PIANIST DICHTER RETURNS---CAUTIOUSLY
                    It's All About the Right Hand  
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Feb. 18-25, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 67
            STANFORD---Pianist Misha Dichter is on the comeback trail of recitals. If he’s still well short of the summits he reached so easily early on, he has still made amazing strides from a hand injury that kept him out for close to three years.
            His story is as much about medicine as about pianism. The congenial whiz from L.A. who went to study with the legegndary Rosina Lhévinne at Juilliard and then won silver in the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition, he fashioned an extraordinary performing career with a heavy 19th-century-music emphasis for four decades. He came down with hereditary Dupuytren’s Disease laming his hand, which has been laboriously worked on and sufficiently cured to enable cautious resumption of a concert career. 
            Now 64, the pianist who could pass for a matinee idol a generation younger worked gingerly through a romantic recital program at Stanford University’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium on Feb. 17, offering a modicum of fireworks at the very end, belatedly in full command of the material.
            When I interviewed Dichter many years ago, he told me that the most important single quality for a concert career in piano was a “singing tone”---i.e., playing the instrument very lyrically. The big disappointment in this comeback appearance was that the singing tone once so eloquent in his play had not yet resurfaced. Much of it was dogged plugging. Let’s get it right, let’s get through it, let’s see if the hand behaves.
            For examples on how to proceed longer-term, Dichter can look to both Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman, both of whom struggled with hand ailments in mid-career (all three of them with right-hand problems), both turning then to teaching pianists. However Fleisher, now in his 70s, has returned to a concert life. All three sustained serious injury, in large measure because of heavy practice schedules (Dichter’s: up to 12 hours per day), and the resultant stress put on the carpal tunnel and related forearm, wrist and hand components.
            I kept looking for Dichter’s old faculty at nuance and seductive touch in this workaday Central-European program at Stanford, in vain. The late Schubert sonata (A Minor,  D. 784) of the kind previously he could convert into a siren song of the Lorelei came out perfunctory. The piece does not lack for drama, starting with the slow, heavy bass-register chords recurring like Gothic-cathedral bells. And both the late Beethoven bagatelles and the early Brahms Ballades (Op. 10) were mechanical in execution.
            Dichter fortunately warmed to the all-Hungarian second half of the program. The stark harmonies of Béla Bartók’s “15 Peasant Songs” of 1914-18 had a welcome untamed quality, culminating with an elaborate theme-and-variations Ballade at the very center containing much more Bartók than peasant flavor.
            And his Liszt was expressive and fiery, bringing out the overblown filigree for which the composer was famous. These spanned “Funérailles” with its growling bass chords, the harmonically advanced “Funeral Gondola” written close to the  75th birthday (!), and Liszt’s ultra-flamboyant free variations on the patriotic “Rakoczy March,” which more than a century later would still set hearts pounding and Budapest citizenry marching in downtown protests. That brought Dichter's cool audience emphatically to life, drawing out three encores: Debussy’s “Claire de lune,” a Scriabin Etude in F Sharp Major and, in response to an unorthodox shouted audience  request ("Chopin before I die!"), a subtle Mazurka in A Minor. 
            Misha Dichter, piano. At Stanford Feb. 17, then Feb. 20 in Sacramento. For info on the former, go online; info on the latter, online.

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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