E-Mail This Article to a Friend On the right track Leon Fleisher returns with both hands BY DAVID WEININGER

Our image of Leon Fleisher is frozen in time. In 1964, at the height of his career, the pianist suffered a crippling injury to his right hand that would cut him off from the piano literature, vast portions of which he was already an acknowledged master at age 37. Between then and now, he remained active in a limited way, becoming a sought-after teacher. But to think of him as perhaps the greatest American pianist of his generation is, by necessity, to remember what was.

Next week, Fleisher comes to Boston for his first two-handed recital here in longer than most of us can remember. It is less a triumphant comeback than the latest stage in a long, still-unfolding journey to pick up, more or less, where he left off 40 years ago.

If you want to be great, having a great teacher doesn’t hurt. Fleisher’s was one of the best: Artur Schnabel, with whom he studied for 10 years. Another early mentor was Pierre Monteux, who was conducting in the young pianist’s native San Francisco and who called Fleisher "the pianistic find of the century." In 1952, he became the first American to win Belgium’s prestigious Queen Elizabeth Competition in front of a jury that included Rudolf Firkusny and Artur Rubinstein. High-profile tours and recordings duly followed.

Fleisher’s most important collaborators in his heyday were the Cleveland Orchestra and its demanding, authoritarian conductor, George Szell. Conductor and pianist seemed a perfect fit: both had impeccable technique and were notoriously unfussy in their approach to the classics. So interlinked were their names that it became common to refer to their efforts as "Fleisher/Szell." Their recordings of the Beethoven concertos have become the standard by which other "classical" renderings of the work have been measured. The two Brahms concertos are models of playing that’s commanding but also perfectly proportioned. (A Tanglewood broadcast of No. 2 from 1962, with the BSO under Monteux, shows a fierier and more intense side of his personality.)

Yet it’s instructive to remember that his repertoire exceeded the narrow confines of 19th-century Vienna. The two-CD set devoted to him in Philips’s "Great Pianists of the 20th Century" series includes a cohesive and well-argued traversal of the Liszt B-minor Sonata as well as supple, sparkling performances of the Copland Sonata and Ned Rorem’s Three Barcarolles. And the Fleisher/Szell rendering of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini makes even this tired warhorse sound fresh and inventive.

And then, disaster. He suffered from dystonia, a neurological condition that forces the muscles of certain parts of the body to constrict. Eventually he regrouped, redoubling his teaching efforts and learning to conduct. He came slowly to the left-hand literature, eventually recording its own canonical works. But he could never bring himself to take up the mantle of being a "lefty." "There are over 1000 pieces for the left hand alone," he told an interviewer last year, "and most of them are crap. . . . But there is one recital’s worth, maybe two recitals’ worth, that is really good."

The breakthrough came in 1995, when he discovered a massage therapy called rolfing and the chemical botox. The latter, better known for its role in erasing the effects of aging, turned out to be the magic bullet that allowed him to use his right hand again. Slowly he returned to the two-hand world — some chamber music, Mozart concertos. Last October, he played his first Carnegie Hall recital since 1947. Reviewing the concert, Bernard Holland of the New York Times wrote, "It is hard to say whether 30-odd years of dormancy has robbed us of music making at this level or whether a quiet period of germination has resulted in the kind of quality heard here."

It is, of course, impossible to know who Leon Fleisher would be now if fate had not dealt so harshly with him. But next Thursday’s recital can do something more important: introduce us to the artist he is now. He’ll mix the left-hand and two-handed repertoire, beginning with Egon Petri’s arrangement of the "Schafe können sicher weiden" ("Sheep May Safely Graze") aria from Bach’s Cantata No. 208 and following with a suite of works by American composers (Sessions, Perle, Kirchner). As if to comment on the epic nature of the route he’s traveled, he’ll devote the second half of his recital to one of music’s great journeys — Schubert’s posthumous B-flat major Sonata D.960.

Leon Fleisher performs next Thursday, May 20, at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Tickets are $41 to $51; call (617) 482-6661.