Youth and Age

It’s always great to return to Carnegie Hall with a bang, and I certainly got that thrill last week. I was able to attend two amazing concerts with two days of each other, each exemplifying something completely different about the virtues of musical performance.

First up, on Wednesday, was the young Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki, whom I had discovered in Berlin about five years ago. That was a purely chance encounter—he was substituting for some ailing eminence in a piano concerto at the Konzerthaus, and I bought the ticket at the last minute, on a whim—and I was blown away, as was the rest of the discerning, normally reticent Berlin audience. When Lisiecki (who must have been all of 23 at the time) finished his undemonstrative but wonderful performance, we all howled and stamped our approval. So when I heard he would be holding the stage of Stern Hall all by himself on March 13, I hastened to get a ticket.

It was the kind of program only a young man would put together. The first half consisted of fifteen preludes by various different hands, some as short as sixty seconds and none lasting longer than eleven minutes. In quick succession, without pausing to allow for any applause, he gave us pieces by Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Szymanowski, Messiaen, and Gorecki—all without any musical score in front of him, and all rendered beautifully. He hadn’t said anything about his attacca approach beforehand, but he didn’t need to, because his body language was enough to keep us quiet and attentive throughout. Not a whisper or a page-flutter could be heard in the packed hall; as far as I could see, not a head moved from its focus on the lone figure on the stage. I felt as if we were hiding in a forest, watching and listening to some gorgeous rare bird that might fly away if we moved a muscle. The audience members were so stunned by Lisiecki’s performance that they forgot to give a standing ovation at the end of the first half—something they might normally have done just to get out of their seats. But the applause, when it finally came, was thunderous.

The second half was equally thrilling in a different way: it consisted entirely of Chopin’s Twenty-Four Preludes (Opus 28), where the composer pays a brief and enchanting visit to every major and minor key. This gave Lisiecki a chance to show his range within a single composer’s work, and I have to say, he managed to enlarge my feeling for Chopin to an extent I would not have thought possible. Every available emotion seem to be covered in these twenty-four little pieces, and the way they differed, rhythmically and dynamically, showcased Lisiecki’s skill without ever making it seem like mere virtuosity. Throughout, his manner was entirely unmannered; his huge talent was gracefully and modestly worn, so much so that it was a pleasure to watch him as well as hear him. This time the audience was prepared, and this time we did stand (and howl, and applaud until our hands hurt). And Jan Lisiecki responded in just the way a young man should, with an encore that was at once witty and touching: a Romance, because, as he said, “what should follow all these preludes but Love?”

Neither Mitsuko Uchida nor Mark Padmore is what I would call old. As performers they are still in their prime, and their evident vigor and grace as human beings makes them seem ageless. But they bring to Schubert’s Winterreise, which they performed together last Friday night in Zankel Hall, the kind of experience and knowledge that can only be acquired through years of living. Poor Schubert, who died at the age of 31, never got to have a “late style” in the sense that, say, Beethoven or Shostakovich did. But Uchida and Padmore kindly gave him one in their March 15 concert, and I was grateful to witness it.   

Partly, it was a matter of pacing. Like Glenn Gould in his final recordings of the Goldberg Variations, the pair slowed things down, and even gave us pauses—not just between the songs, but even within them. To me, this was particularly apparent in Uchida’s piano-playing, as if it were she, and not the tenor, who had willfully decided to make each note linger in our minds as long as possible. Yet Padmore matched her in gravity and honesty, managing to bring a new interpretation to this piece that he has done so many times before. The songs were less slippery and more wrenching; one could sense a certain harshness behind them, as if they had been pulled up with great effort from terrifying abysses of feeling. In this sense, the journey was even more wintry than usual: the narrator’s character had deepened and darkened, to the point where he was reflecting at a distance on his own illusions and disillusions. I found the whole seventy-five-minute performance extraordinarily moving, and I think everyone around me did too.

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The Italians and Schubert

About fifteen years ago, when I was engaged in writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets, I interviewed one of the Emerson Quartet violinists, Eugene Drucker, about the intense impact those works had on the audience. “When we put a Shostakovich quartet on a mixed program,” he told me, “no matter whether we put it before the intermission or at the end, when people come backstage, what they want to talk about is the Shostakovich. This happens even if we’re also playing something equally great, like Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden.’” What struck me at the time, and what I emphasized in my book, was how emotionally powerful the Shostakovich quartets evidently were. Still, over the years I found myself imagining the thrill of listening to two such amazing pieces—the Schubert and, say, Shostakovich’s Eighth—in a single concert. How great would that be?

So my Pavlovian response, when these very pieces appeared on a CMS program last Friday, was instantly to grab tickets. I had no prior acquaintance with the Quartetto di Cremona, the featured group, but their reputation was good, so I figured it wasn’t much of a risk. And the addition of a single brief contemporary work to the program—Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae for String Quartet—also suited me, since I figured that the congenially harmonic Golijov would offer a nice appetizer to the two meatier works. I do not mean to demean Golijov by saying this: his 2002 piece, though offering its own distinct pleasures, could never have aspired to reach the depths of the other two. But then, practically nothing written for string quartet, whether in this century or in Shostakovich’s or Schubert’s, would have stood up to that competition.

