Leon Fleisher

Yesterday's Live section listed the wrong phone number for information on the Leon Fleisher concert at Shriver Hall on Sunday at 7: 30 p.m. The correct number is (410) 516-7164.The Sun regrets the errors.Piano great and local favorite Leon Fleisher will be performing at Johns Hopkins University's Shriver Hall this Sunday.In the program are works by Bach, Takacs, Sessions, Kirchner, ** Saxton, Lipatti, Hasse, Blumenfeld and Godowsky.The concert is Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at Shriver Hall at Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St. Tickets are $21-$25 general admission; $11-$13 students.

Weekends are wonderfully musical around here, offering, more often than not, too many events for any one listener to take in, without benefit of helicopter or cloning. The choices I made last weekend paid handsome dividends. On Saturday night at the Gordon Center, which boasts some of the most satisfying acoustics around, the Concert Artists of Baltimore, led by Edward Polochick, delivered a typically diverse program in typically dynamic fashion. When it comes to our local professional orchestras, the Baltimore Symphony rightly holds pride of place; it's one of America's finest, after all. To my ears, the next ensemble in any Baltimore-area ranking would have to be Concert Artists, which, more often than not, plays way beyond its pay scale and produces a sound much richer than its size would suggest.

In the years since 1965, when a mysterious hand ailment destroyed his two-handed piano career, Leon Fleisher has played almost all the important left-handed concertos for piano and orchestra. Not until Monday night, however, had Fleisher given a left-handed solo recital. That recital in Charleston, S.C., will be followed Saturday night by one in the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater -- a benefit for the Theater Chamber Players, of which Fleisher is music director.Playing a recital is much tougher than a concerto, Fleisher says.

Jonathan Biss, the young pianist who makes his Carnegie Hall recital debut on Friday and will repeat the program at the slightly more modest Shriver Hall on Sunday, could easily have become a violinist. But as he tells it on the bio page of his website, "the highlight of his career as a violinist took place when he was a fetus. " A few months before his birth in Indiana in 1980, Biss writes, "he performed, prenatally, the Mozart A major Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall, with the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Lorin Maazel.

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.

When Edward Polochick described Leon Fleisher, his onetime teacher, as "in my book, the greatest musician alive today," he wasn't being obsequious. Classical musicians in Baltimore adore Fleisher as baseball fans adore Cal Ripken, and Sunday's "Beethoven Spectacular," in celebration of the 15th anniversary of Polochick's Concert Artists of Baltimore ensemble, was a testament to Fleisher's legacy as pianist, teacher, musical philosopher and cultural force....

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.

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.

The music of Beethoven invariably suggests struggle, determination and, more often than not, triumph. It's a good match for pianist Leon Fleisher, whose life has had a large share of all three conditions. Next weekend, he is slated to play Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 -- the one nicknamed Emperor -- for the first time in four decades. The performance, with the Concert Artists of Baltimore, will certainly involve struggle and determination. And triumph? "There ain't no guarantees," says Fleisher, 73, with a smile.

Under the best of circumstances, the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Johannes Brahms can be a scary prospect for a soloist. The outer movements abound in two-fisted, blood-and-guts action; the rapt Adagio in between calls for an exceptionally poetic touch. Ultimately, what the concerto demands from the pianist is total, unconditional victory. So why is Leon Fleisher, who hasn't enjoyed full, free use of his right hand for almost 40 years, attempting such a task in Baltimore this week? "It's interesting and it's fun," he says.

Leon Fleisher drolly dubs the program "duets for pets" — a concert to benefit Baltimore Animal and Rescue Care Shelter Inc. The celebrated pianist will be joined by his wife, Katherine Jacobson, an accomplished keyboard artist in her own right, for the June 4 fundraiser at the Peabody Institute. Both are on the faculty there, Fleisher for more than 50 years. The two musicians are longtime supporters of BARCS. "We're very impressed with the staff and their deep commitment to giving animals a chance at a new lease on life," Jacobson says.

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.

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.

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.