Once, when serving as a judge in the International Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, one of the contestants played a Prokofiev Toccata faster and louder than anyone else. Fleisher turned to a fellow judge, and remarked: “Why does he hate his mother?”
In an open letter in the Washington Post, “My White House Dilemma,” he
protested the Bush White House’s policies regarding the Iraq War, the
torture of prisoners, and other decisions that he said amounted to a
“systematic shredding of our nation’s Constitution [that] have left us
weak and shamed at home and in the world.” He ended up attending the
event wearing a peace symbol and a purple ribbon.
https://www.juancole.com/2020/08/fleisher-reinvented-inspired.html