Leon Fleisher

A week after receiving one of this year's Kennedy Center Honors, Leon Fleisher performed two-hand piano music with inspiring confidence and expressive power at the Peabody Institute. Denied the use of his right hand for decades due to a neurological movement disorder, the pianist has made a gradual return to ambidexterity in recent years, thanks to Botox injections. As Fleisher is the first to point out, his condition has hardly been healed, just modified. So every occasion to hear him in double-barrel music-making is to be treasured.

Public works director dies George L. Winfield, director of Baltimore's Department of Public Works and a veteran city employee, died after suffering a stroke. Pianist Leon Fleisher honored Peabody Conservatory faculty member and renowned pianist Leon Fleisher was given the Kennedy Center Honors, one of the nation's highest awards for the arts. Long and short of utilities The Public Service Commission predicted shortages and rising electric rates unless partial re-regulation is imposed.

As he demonstrated last night in Meyerhoff Hall in an all-Mozart program, the second in the Baltimore Symphony's Summer MusicFest, Pinchas Zukerman has developed into a redoubtable conductor as well as a violinist whose playing combines sweetness with assertiveness, humanity with imagination and romantic intensity and feeling with classical impetus and delicacy.I don't remember a more inspirational performance of Mozart's Sonata in B-flat (K. 454) than that by Zukerman and his partner, pianist Jonathan Biss.

It is 40 years since Leon Fleisher's appointment as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Piano at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. The conservatory celebrates the anniversary this week with a three-day festival in Fleisher's honor.The festival concludes Wednesday evening with a black-tie, by- invitation-only dinner in the George Peabody Library. Actress Claire Bloom will act as mistress of ceremonies to titled nobility and musical luminaries who have come from all over the globe to honor Fleisher.

Filipino pianist Cecile Licad has sprained an ankle and will be unable to perform tonight's concert for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's Summer MusicFest, BSO officials announced Monday.Pianist Brian Ganz will take her place on the program, playing Schubert's "Trout" Quintet with guest musicians, including artistic director Pinchas Zukerman on viola.He also will accompany soprano Janice Chandler in the song "Die Forelle" ("The Trout"), whose tune is used in the quintet and gives the chamber work its name.

Some great music-making is going on in Annapolis these days. And nowhere was this more evident than at Maryland Hall Friday and Saturday, when Leon Fleisher led the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra in three challenging works that provided a short tour of the Austrian and German repertoire.The first stop was the classical period, represented by Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12, which Fleisher, the orchestra's former music director, conducted from the keyboard.Fleisher drew graceful string playing from his orchestra, then repeated those musical lines in his crisp, direct keyboard style.

A heavy rain is falling outside on West 57th Street when two men, both 67 years old, seat themselves at concert grands in the basement of the Steinway piano company in Manhattan. The cavernous room is filled with huge, nine-foot pianos which, with their lids up, resemble a fleet of sleek whales. They are old friends, these two great pianists and the Steinway whales.It's been more than 50 years since Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher began coming to "The Basement," and it is as familiar to them as the ivory keys beneath their fingers.

NEW YORK -- Leon Fleisher has been understandably reluctant to describe his recent performances of a Mozart piano concerto as a comeback. The injury that disabled his right hand for more than 30 years is still a problem, though he has been undergoing some promising rehabilitation.Last year he felt encouraged enough to perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 in A. On Saturday night he played the work with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Andre Previn at Carnegie Hall, where in 1944 at the age of 16 he made his stunning debut.

While perusal of William Bolcom's score for "Gaea" suggests that it is much more than a compositional stunt, there's a sense in which every left-handed work is just that.The piano's left hand repertory came into existence for one reason -- pianist-composers love to show off. The way Brahms viewed Bach's unfathomably great Chaconne for solo violin is a classic example of such a mind-set."On a single staff, for a tiny instrument, the man has written a whole world of the most profound ideas and powerful emotions," he told Clara Schumann.

Celebrate city life"City Life Alive," a monthlong celebration of city life and the opening of the Morton K. Blaustein City Life Exhibition Center, begins 9 a.m. Saturday with the City Life Stroll, a public procession from the Inner Harbor to the new museum at 33 S. Front St. The Blaustein Center is the latest addition to the Baltimore City Life Museums, which consist of seven historic sites in and around downtown Baltimore. Other center activities planned for this weekend include the City Life Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and a lecture on Baltimore's history at 2 p.m. Sunday.

