Leon Fleisher will celebrate his 80th birthday this week doing two of his favorite things - playing the piano and conducting. Joining him onstage for an all-Mozart program will be the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which shares with Fleisher a long, strong history.
"It's quite fitting that on the very day of my birthday [Wednesday], I have two rehearsals with the orchestra," he says. "It's a kind of homecoming."
Such an occasion makes a perfect time for reminiscing and taking stock. Settling into a leather couch opposite two grand pianos in a high-ceilinged salon of his handsome Roland Park home on a recent Sunday morning, Fleisher faces the inevitable question of how he feels about approaching his octogenarian milestone.
"Terrible," he says. But his eyes start laughing before he does. "Thank God I'm still ambulatory," he adds with a smile.
Fleisher is much more than ambulatory, of course.
He's also pianistically ambidextrous these days, a big deal for a brilliant artist who lost the use of his right hand in 1965 and only regained it - to a limited degree - about 10 years ago.
That's when the neurological condition that affected Fleisher's hand, focal dystonia, was treated with botox injections, which can alleviate the condition enough for some two-hand playing. It was during the decades when he was limited to left-hand repertoire that Fleisher developed a second career as a conductor.
From 1973 to 1978, Fleisher was on the BSO roster, engaged by music director Sergiu Comissiona initially as associate conductor, then resident conductor. For a dozen years, starting in 1970, Fleisher also served as music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, where he developed "whatever chops I have as a conductor."
The impressive thing about Fleisher's work on the BSO podium in the '70s wasn't necessarily his baton technique. "The hands did the job well enough," says principal bassoonist Phillip Kolker, who joined the BSO in 1972. "But it was the musical ideas he brought. They were so strong and so very convincing."
Fleisher's last BSO conducting gig was in 1982, although he has appeared many times since as piano soloist.
But that doesn't even begin to tell the story of why, as Jane Marvine, the BSO's English horn player, puts it, "There is an incredible bond between Leon and the orchestra."
