Again with The Hard Nut

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

I have to say, I never tire of it. I must have seen this Mark Morris production at least a dozen times over the course of the past three decades, and each time I see something new in it. I was about three or four seasons in, for instance, when I first noticed the crying woman during the carol-singing session at the Christmas party. A decade or two later, I wondered for the first time about Drosselmeier’s vigorous bouncing of Marie on his lap: were we meant to sense an element of child sexual abuse? These elements were both there from the beginning, but because the party scene in which they occur is so complicated and various—and because, in addition, we see what our current news makes us more likely to see—my take on them varied over time.

This time, at the BAM performance on December 14, I was struck in particular by how closely Morris’s staging followed E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original storyline. Having just finished reading Hoffmann’s “Nutcracker and Mouse King” tale (and also his “Sandman,” the inspiration for both Tales of Hoffmann and Coppelia), I was able to pick out the specific details that Mark Morris had preserved: not only the name Marie for the little heroine of the story (rather than the more common Clara) , but also the connection between Drosselmeier and the Nutcracker (they are uncle and nephew), the performance of mechanical dolls at the Christmas party (though they are miniatures, not life-sized, in the Hoffmann story), the presence of gold and silver apples on the Christmas tree, the battle between mice and soldiers, the whole tale of Princess Pirlipat and the Hard Nut, and even the inclusion of the dentist who takes care of the failed suitors. All of this was there on Hoffmann’s page, and all had been faithfully incorporated into Morris’s Hard Nut. Only the pointe-shoe-clad maid—a brilliant invention, originated by Kraig Patterson and now danced to perfection by Brandon Randolph—is entirely new to the plot.

If you have watched a particularly vivid dance piece over the course of thirty years, one of the things that happens is a kind of superimposition of roles. Behind Elisa Clark’s graceful rendering of Mrs. Stahlbaum, I saw not only the initial outrageous travesty by Peter Wing Healy, but also the subtle, womanly performance by John Heginbotham—all three excellent in their own ways, but with an added Shakespearean twist lent by putting a female dancer in the role designed as a man performing a woman.  I miss Morris’s own presence in The Hard Nut (first as a drunken party guest and the lead Arabian, later as Dr. Stahlbaum), but was thrilled to see his Stahlbaum role taken now by Joe Bowie, an old and much-missed member of the dance group. Rob Besserer, the original Drosselmeier, still inhabits my memory, but Billy Smith has done a wonderful job in recent years of masterfully taking over the role. And his touching duet with his Nutcracker nephew (formerly David Leventhal, then Aaron Loux, now Domingo Estrada) remains one of the most moving and thrilling and echt-Morris parts of the dance for me.

On my visit to BAM last week—my first time seeing The Hard Nut again since before the pandemic—I brought along a friend who had never seen the dance before. She was in ecstasies, like a small child. Another astute enthusiast, as I soon discovered, was the stranger sitting next to me. Just before the piece commenced, he politely informed me that he had a very small bladder and might have to dash out to the bathroom during the performance. “But I promise not to come back in again until the end of the act, so I won’t mess up your view twice.”

“Okay,” I said, “as long as you don’t leave during the Snowflake Dance.” 

“The Snowflake Dance!” he exclaimed. “How amazing that you should say that. That’s why I’m here for a second time, to see the Snowflake Dance.”

And a very good reason it is, for I too always await, at the end of the first act, this marvelous, inventive, funny, sad, thrilling ensemble performance, which concludes with the lovely image of Drosselmeier making his solitary way upstage through the snow, as the spinning snowflakes mark his progress by slowing to a gradual halt around him.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A German Requiem

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

The first time I was ever in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, back in the fall of 2003, I heard Brahms’s German Requiem. It was the first time I’d ever heard the piece performed live, and it was not a work I knew well, so what I mainly took away with me was the tremendous sense of the waves of sound penetrating my body. This was attributable, of course, to the felicitous acoustics of the concert hall (my favorite in the world, I often think, though the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall in New York give it a run for its money), but it was also due, I now realize, to the music itself. The choral singing, in particular, moves its listeners by overwhelming them, whatever their knowledge or lack of knowledge about the German words being sung.

On my most recent visit to the Philharmonie, twenty-one years later, I was lucky enough to hear Ein deutsches Requiem again, this time conducted by the incomparable Vladimir Jurowski and played by his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. The RSB has taken the place of the fabled Berlin Philharmonic orchestra in my heart, now that Simon Rattle has stepped down from the latter in favor of Kirill Petrenko, and if Jurowski is conducting anywhere in Berlin during my stays, I always make an effort to hear him.

The effort, this time, was repaid beyond measure when I was treated on November 24 to a concert that began with Haydn’s sprightly Symphony No. 44—new to me, but then, since he wrote over a hundred of them, that is not surprising. So far, so good, I thought at the intermission. But then, as if in recapitulation of my first experience, I was transported beyond pleasure to something resembling awe at the RSB’s performance of the German Requiem. Jurowski was terrific, and the orchestra no less so, but pride of place went, as it should, to the Rundfunk Chor, which brought forth Brahms’s sonorous admonitions and praises and contemplations of death (and life) in a way that profoundly stirred me. The two soloists, soprano Elsa Benoit and baritone Gerald Finley, were fine, but as usual the performance left me feeling that the very existence of soloists, in such a piece, was rather beside the point. It was the cohesion of the choral voices—their harmony, their counterpoint, their unified strength—that gave Brahms’s work its terrifying, remarkable, infinitely moving power. I left Berlin the next day with the sense that the city had rewarded me, as it always does, with the best musical experiences the world has to offer. And to me, in the present state of the world, that means a lot.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Czechs, Etc.