The Quartetto di Cremona’s ordering of the program—first the twenty-minute Shostakovich, next the twelve-minute Golijov, and then, after the intermission, the forty-minute Schubert—made sense in terms of timing, but it struck me as slightly perverse. With my innate bias toward Shostakovich, I expected to like the Eighth Quartet the best and to feel that everything went downhill after that. Talking to my friends at the intermission, I was still vociferously defending my Russian favorite and wondering why he couldn’t have appeared last. His emphatic, severely anxious, but also consciously self-dramatizing despair (embodied in both the strong three-beat “knocks” and his relentless repetition of the D-S-C-H theme) combined with shreds of his innate wit (those dance-of-death triplets in the middle section, for instance) to make his 1960 quartet a searing experience that was bound to burn up everything else in its vicinity. I also commented that the Italians seemed a somber group. Their playing, I agreed, was terrific, but their faces never cracked the slightest glimmer of smile, even during the uproarious applause.

As it turned out, I had to eat all those words in the second half. Never have I heard Schubert’s Fourteenth Quartet played better. In fact, never have I heard any Schubert quartet played better than this one was done by the Quartetto di Cremona on Friday, March 8, at Alice Tully Hall. It was not that the Shostakovich faded away; I was glad to have heard it live, as I am always glad whenever it appears in my life. But the Quartetto’s rendering of the Schubert was so intense, so varied, so vigorous and yet so attentive to nuance, as to leave me stunned.

My first glimmerings of how great it would be appeared as early as the opening Allegro, when I watched the face of the first violinist, Cristiano Gualco, and saw the edges of his mouth tugging upward in an involuntary smile. Gualco was facing my direction, so I couldn’t see the other countenances as clearly, but it was obvious from their playing that Paolo Andreaoli, Simone Gramaglia, and Giovanni Scaglione had also reached the moment they were waiting for. They loved this quartet. They treasured its every move from speed to slowness, loud voices to soft ones; they savored every repetition with a difference. In the course of their emphatic bowings, they lost horsehairs all over the stage, but nothing could stop the onward flow. It was as if they had been born to play this music. It spoke to them, and through it they spoke to us.

At the quiet, solemn end of the Shostakovich, the four players had held their final position, still and silent, for a noticeably lengthy time before they lowered their arms and allowed us to applaud; this is what the Eighth Quartet demands, and they were listening to it. But when they reached the close of the Schubert’s final Presto segment, they threw up their arms in joy, and we responded accordingly. If I had been invited backstage afterward (and Gramaglia’s charming introduction to the Puccini encore made me wish I had been), it was the Schubert I would have wanted to talk about.

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Rainy Days and Live Music

January was a dry spell—not so much in terms of the California winter rains (we had the normal level) but in terms of live concerts I could attend. I wasted away at home, watching endless Netflix serials, some of which were worth recommending (for instance, The Golden Hour, a Dutch police procedural) but most of which were not.

Then, this past weekend, I was treated to two excellent concerts in a row. Unfortunately, it was also a weekend of heavy, threatening rain and wind, so to the usual “It’s great to get out of the house” was added an unusual “But will I make it home again?” In both cases—to the San Francisco Symphony concert in Davies Hall, and to the much closer Cal Performances concert in Berkeley—I had to drive rather than walk or take public transportation. Surprisingly, I was able to park close enough both times to avoid getting drenched. Unsurprisingly, the best thing on each program was a Beethoven piece.

I went to Saturday night’s San Francisco Symphony concert in part for the attractive program (Schubert’s Sixth combined with Beethoven’s Seventh), but also because it featured a conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who was new to me. He turns out to be far from new to conducting: an eminent, grey-haired Finn, Saraste, who now heads up the Helsinki Philharmonic, is a veteran of guest-conducting and regular-conducting positions worldwide. His manner was brisk and effective, with clear distinctions between the parts of the music that were supposed to be sharp and angular (jagged, cutting hand gestures) and the parts that were more flowing and smooth (sweeping, curling hand gestures); he rarely ascended, or descended, to a full-body sway, but he did bend his knees a few times when he was really swept away by the music. His Schubert, I would say, was fine but no more. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was thrilling. Admittedly, the Seventh Symphony is one of the great musical works of all time, but even it can be ruined. (I saw Loren Maazel ruin it once.) In this instance, Sarastre drew the absolute best out of the San Francisco players, and it was a complete delight to hear them perform.

