08/29/bf3fd00e-c5df-11e9-b5e4-54aa56d5b7ce_story.html">Kennedy Center’s $250 million Reach annex</a>, which opened with a 16-day festival, prompted debate about whether “they will come” is always what follows “if you build it.”

The Reach, a new multi use complex, will be celebrating its grand opening soon at the Kennedy Center, on August 29 in Washington, DC.

Waking up at last to the lack of people of color both on and behind the stage, classical music is attempting, sometimes clumsily, to tackle the problem. This year saw world premieres of operas about race and injustice (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/the-central-park-five-in-song-composer-anthony-davis-on-his-new-opera/2019/06/19/597a556a-91db-11e9-b570-6416efdc0803_story.html">“The Central Park Five,”</a> Long Beach Opera) and white cops shooting black youths (“Blue,” Glimmerglass Festival opera company, coming to Washington National Opera next year), which is good, but there was also more pigeonholing of black artists such as the tenor Russell Thomas, in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/russell-thomas-is-much-more-than-a-black-tenor-now-hes-tackling-otello-and-the-fields-stereotypes/2019/10/16/0fc2b45c-eeac-11e9-8693-f487e46784aa_story.html">WNO’s “Otello”</a> this fall. Epitomizing the problem was the Metropolitan Opera’s lavish <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/met-opera-offers-a-porgy-of-its-time-that-speaks-to-ours/2019/09/24/0c73c756-de8e-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html">“Porgy and Bess.”</a> Maybe next year we’ll see more works that truly spotlight and celebrate black culture.

The Baltimore Symphony pump-faked fans by announcing a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/baltimore-symphony-orchestra-unexpectedly-cancels-summer-season/2019/05/30/825ddda2-8318-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html">summer season</a> and then <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/baltimore-symphony-orchestra-musicians-officially-locked-out/2019/06/17/c9cced8e-9143-11e9-b570-6416efdc0803_story.html">locking out its musicians</a> for nine weeks, citing steep revenue losses. But the two sides managed to find a way forward, and the musicians are now playing under a one-year contract. Meanwhile, the announced demise of the National Philharmonic, based at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md., prompted hand-wringing and an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/troubled-national-philharmonic-walks-itself-back-from-the-precipice-of-closure/2019/08/11/09fe0444-bc58-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html">11th-hour bailout</a>. Will it last? Stay tuned.

The countertenor Iestyn Davies, always a source of dazzling and thoughtful music, offered not one but two programs in Washington this calendar year: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/countertenor-iestyn-davies-and-fretwork-revive-music-old-and-new-at-library-of-congress/2019/10/17/9431fe64-f0e6-11e9-b648-76bcf86eb67e_story.html">the first</a> at the Library of Congress with the ensemble Fretwork and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/countertenor-iestyn-davies-lutenist-thomas-dunford-mesmerize-in-dc-recital/2019/05/15/0c79b2b4-7747-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html#comments-wrapper">the second</a> at the Kennedy Center with his longtime collaborator, lutenist Thomas Dunford.

The beauty of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/sing-like-an-egyptian-glasss-akhnaten-strikes-poses-in-new-met-production/2019/11/17/0be2f7da-08c8-11ea-924a-28d87132c7ec_story.html">“Akhnaten,”</a> in Phelim McDermott’s production, marked a moment when the beleaguered and often mediocre Metropolitan Opera had a chance to turn things around. At least the company took a step toward a much-overdue housecleaning by announcing the impending departure of Jonathan Friend, the longtime casting director, who will be succeeded by Michael Heaston, formerly of the Washington National Opera.

other

The most creative operatic work is still happening at smaller opera companies. In Washington, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/a-butterfly-without-the-stereotypes-takes-flight-at-in-series/2019/09/08/d1caf7ba-d25c-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html">In Series</a>, under Tim Nelson, offered some memorable <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/in-opera-small-is-the-new-grand-the-revamped-in-series-shows-the-way/2019/05/30/62e1fc5a-8170-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html">small takes</a> on big works, and Urban Arias and WNO’s festival of 20-minute operas kept going strong. In New York, the Prototype Festival presented Ellen Reid’s “Prism,” an opera about sexual harassment, which premiered in Los Angeles and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. And at year’s end, the Long Beach Opera announced that MacArthur fellow Yuval Sharon — whose company, The Industry, in Los Angeles has brought him international attention — would take over as interim director, showing the appeal small companies hold for creative artists.