THEATER 'Broadway: Three Generations' Actress Shirley Jones hosts this three-act evening of abridged concert performances of Girl Crazy, Bye Bye Birdie and Side Show. The show tracks the development of the Broadway musical over three generations of composers. See Broadway: Three Generations at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St. N.W., Washington, today through Sunday. Performances vary. Tickets cost $25-$90. Go to kennedy-center.org. Mary Carole McCauley Poet Joy Harjo Enjoy a family-focused afternoon of poetry and nature with Native American poet Joy Harjo.

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.

The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, video game theme music and Leon Fleisher -- not exactly your typical Baltimore Symphony Orchestra summer season. On the classical side of the eclectic 2008 lineup, the BSO will celebrate the 80th birthday of Fleisher, one of the country's most gifted and respected musicians, with an all-Mozart program that will showcase both his pianistic and conducting skills. He'll lead the orchestra in Symphony No. 35 and No. 40 and, from the keyboard, Piano Concerto No. 12. Performances are July 24 at the Music Center at Strathmore and July 25 at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

A week after receiving one of this year's Kennedy Center Honors, Leon Fleisher performed two-hand piano music with inspiring confidence and expressive power at the Peabody Institute. Denied the use of his right hand for decades due to a neurological movement disorder, the pianist has made a gradual return to ambidexterity in recent years, thanks to Botox injections. As Fleisher is the first to point out, his condition has hardly been healed, just modified. So every occasion to hear him in double-barrel music-making is to be treasured.

Public works director dies George L. Winfield, director of Baltimore's Department of Public Works and a veteran city employee, died after suffering a stroke. Pianist Leon Fleisher honored Peabody Conservatory faculty member and renowned pianist Leon Fleisher was given the Kennedy Center Honors, one of the nation's highest awards for the arts. Long and short of utilities The Public Service Commission predicted shortages and rising electric rates unless partial re-regulation is imposed.

ART LOW COUNTRY ART / / 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday. Zenith Gallery, 413 7th St. N.W., Washington. Free. 202-783-2963 or zenithgallery.com. ....................... Like the famed Gee's Bend, Ala., quilts that were on view this year at the Walters Art Museum, the distinctive art of South Carolina's Gullah culture comes from slave descendants whose geographical isolation and strong community ties helped to keep their African cultural heritage largely intact over the generations.

Leon Fleisher, the eminent Baltimore-based pianist, is one of five artists who will receive the 2007 Kennedy Center Honors in December. The typically wide-ranging list also includes comic actor and writer Steve Martin, singer Diana Ross, film director Martin Scorsese and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. This is the 30th presentation of the Kennedy Center Honors. The recipients will be saluted in a gala attended by President Bush and the first lady, and held at the center's opera house Dec. 2. The show will be taped for nationwide broadcast Dec. 26 on CBS. "I'm very moved by this award," Fleisher said yesterday from his Roland Park home.

Headlines proclaiming Leon Fleisher as a teenage piano prodigy; applause rocking the theater; and a sepia record jacket announcing the pianist teaming with conductor George Szell on Mozart's 25th Piano Concerto -- these triumphal sounds and images tumble off the screen at the start of Nathaniel Kahn's Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story. But they swiftly give way to an empty Meyerhoff Symphony Hall with a vacant piano center-stage, as Fleisher speaks of the terrible time in 1964 when he was preparing for the most important tour of his life and he discovered that he couldn't use the fourth and fifth fingers on his right hand.

Baltimore entered the Oscar lists on Tuesday in a big way in a brief film. Two Hands, nominated for best short documentary, tells the story of revered classical pianist and Baltimorean Leon Fleisher, who since 1964 has waged a fight against the neurological disorder dystonia, which for decades deprived him the use of his right hand. "It's totally a Baltimore story," says producer Susan Rose Behr, noting that the action includes stops at the Peabody Conservatory and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, and the cast includes Fleisher's Johns Hopkins Hospital neurologist Dr. Daniel Drachman (the son-in-law of the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky)

The wonder that is Leon Fleisher chalks up yet another remarkable achievement with yesterday's release of what is only his second recording of two-hand piano music in more than four decades. Leon Fleisher: The Journey, from Vanguard Classics, offers renewed evidence that, at 78, the Baltimore-based keyboard artist keeps pushing back the twilight of his career to enjoy another gratifying day in the sun. Denied the full use of his right hand in 1964 due to a neurological disorder called dystonia, Fleisher has in recent years returned to ambidexterity, thanks to injections of Botox.