For three months this past summer, I didn’t budge from the Bay Area. I got none of the outside infusions of musical culture that have fueled my life for the last decade: no Berlin, no London, no Montreal, no New York. I just stayed put in my Berkeley house and went to events I could drive to in an hour or less.
It was a revelation. I may have attended fewer concerts than I usually do (it’s possible, in some summer weeks, to exhaust the desirable local offerings in only one or two nights), but the quality of the ones I did go to was consistently high. In fact, at least three of these events ranked among the best performances I’ve heard in years.
I’m cheating a bit in calling Ojai North a single “event,” since it was really a cluster of concerts spread over four days. A collaboration between Southern California’s long-running Ojai Music Festival and Berkeley’s Cal Performances (which has become newly adventurous under the directorship of Matías Tarnopolsky), Ojai North brought a generous sampling of the mother ship’s offerings to those of us too lazy to drive six hours southward. And what offerings they were! On the opening Monday night, we were given a free outdoor concert of John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit, staged in a glade just outside Hertz Hall, the campus’s chamber music auditorium. Like most of this Alaska-based composer’s work, the 2009 Inuksuit is an eerie, inventive, environmentally responsive piece that draws on elements of the far-north landcape as well as the Inuit culture of that region. The piece is scored for anywhere from nine to ninety-nine percussionists, and it usually lasts about seventy minutes: in Berkeley, the twenty-two performers brought the work to a close in just under an hour—in time for the final silence to be punctuated by our environmental sound, the regular peals of the Campanile.
The music itself was spare and whispery to begin with, and because its source was multi-directional, with small encampments of performers planted all over the large, hilly glade, you couldn’t tell at first whether you were hearing Adams’s composition or just a heavy wind in the trees. Gradually, though, the musical texture intensified, until it included a range and density of sound that could only have emanated from humans, variously playing on cymbals, bass drums, air-raid sirens, gongs, conch-shell trumpets, whirled plastic tubes, papery noisemakers, and a bunch of things I’ve never even seen before. The work had a coherence of pace and structure that could be sensed if not predicted, as it built slowly toward its sometimes deafening crescendo and then died down again. And the whole event had an appeal that went beyond the purely musical. Before the piece started, the audience members had been encouraged to leave their spots on the grass, if they so wished, and move around the glade during the performance. I did this once, for about ten minutes, and was struck by the vision of all those individually peripatetic listeners, quietly on the move, smiling rather beatifically (but not in an annoying way) as they passed each other going in all directions. It had an almost science-fiction quality to it, like that final scene in Fahrenheit 451, where all the people are murmuring aloud the books they have memorized—except here the people were silent, and it was the landscape itself that seemed to murmur.
For the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday concerts, Ojai North moved into the more conventional setting of Hertz Hall, but with unconventional timing and pricing: there were two concerts each night, one at 7:00, one at 9:30, and each ticket cost only fifteen to twenty dollars. Despite the commendable bargain prices, the indoor concerts were less well attended than the opening-night freebie, which was a shame, because the music was outstanding. Of particular note was a four-handed piano version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, marvelously performed by Leif Ove Andsnes (this year’s guest music director) and Marc-André Hamelin. I also loved Schnittke’s stirring 1976 Piano Quintet—with Andsnes, again, on the piano—and Hamelin’s brilliant rendering of the Ives “Concord” sonata. In fact, the only dud among the great pieces I heard that week was a version of Janacek’s “Kreutzer Sonata” quartet arranged for string orchestra and actor. Such arrangements are always a mistake, if you ask me, and in this case the presentation was particularly repellent, with irksomely enunciated bits of Tolstoy’s writing interlarded with muddied-up passages of Janacek.
Janacek got his revenge later in the summer, though. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say that I was rewarded for my patience in sitting through that bad “Kreutzer” by an absolutely superb performance of his “Intimate Letters” quartet. This was the middle piece in a program that the Pacifica Quartet gave down on the Peninsula in July, as part of their appearance in the tenth anniversary season of the excellent Music@Menlo series. Janacek’s second quartet was sandwiched between Beethoven’s Op. 135 and Smetana’s Quartet No. 1, both of which the Pacificas performed with consummate skill and verve—but it was the Janacek that stood out, even in comparison to the Beethoven. For some reason I’ve heard “Intimate Letters” performed four or five times in the last couple of years; it seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. But though I have liked the piece well enough in its other incarnations, nothing has come close to the way the Pacificas did it. In their hands, it was both piercing and conversational. Masumi Per Rostad’s expressive viola, Simin Ganatra’s passionate first violin, Brandon Vamos’s richly singing cello, and Sibbi Bern-hardsson’s clear, companionable second violin all joined together to bring out the intense pathos of the piece. Perhaps even more importantly, their carefully melded, mutually responsive playing also gave the work an actual intimacy rather than a merely nominal one. Hearing the Pacificas perform the “Intimate Letters,” I felt as if I understood the music for the very first time—as if it finally made emotional sense to me, with or without the unrequited love story background that the programs are always eager to supply.
I was so overwhelmed by this Pacifica concert that I found myself splurging at the CD table afterward, buying not only the latest volume in their ongoing Shostakovich series but also their earlier edition of the complete Mendelssohn quartets. I was not surprised at how good the Shostakovich turned out to be, since for the past two years I’ve been following the Pacificas in their live Shostakovich performances all over the North American continent. But the Mendelssohn CDs astonished me. In the months since I bought them, I have played them over and over, trying to figure out why these particular recordings finally enabled me to love a composer who had never appealed to me before. What subtle but distinctive interpretive choices did the Pacificas have to make, individually and as a group, in order to arrive at such a remarkably engaging Mendelssohn? I am resolved to find out, even if it takes me years.
My third great pleasure of the summer should not have been unexpected, given that it involved the San Francisco Symphony. I can honestly say that over the past couple of years I’ve enjoyed every SFS concert I’ve been to. The orchestra is in top form under Michael Tilson Thomas—better, I would say, than the New York Phil-harmonic under either Lorin Maazel or Alan Gilbert—and one senses in the players a consistent desire to give their adventurous best. For the conclusion of their hundredth anniversary season, they chose to deliver a blockbuster, Beethoven’s Ninth. And deliver they did. Everything about this packed-out performance was thrilling, from the hushed anticipation of the largely local audience to the terrific singing by the four soloists and, especially, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. MTT paced the work so that we could really perceive all its strange virtues—the way it makes us wait through three huge orchestral movements (each one of which would have been enough to satisfy) before we get a glimmering of song; the way the theme of the Ode to Joy sneaks in quietly at first, on basses and cellos, before it bursts forth in human voices; the way even the bass drum begins to take on the quality of a solo voice; and the way the vocal soloists, grand as they are, finally give way to the glorious chorus, who are the true heroes and heroines of this massively beautiful work. It is the kind of art—rare, in my experience—that makes one proud to be part of a multitudinous humanity, pleased to be plural rather than singular. We audience members were tremendously moved by it, and when the performance came to an end, we leapt to our feet and roared.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her latest book, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, is out in paperback from Yale.