Sunday afternoon’s concert was something else entirely. Held in Hertz Hall, the chamber-music venue on the UC Berkeley campus, it featured a string quartet, the Attacca Quartet, that I’d heard of but never seen live. The first half of the program was a smorgasbord of pieces that bore a family resemblance to each other (tuneful modernism, I guess you’d call it) and that were mostly snippets from longer works, strung together and performed “attacca”—that is, without breaks in between. So we got excerpts from Caroline Shaw’s Three Essays and The Evergreen (both 2022 compositions), a segment from Paul Wiancko’s 2020 Benkei’s Standing Death, a Radiohead song adapted for string quartet by Attacca’s violist, and one movement of Ravel’s marvelous string quartet from 1903. I was relieved when I heard the Ravel—not only because it was the only thing I recognized on the program, but also because the Attacca players performed it so gorgeously. This, I thought, was a good sign. It signaled that the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Beethoven’s Opus 131, would be worth hearing.

That, it turned out, was an understatement. With their ear for the unexpected and the revelatory, the Attacca Quartet made something new of this great Beethoven work, even as they also played it exactly as written. I listen to various recordings of it all the time, and none of what they did jarred my ear; they did not depart noticeably from the tradition. Yet in tiny ways (varying the volume on repeats, for instance, or emphasizing the rhythmic shifts) they managed to imprint their own technical expertise on the venerable quartet. They showed us—as if anyone still needs showing—exactly how much of a “modern” composer Beethoven was in those late, great quartets, and at the same time they remained completely true to his unsurpassable ear for melody. The performance was moving and thrilling, and it earned its uproarious standing ovation—followed by a brief and delightful encore of a John Adams snippet: a tip of the hat, perhaps, to our local musical hero. All in all, it was a concert well worth braving the storm for.

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Delirious Pleasure

In most years—and this one was no exception—my favorite concert of the year is the appearance at Carnegie Hall of Harry Bicket and his English Concert, performing yet another Handel opera or oratorio. Last Sunday it was Rodelinda, which happens to be one of the operas I play on my devices all the time. And it turns out that I can even stream a 2021 English Concert version these days, featuring at least two of the stars, Lucy Crowe and Iestyn Davies, who appeared in this December’s Carnegie concert.

But there is absolutely no comparison between listening to this reduced version at home and hearing the real thing, live, at Carnegie Hall. Part of the enhancement is visual: although these are concert versions rather than fully staged operas, the singers (under Harry Bicket’s direction, I presume) do their best to take on the characters and gestures of their parts. A touch on the arm here, an embrace there, an angry or wistful or regretful expression—these are enough to give life to the figures of Rodelinda and her husband Bertarido, the usurping king Grimoaldo and his evil advisor Garibaldo, the loyal servant Unulfo and the strangely mixed figure of Eduige. It’s also fun to watch the musicians themselves: the two harpsichords facing each other (one manned by Harry Bicket himself), the four terrific wind-instrument players in the back row, the huge theorbo up front, and all the other talented and essential strings. For an opera company, it is a relatively small group of instrumentalists and singers, but they pack a wallop far beyond their size.

Of course, the main benefit of hearing it live is auditory, and Carnegie Hall is the perfect setting for that. This was clear to all of us the minute the overture was over. To hear Lucy Crowe’s pearly soprano beam out across the seats and upward through the successive balconies—a gem of a voice, with perfect diction and occasional moments of wild expressiveness, never pushed too hard, never unmusical—was a delight of the first order. And to hear it in combination with Iestyn Davies’ golden countertenor (which we finally got to do at the end of the second act: Handel always makes us wait for a combination of voices) was to hear both singers at their very best. Bicket always gets good people for the solo parts, but in this instance he exceeded even his usual brief, for there was not a singer onstage who was less than stellar. The other countertenor, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, was tender and delicately rich. The bass-baritone, Brandon Cedel, had that rare deep voice that could hit all the notes perfectly and boom out loudly (and he had a lovely semi-comic manner as well, which suited his role as the truth-telling bad guy in the plot). Eric Ferring carried his heavy tenor role with dignity and grace. And Christine Rice was a wonderful Eduige, her mellow mezzo-soprano placing her midway between the high-voiced heroic characters and the lower-voiced villains.

But just as you can’t get a true sense of any opera from a mere recording, my mere assertion of how great this performance was cannot begin to duplicate for you the actual experience of being there. So I have just one piece of advice. If you are anywhere near Carnegie Hall next time the English Concert and Co. come around with one of their Handel operas, do yourself a favor and buy a ticket. You will thank me, and more to the point, you will thank them for the deep, irreplaceable, long-lasting pleasure.

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Some Notes for Peace

Like everybody else, New Yorkers are feeling pretty terrible these days. It was with the hope of forgetting about the world’s problems, at least for a couple of hours, that I attended last week’s performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at Geffen Hall. I mean, what could be more soothing and familiar and at the same time stirring and rewarding, if it is done right?  And what were the chances that the New York Philharmonic would do it wrong?

