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Posted on Wed., April 19, 2006

Legendary pianist on Steinway Society lineup

By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News

When the Steinway Society's 2006-07 season begins in October at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, you will need a creative excuse not to attend because the society has snared Leon Fleisher, one of the classical music world's legendary players, and best stories, as its opening act.

How has it engaged the famous Fleisher to perform in a concert hall with fewer than 400 seats? "It might just be a matter of our having been too naive to think it's impossible,'' says Ellen Tryba Chen, who chairs the society's artistic committee and has pursued the 77-year-old Fleisher for the past six months.

He will headline a season that also will include such performers as Sa Chen, only in her mid-20s and regarded as one of the top pianists to emerge in the past few years from China (a nation filled with pianists), and Kevin Kenner, an American-born player now teaching at London's Royal College of Music, who wowed the audience at Trianon with his Chopin a year ago and is returning for an encore performance.

The best piano recital series in the Bay Area keeps getting better. Here's the season:

· Oct. 7-8: Fleisher. Born in San Francisco in 1928, the son of a hat maker, Fleisher made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony at age 14 in 1942 and with the New York Philharmonic at age 16 in 1944. His career sailed in the '50s: His recordings of the Brahms concertos with conductor George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra still are definitive for many listeners.

But in 1964, when he was at the height of his powers, the fingers of his right hand began seizing up. He suffered from a neurological disorder that forced him into teaching and conducting - and turned him, as a pianist, into a specialist, performing the limited repertory composed for left hand alone.

That has changed the past few years as a cure (botox injections, believe it or not) emerged for Fleisher's condition, known as focal dystonia. In 2004, he issued his first two-handed piano recording in 40 years; it was one of the year's big music stories.
Once again active as a 10-fingered recitalist, he is coming to San Jose to perform Stravinsky, Mozart and (with pianist Katherine Jacobson, who also happens to be his wife ) "four-hand'' works by Schubert and Ravel.

· Oct. 29: Sa Chen. Fou Ts'Ong, a revered piano teacher and music guru in China, has dubbed Lang Lang, Yundi Li and Chen as the top three Chinese virtuoso pianists of our day. Last June, at age 25, Chen finished third in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas; two representatives of the Bay Area's Steinway Society (Ellen Tryba Chen and Emily Lorraine) attended and came away very impressed.

"She plays with loads of love, and that's what I look for,'' says Ellen Tryba Chen. "I had goose bumps. Meltingly beautiful.'' Sa Chen will perform Mozart, Chopin, Albeniz and Liszt at Trianon.

· Nov. 12: Sara Davis Buechner. The Steinway season often includes a foray into American popular song; along that line, Buechner's program is titled "The Roaring Twenties in Sight and Sound!''

"The first half will be music of the '20s, and it just sounds delightful,'' Chen says. "There will be novelty pieces and rags,'' including "Clothesline Ballet,'' composed by Fats Waller, and "110th Street Rumba.''

In the concert's second half, Buechner will accompany three silent cartoons from the '20s: "Koko's Earth Control,'' "Felix in Hollywood'' and a Keystone Cops comedy still to be determined.

· Feb. 11: Kevin Kenner. Winner of the 1990 International Chopin Competition, Kenner garnered such a positive response from last year's Steinway audience that Chen decided to bring him back. She has been listening to some of his recordings, and they "feed my soul,'' she says.

"His playing is on such an elevated and, at the same time, deep level. My background is Polish, and his mazurkas are more Polish than Polish. Here's this American who just gets it.''

Kenner will perform Beethoven, Schumann, Paderewski and Chopin.

· March 4: Pola Baytelman. Born in Santiago, Chile, and known for her interpretations of Latin American works, she will perform Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, Schumann and others. Chen calls her playing "stunning and highly nuanced. She's just a master of rubato and color and inflection.''

· March 25: Jonathan Bass. Local pianists have been filing requests for Steinway to feature this former faculty member at San Jose State University. Chen has listened lately to one of his CDs, of Bach transcriptions and Chopin, and "was just transfixed. You have to sit down and put on the headphones and listen.'' He will perform Bach, Chopin, Scriabin and Barber.

· April 29, 2007: Nikolai Demidenko. Living in Singapore in the late '90s, Chen heard him play Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto with the Singapore Symphony ( George Cleve, the old San Jose Symphony's longtime conductor, happened to be on the podium ) "and it was the most astoundingly passionate Rach 3 I have ever heard in my life.'' Demidenko's program will include Bach, a Liszt transcription of Bach, and Schumann.

· May 13, 2007: Young Artists. This annual event features winners of regional and international competitions. At least one will be from among the winners of the Young Pianist's Beethoven Competition, held earlier this month at San Jose State University and sponsored by the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State and the American Beethoven Society.

"This year, the standard was almost unbelievably high,'' says Chen, who attended and looks forward to this youthful cap to the 2006-07 season.

Bay Area Steinway Society
2006-2007

Where: Le Petit Trianon, 72 N. Fifth St., San Jose

When: Oct. 7 to May 13, 2007

Subscriptions: (available now) $150-$260 for the full eight-concert series ($140-$220 for seniors, $120-$150 for students); $98-$170 for four concerts ($85-$160 for seniors, $75-$110 for students). Subscribers receive priority seating and 20 percent off additional single tickets.

To order subscriptions: phone (408) 286-2600, extension 23; fax (408) 295-6518

Single tickets: (available Aug. 1) $30-$65 ($25-$60 for seniors, $20-$55 for students)

Information: (408) 295-6500; after May 1, www.steinwaythebayarea.com