Slowly but surely, the field is waking up to the idea that 50 percent of the population deserves better representation on the concert stage. The New York Philharmonic announced its multi-season Project 19, commissioning 19 works by 19 female composers to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Washington got a brand-new festival of women’s music, courtesy of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/do-we-need-a-whole-festival-of-womens-music-the-boulanger-initiative-thinks-so/2019/02/28/0879c25e-3ab5-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html">Boulanger Initiative</a>, as well as recitals by mezzo powerhouse <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/women-are-celebrated-as-creators-not-just-heroines-in-powerhouse-recital-at-kennedy-center/2019/05/05/17f1d54a-6f40-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html">Jamie Barton</a> and pianist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/the-unbearable-lightness-of-womens-music-pianist-downes-celebrates-the-matriarchy/2019/02/24/d84721da-385c-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html">Lara Downes</a>. Should women’s music be segregated this way? There are a lot of strong feelings on the subject, but advocacy is needed to give more people a chance to recognize the quality of what’s out there.

A three-part series of the complete quartets by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer you might not have heard of, sounds like an obscure attraction. But the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/one-of-the-greatest-music-events-in-washington-this-year-is-happening-at-the-phillips/2019/04/29/3aff6f18-6aac-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html">Phillips Collection</a> gambled on quality and gave D.C. audiences a chance to hear the quirky Quatour Danel in a rich tapestry of work that deserves to be much better known.

People often ask: Why can’t we update old operas for our time? With <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/reexamining-opera-one-classic-at-a-time/2019/06/13/316d437e-8c64-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html">“Prisoner of the State,” </a>David Lang has done just that. He remakes Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” a problem child of the repertory, into a new work that hews to the original in form while underscoring its relevance to today’s society. Watching Lang blossom into one of the heavyweights of the field over the past couple of decades has been a pleasure, and his opera stayed with me and is one I look forward to seeing again.

When I looked back over my concert-going experiences in 2019, I found that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/noseda-nso-find-the-fun-in-a-sacred-and-profane-program/2019/10/03/bad46222-e651-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html">Gianandrea Noseda’s concerts</a> with the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/national-symphony-orchestras-tristan-was-lacking-in-dc-they-made-up-for-it-in-new-york/2019/11/18/6bb9e878-0a29-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html">National Symphony Orchestra</a> were among the ones that remained most vivid in my mind. Noseda has created a narrative at an orchestra that didn’t have one, offering <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/its-my-last-review-as-the-posts-classical-music-critic-here-are-my-parting-thoughts-on-the-nso/2019/11/22/112053c6-0d3e-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html">hopes of better things</a> to come.

Best of 2019: Classic music

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/culture

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/arts_and_entertainment/theatre/music_theatre/operetta

client-blocklists/Ford/Lincoln KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Bank of America KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/Black Lives Matter Content

advertising/B2_Health and Beauty_legacyaux_3fv

advertising/B2_Social Issues Content_legacyaux_8C2

advertising/B2_Women's Beauty_legacyaux_9jv

client-blocklists/Client List: GEICO KWs

client-blocklists/Client List: Cisco KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Capital Concerts KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Boeing KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 12.23.20

Music

Arts & Entertainment

for The Washington Post

Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco

Kennedy Center Honors 2019: Michael Tilson Thomas - The Washington Post

Michael Tilson Thomas is 74 years old. In conductor years, that’s young.

He wears his elder-statesman mantle lightly, even with a kind of incredulity. He’s “MTT,” music director of the San Francisco Symphony, co-founder of the New World Symphony in Florida, sometime-leader of dozens of major orchestras around the world, expert communicator, breaker-down of musical genres and still, at bottom, the youngest-ever conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of whom Leonard Bernstein once said, “He reminds me of me at that age.” Thomas has been famous for so long, and boyish for so long, that he hasn’t had to struggle to attain the one or ever entirely abandon the other.