As it turned out, zero. Under the baton of the lively and charmingly fuzzy-looking guest conductor, Stéphane Denève, the orchestra’s players were excellent, allowing the dynamics of the piece to range, as they must, from the forceful to the subdued. But the real hero of the evening was a soloist I’d never heard if before, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. He wielded his 1741 Guarneri “del Gesu”—on longterm loan to him from the Royal Danish Theatre—as if he’d been born with it in his hands, and though his stance was a bit more stolid than I am used to in my favorite violinists, his playing was a fluid as one could wish. It was a delight to hear him, and to hear the orchestra backing him up so well; he and they appeared to get along like a house on fire.

When he came out after the fourth round of applause to play an encore, he spoke to us first, thanking us for our enthusiasm and announcing he would now play a short Bach partita. I cannot reproduce his words exactly, but I know they contained the words “reflection” and “dialogue,” and somehow managed to allude to the disaster in the Middle East without overtly saying so. We all got the point, and a large portion of the audience applauded his words as well as the beautiful piece that followed them.

Later, on the subway home, I read the program note about Szeps-Znaider and also Googled him on my phone. It turns out he was born in 1975, in Copenhagen, to a Polish-Israeli father and a Danish Jewish mother. The timing suggests to me that his father was one of those Polish Jews (I knew several in my youth) who fled from Poland’s wave of anti-semitism in the late 1960s. In any case, Nikolaj was brought up in Denmark but now plays all over the world, including as a violinist and conductor with orchestras in Singapore and France. One of his numerous concerts this season will be an appearance at Wigmore Hall with someone he describes as his “longtime collaborator,” the pianist Saleem Ashkar. So clearly this is a guy who is used to reaching across the aisle.

Sitting in my seat at Geffen Hall, and thinking back on those moments in the week since then, I felt extremely grateful to Szeps-Znaider for sharing his cosmopolitan, humane vision with the rest of us. As much as the gorgeous music, it was what I desperately needed.

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Open Season

Every year, when I arrive in New York in early September, I always forget that it’s going to be another month or so before I can regularly start attending the concerts I love. Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, it turns out, only really get going in October—and now, at last, I have been to one event from each.

First up on my calendar was one of the two opening concerts at Carnegie Hall, both of which featured Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony. I chose the second night—Thursday, October 5—in part because it included a New York premiere by Philip Glass, whose music I almost always enjoy in a low-key, calming sort of way. The Triumph of the Octagon, his single-movement piece written specifically for Muti (in honor of a photo of the 13th-century Castel del Monte that Glass saw hanging on Muti’s office wall), was no exception, though I felt it ended rather abruptly.

The Glass piece set the note for the Italian theme that pervaded the evening. Next up was Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, which the orchestra (clearly delighted to be re-united with their recently retired conductor) performed beautifully, and which was wholly enjoyable if not terribly earthshaking. Then, after the intermission, came Richard Strauss’s “Aus Italien,” a series of tone-poems or lyrical interludes on such subjects as “Amid the Ruins of Rome” and “Neapolitan Folk Life.” I couldn’t for the life of me detect anything Italian about the piece or its segments—it all seemed a very Germanic take on Italy, to me—but again, the orchestra performed wonderfully. It wasn’t until the encore, however—the overture to Verdi’s rarely performed opera Joan of Arc—that the true melding of conductor and musicians came forth at full strength. Now here was something Italian to listen to, for a change, and something marvelous besides. If I hadn’t just heard Verdi’s Requiem performed at the Metropolitan Opera (spectacularly done by everyone involved), I might have been tempted to classify this little overture as my favorite piece of Verdi music, ever. That’s how good it sounded.

On the very next night, Friday the 6th, I was at Geffen Hall listening to the New York Philharmonic perform another premiere by another New York composer. This was Steve Reich’s Jacob’s Ladder, a world premiere of a piece for vocal ensemble and chamber group which was having only its second outing, after its first on the night before. Reich has always been a more complicated composer than Glass, and you never quite know what you’re going to get with him, but in this case I found the work completely compelling. The soprano and tenor voices were otherworldly, or unearthly, or whatever you want to call singing that does not sound like normal people carrying a tune but that nonetheless works its way into your emotions. And the instruments—which included clarinets, oboes, flutes, vibraphones, strings, and piano—carried on a continuous and occasionally emphatic humming throughout, so much so that when a single violinist left off his rhythmic bowing, another had to pick up the beat seamlessly. In a Reich work, time always disappears as rhythm comes to the fore: you have no idea how long you have been sitting there, but you know exactly what beat your body is thrilling to. Here the captivating rhythms built toward the end, not by speeding up but by portentously slowing down.  It was fun to see Reich himself there in the audience, wearing his standard baseball cap; that made it feel like an important New York musical event, as did his warm bow with the musicians at the end of his piece.

