Commensurate
Recently, during a long drive, I listened to Yo-Yo Ma being interviewed on Desert Island Discs. He speaks of growing up with a recording of Leon Fleisher playing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. Anyone who has heard that recording will know what an impact it makes. Only upon watching Nathaniel Kahn’s fifteen-minute video portrait Leon Fleischer – Two Hands did I discover that the great pianist spent much of his life, on account of a subtle neurological condition, with a substantially incapacitated right hand. The drama that represents for a pianist is overwhelming; the lucidity and grace with which he dealt with it are inspiring. Fleisher remarks: ‘There was a lot of despair and misery and unhappiness. But there were commensurate ecstasies. And you can’t really expect to have one without the other.’ On the whole, he says, he wouldn’t have changed anything in the way his life turned out. In this there is a parable – worth watching, and thinking about.