On a sunny afternoon in October, Thomas, newly recovered from heart surgery, is at his home in Miami, serving lunch. Conductors live in many places, and Thomas’s base is California, where he and his husband, Joshua Robison, grew up. But the Miami home — purchased thanks to a tip from director Hal Prince — is needed because of Thomas’s work with the New World Symphony, the orchestra he co-founded in 1987. Yachts glide past the window, behind the tiled pool; inside, the art collection includes paintings by the conductor’s father, a sometime screenwriter who played the piano for hours a day. The house is both comfortable and representative, not too personal to be a space for entertaining donors and luminaries; after all, a conductor’s life is partly public.

But upstairs, on a terrace, a spiral staircase leads to a small rectangle of a studio perched uneasily atop the house, like a fortification. There’s no decor, just a desk at one end and a keyboard and monitor at the other. Thomas calls up a musical score on his computer. It’s a song he wrote for the late jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, though she never sang it. Another comes from a group of settings of poems by Rilke, which will have their premiere at the San Francisco Symphony in January, as part of Thomas’s last season as the orchestra’s music director. In this room, rather than leading music composed by others, Thomas is creating and revising his own.

“I’ve given them 25 years,” he says of the San Francisco Symphony. “Now it’s my turn.”

MTT, this year one of the artists receiving Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement, is reinventing himself yet again.

For much of Thomas’s life, he has been depicted as the bad boy of classical music. Even now, no one’s denying the “boy” part. He has always had an air of aggressive precociousness; even as a student, he spoke with the authority, or arrogance, of the smartest person in the room. As a teenager, he accompanied and conducted the orchestra for master classes by the legendary cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and violinist Jascha Heifetz, and Piatigorsky asked him to learn Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata.

No, thank you, Thomas replied — he was specializing in Bach, Schoenberg, Boulez and Stockhausen.

“[Piatigorsky] took a couple of puffs on his cigarette,” Thomas recalls, “and said, ‘You are too talented to be a specialist. Next week, Rachmaninoff sonata.’ ”

Thomas developed his self-assurance during his childhood in Los Angeles, surrounded by his parents’ circle of artistic and intellectual friends — people who worked in Hollywood, played chamber music together and knew a cross-section of creative stars, from Stravinsky to Orson Welles. His grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, were major stars of the Yiddish theater in the early 20th century; Boris died before Thomas was born, but Bessie lived nearby and often visited when he was young.

“I see you. I see who you are,” he recalls her telling him. “You’re like me, you’re gonna have to really do something and become what you want to become. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs.”

Once the wunderkind started to become what he wanted, there weren’t always people like Piatigorsky around to keep him in his place, though there were plenty of mentors: Thomas studied with Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California; helped prepare performances for Igor Stravinsky; and went to Bayreuth to work with Friedelind Wagner, the composer’s granddaughter (though he still complains about the length of Wagner’s operas). He met Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood and won the Koussevitzky Prize.

At 24, Thomas was with the Boston Symphony when William Steinberg took ill during a concert, and he stepped in and conducted the second half. “Mr. Thomas knows his business, and we shall be hearing from him again,” wrote the New York Times’s Harold C. Schonberg of that 1969 concert. (Sometimes critics get it right.)

After that, Thomas was seen as marked for a great future, the subject of lengthy newspaper features and speculation about a second Bernstein. But Thomas never pandered to conventional taste. His first recording with the Boston Symphony focused on music by Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives — still something of a stretch for conservative audiences — and he caused a near-riot at Carnegie Hall in 1973 by leading Steve Reich’s “Four Organs” on a BSO program.

“At the beginning,” Thomas says, “one thing that contributed to my being asked to turn up was that I knew a lot of pieces that nobody knew. So I could do the Berio ‘Epifanie’ or Stockhausen or Elliott Carter or whatever, and that’s what orchestras wanted me to come do. And then, okay, I’m also going to conduct something more in the standard repertoire” — in which, he acknowledges, he was often still finding his way.

After so much acclaim and attention, backlash was inevitable. Although some hailed his brilliance, others found him arrogant and unlikable, or criticized his technique. Instead of the starry posts foreseen for him, Thomas became music director at the midsize Buffalo Philharmonic. Then, in 1978, he was busted at John F. Kennedy Airport for drug possession, for small amounts of cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines. He resigned from Buffalo later that season, and the drug story made it all the harder to get another permanent post.

Being openly, if quietly, gay may not have helped, either. Thomas and Robison have been together since 1976. In 1985, Robison says, Thomas was already under consideration for the San Francisco Symphony music directorship, but “we already could sense that they were not ready for the both of us.”