The rest of the program was divided between the outstanding (Lief Ove Andsnes as the soloist in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto) and the ho-hum (Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which I am convinced he left unfinished for a reason). But though the quality of the music ran the gamut, the audience seemed equally thrilled at every piece. In fact, they seemed thrilled just to be present in Geffen Hall, which was packed to the rafters. I agree that Geffen is a huge improvement, acoustically, over the Avery Fisher Hall that preceded it, though I think it lacks the amazing warmth of Carnegie or the perfect balance of the Berlin Philharmonie. But hey, who’s complaining? The music is good enough—and when Gustavo Dudamel shows up next year to replace the competent but lackluster Jaap van Zweden, the quality of the concerts and the response to them should go through the roof.

Third up in my series was the season opener of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, in the ultra-comfortable, perfectly sized, warmly glowing Alice Tully Hall. I admit I am a sucker for chamber music in general and for this group’s performances in particular. But even I could not have predicted the pleasure I would derive from the October 17th concert, which was titled, with complete accuracy, “String Sonorities.” That’s exactly what we got in each of the five pieces on the program: the sound of violins, violas, cellos, and a double bass blending together in various harmonious ways. No single piece on the program would have drawn me by itself (though Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony for Strings, which closed the concert, was so terrific that I will take my first chance to hear it again). But as we moved from Elgar to Bartok to Grieg to George Walker, I had a chance to savor musicianship at its most skillful and comradely level. The lead violinist changed in each piece, and players who had stood in the back row before came forward to strut their stuff.  Even David Finckel, the grand old cellist who helps run CMS, went from prominence in the Elgar to nearly hidden in the Britten, as if he were just another working musician. The featured players were mostly young, and many of them were recent additions to the CMS family, but they blended with the oldsters as if they were all, so to speak, on the same page. I’m glad to think that with such a good collection of talented and collaborative members, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has a long and healthy future ahead of it.

 

 

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Britannia in Berlin

A couple of weeks ago I attended two terrific concerts as part of Berlin’s Musikfest, and both, by chance, had British links. This was not why I picked them—I chose them for their intriguing programs and their great conductors—but this Britannic element turned out to be something they had in common.

The first concert consisted entirely of Simon Rattle conducting Mahler’s Ninth with the London Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, an Englishman, has lived in Berlin since the beginning of the twenty-first century, when he took up the artistic leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic. After roughly fifteen years there, he moved over to the London Symphony, which he has led for the past six years, but he is now about to give that up in order to conduct the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. So this outing with the LSO was one of his last formal appearances as their official conductor. The Philharmonie was sold out for the occasion, and everyone (including the audience) lived up to the high expectations.

Every bit of the seventy-five-minute Mahler symphony was thrilling, but perhaps none more so than the closing moments. As the strings softly sounded their final few notes, gradually fading away into nothingness, the listeners respectfully maintained a total silence. The musicians kept their bows resting on the strings, with Rattle’s arms remaining outstretched in his final gesture, and still the hush continued. I began counting in my head: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand… We had reached the fifteen-second mark when the conductor finally lowered his arms and the audience burst into wild applause. I treasure moments like this at the Philharmonie: those prolonged silences, when not a cough or a rustle can be heard. And though I am not always a huge Mahler fan—sometimes he strikes me as too floaty and amorphous—Rattle’s knife-sharp interpretation of the Ninth made me into one.

The second great concert was Vladimir Jurowski’s evening with his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin—Berlin’s equivalent of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra that Rattle is about to take over. Jurowski has been with them since 2017, and under his hands the RSB has become a fine-tuned instrument, capable of doing anything well.  In this case, in celebration of their 100th anniversary, they performed three pieces: Kurt Weill’s 1929 suite of music from The Threepenny Opera (labeled the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik für Blasorchester); Thomas Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring the marvelous pianist Kirill Gerstein (who also helped out in the Weill piece); and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3. All three were a revelation in different ways. I know the Weill practically by heart, but this version felt delightfully fresh and new. I’d never heard the Adès concerto before, but it was performed with such clarity and precision that every movement was graspable. And the symphony! I’d foolishly thought I had Rachmaninoff’s number, but it turned out I didn’t have a clue. Vladimir Jurowski has conducted the Third Symphony before, and has made at least one recording of it (which I will now proceed to listen to over and over). He was able to take us deep inside the music, to the point where even those of us with reservations about the composer could only give up and adore this symphony.

In a charming speech he made to the audience at the end of concert, Jurowski pointed out all the British elements in the program—Threepenny‘s London setting (along with its origins in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera); Adès’s British citizenship; and, not least, Rachmaninoff’s warm welcome to England by Sir Henry Wood, who first brought the composer and this symphony to London. As an encore, therefore, Jurowski offered us a piece by Henry Wood himself, a figure best known as the founder of the Royal Albert Hall Proms. (As an added fillip, Jurowski mentioned to us—in a confiding rather than boastful manner—that that RSB had recently played this exact programs at the Proms.) Both the speech and the encore were a lovely gesture of friendship across the water, and they rounded out the program to perfection.

