Leon and Katherine Jacobson Fleisher
Katherine Jacobson Fleisher
Katherine Jacobson Fleisher’s international performing career as a soloist, duo pianist and chamber musician has received critical acclaim. Her recent Carnegie Hall debut, with piano partner Leon Fleisher was praised by The New York Times for its “abundant musicality and refined technique.”
Leading orchestras with which she has performed include the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Gulbenkian Orchestra of Portugal, and the Orchestre National d’Ile de France. This season she will concertize in Japan, Germany, and France, as well as the United States.
Ms. Jacobson Fleisher gave the North American premiere of the Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra by the late Greek Cypriot composer Phanos Dymiotis (Leon Fleisher, conducting). Emphasizing the importance of the music of our own time, she has commissioned works by contemporary women composers such as Dina Koston and Luna Pearl Woolf, most recently performing chamber music of Dina Koston in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.
Her major musical influence was Leon Fleisher, with whom she worked at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. At the Cleveland Institute of Music, she received her Master of Music degree studying with the renowned duo piano team of Vronsky and Babin. Prior to attending the Cleveland Institute of Music, Ms. Jacobson Fleisher graduated from St. Olaf College, receiving her Bachelor of Music degree.
The artist, along with her former duo piano partner, won first prize in the National Piano Ensemble Competition. (U.S.A., 1977) Ms. Jacobson Fleisher currently directs the piano ensemble program at the Peabody Conservatory.
Katherine Jacobson Fleisher now performs solo and duo piano concerts worldwide with her husband, pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher.
Leon Fleisher
"It's a state of grace, it's a state of ecstasy. It's wonderful. How else can I describe it? There is another level of awareness of the keys, the way I'm holding my hand, the sense of contact."
Renowned pianist, conductor and teacher Leon Fleisher, now in his sixth decade before the public, started piano lessons in his native San Francisco at age four, and gave his first recital at eight. A year later he began studying with the great German pianist Artur Schnabel, and by 16, in 1944, made his debut with the New York Philharmonic. He was the first American to win the prestigious Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition, in 1952. Fleisher's career was on a smooth upward trajectory for the next dozen years: he concertized all over the world with every major orchestra and conductor, gave recitals everywhere, and made numerous touchstone recordings with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra of the piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, as well as pieces by Grieg, Schumann, and Rachmaninov (all available on CD).
Fleisher was suddenly struck silent when two fingers of his right hand became immobile in 1965. Undergoing many treatments that gave only temporary relief, he was forced to "retire" when only 37 years old. This was the defining moment in his career until recently, when he began treatments that finally helped relieve the neurological affliction known as focal dystonia that had been plaguing him for more than half his life.
Overcoming decades of seemingly insurmountable challenges, Fleisher has been playing with both hands again for the last several seasons, and recently made his first two-hand recording in 40 years: the critically acclaimed Two Hands. Its repertoire ranges from J.S. Bach and Domenico Scarlatti via Chopin and Debussy to Franz Schubert's monumental final Piano Sonata in B flat Major [Vanguard Classics]. The same title was given to a biographical film by Nathaniel Kahn nominated for Best Documentary Short at the 2006 Academy Awards. In May 2007, his recording of the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Emerson Quartet [Deutsche Grammophon] was released to rave reviews, and his recital and concerto appearances in recent years have re-affirmed his place among the legendary pianists and musicians of our time.
Forthcoming engagements include: his annual appearances at Carnegie Hall; the Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto with the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony and the NHK Symphony in Japan; a recital in Essen (Germany), Brussels (Belgium) and in the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), among many others.
In the nearly 40 years since Leon Fleisher's keyboard career was so suddenly curtailed, he has followed two parallel careers - as conductor and teacher - while learning to play the extensive but limiting repertoire of compositions for piano left-hand. Mr. Fleisher's reputation as a conductor was quickly established when he founded the Theatre Chamber Players at the Kennedy Center in 1967 and became Music Director of the Annapolis Symphony in 1970. He made his New York conducting debut at the 1970 Mostly Mozart Festival and in 1973 became Associate Conductor of the Baltimore Symphony. He has appeared as guest conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Symphony Orchestras of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Detroit, among others. He also had a regular association with the New Japan Philharmonic as its Principal Guest Conductor, leading the orchestra in a series of concerts each season, as well as with the Chamber Music Orchestra of Europe and the Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Teaching has been a crucially important element in Leon Fleisher's life. As a revered pedagogue, he has held the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at the Peabody Conservatory of Music since 1959, and also serves on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. From 1986-97 he was Artistic Director of the Tanglewood Music Center. His teaching activities at the Aspen, Lucerne, Ravinia and Verbier festivals, among others, have brought him in contact with students from all over the world. He has also given master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Paris Conservatory, the Ravel Academy at St. Jean de Luz, the Reina Sofia School in Madrid, the Mishkenot in Jerusalem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Fleisher received the 2007 Kennedy Center Honors at the 30th annual celebration of the arts in December where he was recognized as 'a consummate musician whose career is a testament to the life-affirming power of art.' The 2007 World Piano Pedagogy Conference was dedicated to Fleisher, celebrating him as 'one of the giants of classical music.' In 2005, Fleisher was honored by the French government and was named to the rank of Commander in the French Order of Arts and Letters, the highest rank of its kind. He and his wife-Katherine Jacobson-Fleisher-have opened their private life by regularly playing duos together for audiences around the world.
* "Suddenly I realized that the most important thing in my life wasn't playing with my two hands: it was music," says the fifth-generation Beethoven pupil. His teacher, Schnabel, who left Germany for the United States in 1939, had been a pupil of Polish keyboard giant and pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky, who was a pupil of Carl Czerny, who studied with Ludwig van Beethoven. "Passion, not technique, is what I learned from Schnabel," Fleisher has said.
* "In order to be able to make it across these last thirty or forty years, I've had to somehow de-emphasize the number of hands or the number of fingers and kind of go back to the concept of music as music—whether it be a single line for a wind instrument or a single line for one hand, or one hand sounding like two hands. In other words, the instrumentation becomes unimportant and it's the substance and the content that takes over. It seems less momentous in a sense—but more, an extension and a continuation. In a way, that denies, whatever glory and exaltation there is in this whole event—but perhaps that best describes what this is, Two Hands.
Biographical information supplied by artists' management.