Still, Thomas was too well established to go away entirely, and he gradually worked his way back. In the 1980s, he became principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and then principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, which he helped transform into the international powerhouse it is today.

[A 2010 interview with Michael Tilson Thomas]

In 1987, Thomas co-founded the New World Symphony, a unique training orchestra for young professional musicians and a laboratory for different ways of disseminating music, including long-distance online classes and live broadcasts on the wall outside the concert hall.

Finally, in 1995, San Francisco was ready for him. Among the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2015/06/13/in-san-francisco-mtt-takes-on-beethoven/" target="_blank">highlights of his tenure</a> have been a well-received cycle of Mahler symphonies; a wildly ambitious video, audio and Internet project called <a href="https://michaeltilsonthomas.com/keeping-score/" target="_blank">Keeping Score</a>, offering in-depth looks at composers and works; and programs including an American Mavericks series that presented the full range of American music, from Lou Harrison to the Grateful Dead.

“His ability to create concert programs and festivals that capture the imagination of the public is extraordinary,” says Catherine Payne, a piccolo player with the San Francisco Symphony who was Thomas’s first hire in 1995. “I haven’t worked with anybody who’s such a master at programming, year after year.”

“As I’m very fond of saying, [there are] two moments of an artist’s life,” Thomas says. “Inventing yourself, it takes a lot of courage to do that. But then going the distance, which is much more challenging. To be able to sustain it physically and emotionally.”

In the heart of Miami Beach, the New World Center refracts and reflects the city’s white Art Deco facades in a collection of curving surfaces and tilting blocks encased in a box of glass. Designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2011, the building is devoted to presenting music in every way possible: Odd nooks in the public spaces can become venues for chamber concerts; speakers that snake through the park outdoors like something out of Dr. Seuss enable you to watch the live wallcasts surrounded by sound, oblivious to passing traffic. At the heart of the building is a small, blue, bowllike concert hall, alive with sound.

On a recent October day, Chad Goodman, the orchestra’s current conducting fellow, was rehearsing the orchestra in Schumann’s overture to “The Bride of Messina” while MTT sat at a keyboard and kibitzed.

[Miami’s new concert hall, designed by Frank Gehry]

“And the main problem with this is . . . ?” Thomas quizzed Goodman at the end of one passage, looking over his glasses. Goodman stumbled for the right answer: “Balance-wise, it’s . . . ”

But Thomas was already exuberantly cutting him off: “It’s too f---ing loud.”

Later, Goodman waxed enthusiastic about getting direct feedback from a major conductor. “This kind of opportunity,” he said, “doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

The New World Symphony is one of the orchestra world’s success stories. It was born as a result of Thomas’s realization, at Tanglewood, of just how uncertain life was for young musicians. There must be a more productive way for them to spend their time, he thought, than working at Domino’s to pay for lessons between auditions. Eventually, he was introduced to the Miami-based owner of a cruise ship line, Ted Arison, and the dream became a reality. The New World Symphony is an educational institution, where musicians come for three-year fellowships, honing their skills as musicians, teachers and communicators while taking auditions for orchestra jobs. Fellowships are often cut short if a musician lands a permanent position before the three-year term is over.

The organization is a concrete expression of some of Thomas’s central interests. Working with young musicians sustains him, he says. And disseminating music through technology — videos or audio, the YouTube symphony or the Internet — has been a theme of his career. The New World Center, with its state-of-the-art technology, makes both of these things possible on a grand scale, archiving every performance and master class in the building, newly equipped to record and broadcast everything in 4K HD.

[Musicians in YouTube Symphony offer unsteady performance]

“Doing it here as opposed to doing it in New York has turned out to be an enormous advantage in many ways,” Thomas says. “In New York, it would be one of many different activities and gigs that the fellows would do. Here, it’s much more focused that they’re here to learn and accomplish, and they’re getting a lot of very individual coaching inspiration. [If] you go to a major music school, you get very intensely the perspective of that school and the teacher you’re working with. When you come here, within a couple of weeks, you might be working with people from the Russian tradition, the French tradition, the Cleveland tradition, the San Francisco tradition, the Viennese tradition.”