I missed a third opportunity to hear a British-connected performance when a last-minute illness kept me from attending John Eliot Gardiner’s concert version of the five-hour Berlioz opera Les Troyens. Other things kept the eighty-year-old Gardiner himself away from it. In the week before his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique were scheduled to come to Berlin, they performed the same Berlioz program at another European festival, and that concert ended, backstage, with the conductor punching one of the soloists in the face. (The baritone’s crime had apparently been to exit on the wrong side of the podium.) This caused such an outcry, reasonably enough, that old J.E. was instantly shunted off to London, while his conducting duties were reassigned to his assistant, Dinis Sousa. The scandal only whetted my desire to hear the program, but a severe cold—and the fear that I might end up coughing for the whole five hours—kept me home in the end.

The next day I wrote to my friend Pamela (who, as a former artistic director of the San Francisco Opera and a former intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic, is far more musically aware than I am) to ask her how the performance had gone. “I don’t want to fill you with regrets,” she wrote back, “but the performance last night was simply phenomenal: wonderful singers, the best chorus ever, orchestra excellent and the conductor was TERRIFIC.  It was the highlight of my musical year so far.  I’m still floating.” Ah, well. One can’t be everywhere all the time, and a little well-earned regret is not a bad thing for a habitual audience member to feel, even—or especially—in Berlin.

 

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Two Surprises

Though I’ve had some surprises from Music@Menlo in the past (most notably when they introduced the Danish String Quartet on these shores), I find myself attending their concerts mainly to have my high expectations fulfilled. Predictably excellent performances of good chamber music programs are not something to be sniffed at, and these summer festivals—run every year in Menlo Park by the folks who also run CMS in New York—almost always fit that bill.

So I had no ambitions beyond the usual pleasure-seeking ones when I traveled down the Peninsula last Sunday to hear Concert Program III, entitled “From the Heart.” Though it was part of a summer season devoted to Beethoven, there was no Beethoven on this program: just Schubert, Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and a name I had never heard before, Louise Farrenc. The composers sounded fine, but the draw for me lay in the roster of performing musicians—especially Nicholas Canellakis, a terrific cellist whose career I’ve followed since its very beginnings, a couple of decades ago.

In the event, Canellakis was as entrancing as always, and so were his fellow players in the Farrenc piano quintet: Orli Shaham on piano, Arnaud Sussmann on violin, Matthew Lipman on viola, and Anthony Manzo on bass. They played as if they had been playing together forever, not as if they had simply gathered for this one piece; and they played the music itself as if they had known it all their lives, which they couldn’t have done, because Farrenc is not a composer any of them would have heard of in their conservatory days. This nineteenth-century Frenchwoman had no doubt been dug up from the archives as part of the current desperate search for female composers, and this time someone managed to strike gold.

That was the first surprise: how absolutely wonderful Farrenc’s 1839 Quintet in A minor was. I won’t say it rivaled Shostakovich’s or Brahms’s or Schubert’s piano quintets, but it came pretty damn close. Every movement of the half-hour piece brought something exciting and new, especially in the interplay among the musicians. It was never merely pretty (the way, I’m afraid, the Schubert string trio that opened the program was); there was something somber even behind the liveliest passages, and something witty behind the pensive bits. Because I’d never heard it before in my life, I had trouble grasping it fully, but I was gripped by it and thrilled to be hearing it.

The Farrenc was played right before the intermission, and during the pause I wondered why it hadn’t been placed last, since it was such an obvious hit. But then I got my answer. Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1, the final piece on the program, was the second surprise of the day.

You wouldn’t think that such an old chestnut could surprise anyone anymore—especially me, who listens to it repeatedly in the marvelous Beaux Arts Trio version. But I hope the beloved ghost of Menahem Pressler will not be rattled if I say that this live rendering was even better than my favorite recording. Part of the credit goes to the sensitive pianist, Juho Pohjonen, and the eloquent cellist, David Requiro, both of whom I’ve heard at CMS or Music@Menlo before. But a great deal of the effect, and the primary source of my surprise, lay in the performance of the violinist, Francisco Fullana. A young Spaniard with degrees from Juilliard and USC and prizes from all over the world, he plays with a fiery intensity that makes itself visible throughout his whole body (including in his hilariously glittery shoes). His large hands—in fact, his whole large person and personality—seemed to dwarf the borrowed 1735 Guarneri instrument he plays, even as they brought forth the most beautiful, tender, ecstatic notes from it. It was almost as exciting to watch him play as it was to hear him. There is a special feeling you get when you first hear a great musician in performance, especially if you are not expecting it, and that is what happened to me on Sunday with Fullana. I can’t wait to see and hear what he does next.

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Igor Levit in San Francisco

For those of us in the Bay Area who care about classical music, the last two weeks have mainly been taken up with Igor Levit’s residency at the San Francisco Symphony. I wrote about this marvelous pianist last fall, after hearing him perform all twenty-four of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues in one Carnegie evening, and if you’ve read that wildly enthusiastic post, you’ll be unsurprised to learn how eagerly I attended all four of the concerts he gave at San Francisco’s Davies Hall.

