There is a level of performance below which concerts at Carnegie Hall never fall, if the concert is presented under the official auspices of Carnegie (as almost all the ones I attend are). You are guaranteed a high quality of musicianship, relative to the rest of the amateur and professional musical world: in short, the performers always know how to play their instruments well. But this alone, as I learned last week, is not enough to insure a good concert.
The May 15 performance I heard in Stern Hall featured five well-known musicians—Leonidas Kavakos and Gil Shaham on violin, Antoine Tamestit on viola, and Pablo Ferrandez and Alisa Weilerstein on cello—playing Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major. That sentence alone should clue you in to what went wrong, though I myself failed to pick up the clues in advance. Number One is that chamber music really shouldn’t be played in a hall as large as Carnegie’s largest, which seats as many as 2,790 people in its multiple tiers. Number Two is that these thrown-together All-Star teams generally fail to collaborate as well as less famous but more steadily cohesive chamber groups do. And Number Three is that Schubert’s great quintet, perhaps more than any other piece of music, requires that kind of long-term and heartfelt collaboration.
I was able to do a real-world experiment testing exactly those variables, in that only two weeks earlier, on May 1, I had heard the Hagen Quartett, supplemented by cellist Julia Hagen (daughter to one of the quartet members and niece to two of them), play the same Schubert piece in the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. The Boulez Saal is the perfect size and shape for chamber music: 682 seats in just two tiers, all arranged in the round—or, technically, the oval—around the central performing area. From my seat in the fifth row of the parkett level, I could not only see every expression, every mutual glance, every glimmer of special effort on the players’ faces; I could also hear every note as if it were being played in my own living room. (Better, probably, since my living room does not have especially good acoustics.) But more importantly, the members of the Hagen Quartett have been rehearsing and performing together for decades—so much so that last year they announced they were retiring. I attended that retirement concert at Pierre Boulez Saal, and it was terrific. It was even more terrific to hear that they were coming back out of retirement to perform the Schubert with their niece and daughter Julia. Need I say that it was one of the most moving renditions of this extremely powerful piece of music I’ve ever heard? Especially in the final movement, where the composer is having trouble letting go of the masterpiece he’s wrought, you could feel the individual Hagens clinging to the moment of their reunion and resisting their ultimate dispersal. There was pleasure and excitement here (the final movement is, after all, an Allegretto), but there was also deep longing and more than a tinge of underlying sadness.
Flash forward to May 15 at Carnegie. Perhaps I exaggerate in saying that there was no feeling behind the All-Star performance of the same piece, but if there was, it didn’t affect me. (Nor did it affect any of the three people I attended the concert with, so it wasn’t just me; we were all disappointed.) The musicians all played the notes correctly—how could they not, at their level?—but something in between the notes was missing.
I had another lesson in the past month, too, and that was about novelty versus familiarity. (It may also have been about chamber music size, which is supposed to be the theme of this entry: I do my best to stick to the title’s theme, even if I am not always successful.) At the fabled Berlin Philharmonic, first in the large hall and then in the chamber hall, I heard two concerts that turned out the opposite to what I would have predicted. That is, the surprising program—which combined two things I’d never heard before with one old favorite—turned out to be less thrilling than the familiar selection I thought I’d heard a million times before.
The April 22 concert in the larger hall featured Simon Rattle conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. I will go to anything that Simon Rattle conducts, even if he chooses to conduct the phone book, and in the past he’s introduced me to great pieces I would never have suspected I would love. This time, though, the Bartok with which he began the concert (the Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta), though substantial enough to form the first half of the concert, felt to me like a charming novelty rather than a true discovery. The Busoni that came after the intermission—Two Studies for Doctor Faustus—was even stranger and slighter. Neither was a piece I would wish unheard, but nor will I rush out to hear them again soon, and in any case the opportunity to do that strikes me as seriously unlikely, since each of those composers wrote so much else of more interest. As for the third and final piece on the program, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony—well, I have loved what Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic did with this piece (so much so that I stream their recording all the time), but the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, though packed with talented players, could not fill those shoes. I am sure Rattle had a point he was proving with this program, having to do with the interconnections among composers over time, but the combination failed to grab me in the moment, and that is when live music needs to grab you.
Toward the end of my three-week Berlin stay, I went back to the Berlin Philharmonie, this time to the Kammermusiksaal, to hear the Quatuor Ebene play three Beethoven quartets: Opus 18, No. 5, Opus 18, No. 4, and Opus 127. Had you asked me before I went, I would have said I was just putting up with the two earlier quartets in order to hear Opus 127, my favorite of the entire series.
But I was wrong. The marvelous Quatuor Ebene—a French group, entirely new to me, consisting of three men and one woman, all looking surprisingly young for people who have been playing together for twenty years—made the Opus 18 pieces soar. From their first perfectly coordinated note to the final strain of each chord, I was on the edge of my seat, excited and moved at hearing such vigorous, startling, emotionally persuasive interpretations. And even Opus 127, when it came, had a novel excitement for me, despite all my over-streaming of various stunning performances by, say, the Alban Berg Quartet and the Danish String Quartet. It was as if I were hearing each of these familiar old Beethoven quartets for the first time, and that is something like a miracle. (It was also great to see the three men in the group allow the female violist to enter and leave the stage whenever she wished—first, last, in the middle—which is something I have never seen any classical musical group do before. To my mild annoyance, the music world appears to be the last hold-out of the phrase “Ladies first.” Watch, next time you’re at any sort of concert, and you’ll see what I mean.)