The organization has also become a showpiece of Miami’s cultural scene. Rehearsal is briefly interrupted by a visit from Donna Shalala, the U.S. representative of Florida’s 27th Congressional District, where the New World Symphony is based, though she’s better known as the secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration. She praises the fellows and the power of music, and calls Thomas “a treasure of Florida, and of the world.”

Yet Thomas seems to downplay his achievements. “My forte is prototypes,” he says. “Sustaining something and keeping it going is a different skill.” He says this regardless of the fact that he has been leading this organization, which he essentially invented, for 35 years.

Joshua Robison and Michael Tilson Thomas met in an orchestra in California — Robison on cello, Thomas on oboe. They were 11 and 12. They didn’t become a couple for another two decades, during which time Robison left music (his sister is the flutist Paula Robison) and won a national college title in gymnastics. They got together in 1976, married in 2014 and share a career as they share their lives — matter-of-factly and on a granular level.

Robison is in no small part responsible for helping to sustain and keep going — even to realize — the projects that Thomas launches. Robison is sometimes described as MTT’s manager, but if anything, his role is even more central and ubiquitous. Although Robison doesn’t have an official title at the New World Symphony or the San Francisco Symphony, he has taken an active role at both, planning functions and events, overseeing things like housing for fellows, figuring out how to implement ideas — such as the LGBTQ benefit gala with Audra McDonald that the orchestra organized on short notice in 2017 after canceling performances in North Carolina in response to the state’s anti-LGBTQ laws.

“I honestly don’t think it will make all that big a difference that I’m not there as much,” Thomas told the San Francisco Chronicle of his impending retirement from the orchestra; he will be back, after all, as conductor laureate. “I think, although not as many people realize it yet, it’s going to make an enormous difference that Josh is not there.”

Indeed, for all of Thomas’s extroverted public persona, one of his driving traits is an underlying loyalty, even consideration for others. Perhaps that is what’s at the bottom of his desire to communicate about music: a boyish eagerness to make contact, to share, to play.

“When he gives a soloist a cue,” Payne says, “he does it in a way that’s unusual. He looks at you like, ‘This is going to be the most beautiful thing ever. Show me what you can do, this welcoming, inviting way.’ I’ve worked with conductors who look at you with a stern expression as they bring you in. It’s sort of a challenge. With Michael, it’s an invitation.”

Or perhaps it’s just that Thomas can’t mask his sense of delight.

“The message of all this,” Thomas says, “is that we’re all defined as ourselves in some specific way. Maybe we’re even defending our identities. But in between us is this actual play space. And if people can get their minds and their spirits out into this play space, there’s just such amazing, adventurous and rewarding things that can happen. And that is what the arts teach you to do.

“It is possible,” he continues, “through the work of various artists to learn a lot of things about how to enter this play space. And it’s possible through the arts to experience things that you might be too scared to try out in your own life. This, from the beginning, has been what I cared about. I’ve been really lucky that I’ve been able to hold onto it.”

Read more about the 2019 Kennedy Center Honorees:

<email>anne.midgette@washpost.com</email>

[A friend to everyone: As ‘Sesame Street’ turns 50 and accepts the Kennedy Center Honors, its lessons in niceness are still as easy as 1-2-3]

[Linda Ronstadt never stopped singing]

[Sally Field’s relentless quest for respect: ‘The roles I cared about deeply I had to fight for’]

Anne Midgette

Washington, D.C.

Leon Fleisher, sublime pianist undaunted by mysterious hand malady, dies at 92

In classical music it was a year of building, deconstructing and, occasionally, rescuing

Michael Tilson Thomas was once the ‘bad boy of classical music.’ Now, at 74, he still conducts with childlike delight.

It’s my last review as The Post’s classical music critic. Here are my parting thoughts on the NSO.

National Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Tristan’ was lacking in D.C. They made up for it in New York.

A new leader and new sounds at the Met: Philip Glass’s striking ‘Akhnaten’

During ‘In War & Peace,’ Joyce DiDonato offers an unconvincing recital masked as theater

An ailing Jonathan Biss valiantly works his way through program of Beethoven sonatas

Maurice Sendak’s ‘Magic Flute’ brings storybook flair — and familiarity — to WNO

Whistles, rumbles, bleeps: New Icelandic music sounds like no string quartet you’ve ever heard