The first, and in some ways the most straightforwardly delightful, was a Friday night concert in which Esa-Pekka Salonen (who is himself a great and ongoing gift to the San Francisco Symphony) conducted two Beethoven pieces: the Piano Concerto No. 5, in which Igor Levit was the soloist, and the much-loved Eroica symphony, No. 3. The piano concerto came first, and Levit’s mastery of the music was a pleasure to behold. Playing without a score, he seemed especially alert to what the other musicians were doing and feeling, so that his interactions with the orchestra were both seamless and communicative. As for his own solo passages, they ranged from the delicately near-silent to the thrillingly emphatic—never in an idiosyncratic or perverse way, but in a manner that seemed utterly suited to Beethoven’s intentions.  Even Levit’s bodily gestures (his turns of the head to look around, his relaxed way of keeping the rhythm with hands, arms, and even legs) suggested that this collaboration was a pleasure to him as well as to his fellow performers. Afterwards, and just before the intermission, he responded to the audience’s repeated ovations by giving us a lovely little encore of uncharacteristically tuneful Shostakovich (the Waltz Scherzo, as it turned out, from the Ballet Suite No. 1). So by the time we got to the program’s second half, even the beautifully played Eroica symphony felt a bit like elegant wallpaper: that is, something you were glad to have surrounding you, but not a revelation in the same way Levit’s Emperor concerto was.

That Sunday I went back to hear Levit in a chamber music concert, in which he joined several string players from the San Francisco Symphony in a well-thought-out program. I was shocked by how poorly attended it was, compared to the Beethoven — but then, chamber music almost always draws a smaller crowd than symphonies, and since Davies sadly lacks a chamber-music auditorium, the SFS is forced to hold these more intimate concerts in the large hall. In the event, the concert was just as rewarding as the Friday night had been, with three unusual string pieces (Frank Bridge’s 1912 Lament, and Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz and Emily’s Reel from the 1990s) played by Symphony musicians. This turned out to be the perfect set-up for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, which formed the second half of the concert. I have loved this piece since the very first time I heard it (with Anne-Marie McDermott at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, almost twenty years ago), and it was even better this time, in Levit’s gracefully collaborative, distinctly enunciated performance. In a way that is not at all easy to do, the pianist managed to capture both Shostakovich’s appealing wit and the composer’s dark-tinged anxiety (the concerto dates from 1940, shortly after Stalin’s terrifying critique of Shostakovich, and just at the beginning of the war). Of the four SFS musicians who accompanied Levit in this adventure, Melissa Kleinbart on the first violin and Amos Yang on the cello were particular standouts, though all four were really good.

Then, on the following Saturday. it was time for the big event: Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto in C major, which Igor Levit, with Salonen’s help and support, had dredged up from the archives and brought to life again. Busoni, who lived from 1866 to 1924, was an Italian who settled for much of his life in Berlin. (I have actually seen the plaque on the house where he lived in Viktoria-Luisa-Platz, the same building Billy Wilder was to occupy a few years after Busoni’s death.) It took him three years, from 1901 to 1904, to write his Opus 39: a fiendish piano concerto, seventy-five minutes long, with a piano part so fast and complicated that few people have ever been able to play it.

This concerto, I have to say, is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. Five movements long, it ends with a choral passage in German, sung by a male chorus and apparently representing “mysticism in nature.” But even before then it does not sound anything like your usual piano concerto. The speed at which Levit had to play his assigned notes was so extreme that his page-turner (whom he needed in this case to handle the paper score) often had to get out of his seat every minute or so to turn the page. The music was incredibly loud at times, and with the combination of drums from the orchestra and repeated pounding chords on the piano, it was also incredibly percussive. Which is not to say that it lacked melody: there were sustained harmonious passages that, while not exactly hummable, evoked a sense of something tunefully familiar. These could never be pinned down, though, because as soon as Busoni had accomplished one new thing with the orchestra and the piano, he was on to the next. If I had simply heard it without being prepared in any way, I would not have been able to say whether this concerto was composed in 1812, 2012, or somewhere in between; the musical forms it drew on could have arisen any time in those two centuries, but they were not forms I have heard from anyone else. The whole piece struck me as a genetic “sport”—an evolutionary dead end, a one-of-a-kind development that took things as far as they could go and left nothing for followers to do. Given the difficulty of the piano’s role (and, I imagine, even the orchestra’s), it was no surprise to find that the work has lain fallow for most of the many decades since its composition. Still, in Levit’s hands it was continually exciting—not for a single second was I bored—and we in the audience all felt privileged to witness its revival, even if we did not always know what to make of it.

I thought fondly back to the Busoni evening as I listened to the fourth concert in Levit’s series, a recital that began with Brahms’s Six Choral Preludes and ended with Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, with pieces by jazz pianist Fred Hersch and a piano adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Prelude in between. There was a connection between the two concerts, not just in the fact that Busoni had arranged the Brahms, but also in the semi-Wagnerian adventurousness that I only now realized I had heard in the Busoni. But the Liszt, for me, was a trial: lots of virtuosity, lots of heavy emphasis alternating with hesitant thoughtfulness on the piano keys, but with none of the payback that had been afforded in the case of Beethoven, Shostakovich, and (to a lesser extent) Busoni.

