Norma Fisher was set for a sparkling career as a pianist, until ill health left her unable to perform. Instead she became an eminent professor. But now, recordings of her concerts have been released, decades after they were made.
May 31, 2018 10:32
ByJessica Duchen, Jessica Duchen
Most musicians who become legends in their own lifetimes do not have to wait until the age of 78 for their debut recording. But Norma Fisher, one of the UK’s best-loved piano professors, has just seen the release of her first CD — a situation all the more amazing as she has not given a concert in years.
In the 1990s Fisher’s performing career was destroyed by an ailment which made her the muscles of her right arm go into spasm; after a determined but ultimately fruitless quest for a cure, she elected to devote herself to teaching. Now, thanks to the efforts of the record producer Tomoyuki Sawado of Sonetto Classics, some of her remarkable performances recorded by the BBC in the 1970s are at last being issued on disc. The first volume includes music by Brahms and Scriabin.
“I’m delighted because I’ve thought for such a long time about all those recordings rotting in the archives,” Fisher smiles. “It’s been one heck of a journey with the BBC – and we’re just starting! When I listen to them I feel very joyful and grateful, and I’m thrilled for my kids and grandchildren that what I do will not die a death.”
Fisher was born into a religious Jewish family in Shepherd’s Bush in 1940; her mother was from Poland, near Warsaw, and her father from Vilnius, Lithuania. The small Norma’s musical talent showed early and she was taken out of school to concentrate on the piano. “I auditioned for the Guildhall School of Music as a junior exhibitioner, aged 11,” she says, “so I finished at 14 and was invited to play the Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in the final concert. Of course I was very happy — until I heard it would be on a Friday night.”
She had never even practised on Shabbat, let alone given a performance. “I remember saying to Norman del Mar, the conductor, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m a religious Jewess and there’s no way my parents would ever let me do this.’ And he said: ‘Norma, if you’re going to have the career you should have, it has to be music über alles…’” Eventually her mother took her part and talked her father round. “He said: ‘OK, I’ll try and understand – but I don’t want to see her go out’.”
Then she had to give the concert itself in full awareness that she was transgressing the principles of her religion. “It was a nightmare,” Fisher recalls. “I was terrified! I stepped onto the platform and I honestly thought I was going to be struck by a thunderbolt.”
Happily, she wasn’t. But the demands of musical studies continued to prove at odds with Orthodox Judaism. “My teacher, Ilona Kabos, was horrified by the whole thing,” Fisher says. Kabos was a powerful figure who had studied in her native Budapest with a former pupil of Franz Liszt. Fisher imitates Kabos’s accent: “‘Darrlingk, you are missing 52 days a year, ve can’t have zat!’ She was half Jewish herself, but totally anti-religion and she wouldn’t meet my parents.”
By the age of 15 Fisher had moved out of the family home to reclaim her Saturdays for practising. But the issue would not go away. “My first Prom was on a Saturday night,” she says. “It was summer, so Shabbat wasn’t out. My parents obviously had to be there. They walked all the way to the Royal Albert Hall.”
Fisher’s star was in the ascendant. She won second prize in the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition in 1961 and shared the piano prize with Vladimir Ashkenazy at the 1963 Harriet Cohen International Music Awards— but no recording contract ever materialised. Fortunately, the BBC stepped up and from the age of 17 she gave frequent concerts under its auspices. She took part in its Scriabin centenary project in 1972, one of several distinguished pianists who between them performed the Russian composer’s complete solo piano music.
The Scriabin recordings on the new CD are from that series. Fisher says she would love to feature the Sonata No.5 on a future release, but has found, to her horror, that on her only copy of the recording the final bars are missing. “If anyone, anywhere, has a copy of this recital that includes those last bars, please let me know!” she appeals.
Everything changed when she started to suffer from something called focal dystonia. Fisher explains that it is a neurological condition affecting the part of the brain that controls muscle function, causing them to go into spasm. A genetic mutation makes the condition rife among Ashkenazi Jews; Fisher points to other distinguished Jewish pianists who have suffered from it, including Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman.
For a long time, frustratingly, it was put down to stress — an all too common reaction to musicians’ physical ailments. “When I first went to a clinic, I met other patients who said, ‘Ah, you’ve come to join the ‘Pull Yourself Together club’,” she says.
“I fought it for a long time. I was determined, I don’t go down easily and I tried everything. But eventually I decided I must stop hoping it would come right. After all, in the general scheme of things I’ve got off lightly. It’s not painful, it’s not life threatening, it’s just a bloody nuisance! I decided to concentrate totally on the teaching, which of course I adore anyway. I wouldn’t want it otherwise.”
Fisher started the London Master Classes in 1988, inviting many respected colleagues to coach advanced students and young professionals — the course is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary — and she has been a professor at both the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the Royal College of Music in London. Her pupils have included such musicians as Murray McLachlan, now head of piano at Chetham’s School of Music; the starry young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov; and Chiyan Wong, a prize winner at the Salzburg Mozarteum.
“People ask me, ‘Don’t you miss the playing?’ and I have to say, quite honestly, no,” she says. “I’ve been to hell and back, but I’ve learned so much from it. I work with my students as if I were working with myself. They play for me. There can’t be a greater joy than that.”
Norma Fisher at the BBC, Vol.1 is out now on Sonetto Classics