It was a rather odd way for Levit to choose to end what had been an eye-opening, utterly thrilling residency. But I was clearly in the minority in my reaction, because the crowd that attended Tuesday’s recital once again roared to its feet at the concert’s end, just as it had for the Beethoven and the Busoni.  That avidly applauding, bravo-screaming San Francisco audience seemed, in a way, like a slavering beast—as if Igor Levit were a delicious morsel meant to feed his fans’ all-consuming hunger, if only they could get close enough to swallow him. I found it almost frightening, how much they adored him…even if, throughout most of his residency, I also felt that way myself.

 

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Glorious Shostakovich

I think the Fourth Symphony—which Shostakovich wrote after being castigated by Stalin for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and which as a result was pulled from its 1936 premiere and not performed until after Stalin’s death—might be my favorite of his symphonies. Certainly it is the first one I ever heard live, at a Russian performance in 2003, and I’ve loved it since then. But not until this April, when Vladimir Jurowski and his Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin played the Fourth on their program at the Philharmonie, did it move me so deeply that it left me trembling.

This had something to do (as usual) with the way the brilliant Jurowski had designed the evening’s program. He started with Beethoven’s Coriolan overture, a rousing piece of music that got us all in the mood, and followed that immediately with a Berlin premiere: a piano concerto, Opus 175, by the exiled Russian composer Elena Firsova, who wrote it in 2020 and saw it performed only once before, at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In Amsterdam as in Berlin, the piano soloist was the marvelous Yefim Bronfman, and I only wish I could have been able to hear him do it twice (as Schönberg recommended we do with all new pieces of music). I felt I was barely taking in the multiple strengths and delicacies of Firsova’s concerto, as it flew off Bronfman’s fingers into the auditorium; all I could gather, that first time, was that she was indeed working in Shostakovich’s tradition of rhythmic complexity and melodic inventiveness. The whole experience was enhanced by the fact that Firsova herself was in the audience: she happened to be seated in the row just behind mine, so that after she had taken her bows, and after the intervening intermission, I got to see her being greeted and saluted by tearful young Russian girls who captured her signature on their programs and her photo in their iPhones. (It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it, when a seventy-something composer can be a culture idol for teenagers.)

Firsova politely, or perhaps eagerly, stayed for the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Shostakovich’s Fourth. What can I say, other than that it was truly astonishing? The musicians responded to Jurowski’s dancing gestures as if they were a single large instrument emanating from his hands; their moments of speeding up and slowing down, of alternating loud blasts with mild, contemplative passages, were perfectly attuned to the demands of the piece. As the final quiet notes dwindled into the nothingness that comes at the end of this great symphony, the audience responded as it generally does if the playing is up to par: with what always seems a very long silence, and then with thunderous applause.

 

If the Fourth is the symphony I love best, the Twelfth may well be my favorite of his string quartets. This is a harder choice, though, because I also love the Second Quartet and the Eighth, the Third and the Fifteenth—and let’s not forget the charming Tenth and the terrific Thirteenth… But enough. The Twelfth is the one where I think he most fully demonstrates his range, going from a difficult, fraught beginning (where the second violin just sits it out for a number of measures) to a full panoply of plaintive melody, agitated rhythm, wise sadness, and dour triumph, all in the course of a half hour.

I was lucky enough to hear the Emerson Quartet play this piece last Sunday in Alice Tully Hall, during one of the final New York performances of their last season as a quartet group. Again, the program was beautifully structured and satisfyingly complete, with Ravel’s lovely quartet to start with, Webern’s Bagatelles as a palate cleanser, Bartok’s No. 2 to end the first act, and a New York premiere by Sarah Kirkland Snider just before the performance of Shostakovich’s Twelfth. Like Firsova, Snider is a worthy inheritor of the Shostakovich tradition, and like Firsova, she took her delighted bows and then stayed to hear the Master’s piece that followed hers.

I am used to the recorded Emerson version of the Twelfth (it is probably the one I played most often, when I was writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets), but even so this performance surprised me. It had something new about it: a kind of passion mixed with longing, a sense of human limits and of the power of music to transcend them. I can’t explain how that works, the way Shostakovich’s music always translates itself directly into emotion, but I know it happens every time the quartets are beautifully played, and this was one of those times.

The Emersons closed their CMS program on Sunday with an encore by George Walker, an eminent Black composer who died in 2018, just as they opened by dedicating the evening to Menachem Pressler, who had died only the day before. Having the Shostakovich bracketed by these two deaths helped bring out his affinity for what is mortal in us—his ever-present habit, at least in the quartets, of addressing our limited time on earth. I am always aware of this when I listen to him, but this time I felt it even more so, and for that I was immensely grateful.

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