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

This week the Czech Philharmonic came to Carnegie Hall for three concerts in a row, and so did a huge number of Czechs. You could distinguish them from the normal Carnegie denizens because a) they were all dressed up—the men in suits or even black-tie, the women in glittery dresses—whereas we locals have taken to attending Carnegie concerts in jeans and sweaters; b) they were incredibly silent at the breaks between music, and incredibly vocal in their applause at the end; and c) they were all speaking Czech with each other. Just being in their midst was kind of like visiting a foreign country, without even having to go to an airport. The friendly and extremely knowledgeable man I sat next to on Wednesday night had come all the way from Prague for these three concerts, and I gather much of the rest of the crowd had done the same. On Thursday night they were even joined by the Czech president, who sat in one of the first-tier boxes and benevolently bowed to the crowd when he was introduced from the stage.

But how, you may well ask, was the music? Well, pretty stupendous, on the whole. I missed Tuesday night’s concert (for reasons that will be explained at the end of this post), but on Wednesday we were treated to Dvorak’s Violin Concerto featuring Gil Shaham, followed by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and on Thursday we had Daniil Trifonov in Dvorak’s Piano Concerto, with Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass to conclude the program. Both soloists were outstanding in completely different ways: Shaham looked like he was having a great time amid his fellow players, nodding and smiling at them in the moments when he wasn’t playing, and moving around freely, as a violinist can, whereas Trifonov remained hunched over the piano keys, communing with the instrument as if it and he belonged to their own superhuman species. What the two performances shared was their remarkable virtuosity, even beyond what was demanded by the complicated scores. If I had to judge by the audience response alone, I would say that the enthusiasm expressed for these two soloists was even greater than that accorded to the absent Mahler and Janacek—and that is saying a lot, because those huge symphonic pieces were performed beautifully, and the audience knew it.

Both evenings, plus the one I missed, were led by the terrific conductor Semyon Bychkov. I have only heard him once before, in a guest appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic, but I remembered his name because he was so good—and now, at the helm of his own orchestra, he was even better. In the time this Russian-born, American-trained, European-domiciled conductor has been leading the Czech Philharmonic, he has been able to infuse them with something of his own personality and at the same time bring out their own. In fact, I would say that “personality” is one of the triumphant attributes of this excellent orchestra, especially in the way they performed the huge symphonic pieces (or symphonic and choral, in the case of the Glagolitic Mass). Other fine orchestras feature amazingly exact precision, or subtlety of dynamic range, or some other technical skill; the Czechs are notable for their intensity, which manifests itself in the emotion-infused music they produce. Somehow, they and Bychkov together managed to create the sense that the whole gigantic room was feeling the same thing at once—a feeling that was reinforced when the Czech-led audience began to clap loudly and yell “Bravo” repeatedly at the end.

And where was I on Tuesday night? In the underground chamber space at Carnegie, Zankel Hall, listening to the countertenor Iestyn Davies sing mainly seventeenth-century German songs by the likes of Buxtehude, Geist, and Johann Christoph Bach, all the while accompanied by an English group called Fretwork.  I wouldn’t have missed it for the world—not only because the music itself was lovely and soothing, if often melancholy, but because the sight of five people all playing various-sized viols (with one more player in the background on organ and virginal) was itself intriguing and unusual. Have you ever seen a viol, that ancestor of the violin, the viola, and the cello?  It’s played like a viola de gamba—that is, gripped between the knees of the musician—and the bow is held from the inside rather than the outside, if you see what I mean, so that the whole experience of watching such a concert takes one back to a different period entirely. This was a kind of travel that no airport could have accomplished, and I was exceedingly grateful for it. Even more, though, I was grateful to be present in the same room with Iestyn Davies’ voice, an unearthly sound that can fill the whole of Carnegie’s large hall if it needs to (I have heard him do it, with the English Concert’s Rodelinda last spring), but that comes across as even more remarkable at close range. Neither male nor female, neither childish nor fully adult, the vocal music emitted by a great countertenor—and Davies is one of the greatest—sounds like nothing so much as the heartfelt expression of a ghost or spirit. It can truly make the hairs rise on the back of your neck. In contrast to Wednesday’s and Thursday’s delightfully human and overwhelmingly present experience, Tuesday’s concert seemed to offer a muted, lowkey, but nonetheless tangible access to a magical, hidden, ancestrally known world—one I generally don’t believe in, except when such music has its way with me.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Superlative Quintets

Posted on November 20, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

I am in Berlin now—a long-planned trip, so not an immediate reaction to November 5, but an escape nonetheless. It is good to be away, even if only for a short time, from the horrific goings-on I read about daily in my online version of the New York Times.

One of the key forms my Berlin escapism always takes, even in less fraught times, is to go hear wonderful music. The concerts I pack my schedule with whenever I am here almost never disappoint, but even by that standard, last week’s evening at the Pierre Boulez Saal was particularly noteworthy. I had chosen the evening for its program—Schumann’s third string quartet, followed by Brahms’s clarinet quintet—and for the participation of Jörg Widmann, an excellent clarinettist as well as a major composer, in the latter piece. The fact that the concert showcased the venerable Hagen Quartet was merely a by-product.

Silly me. How could I have failed to be aware of this terrific group, consisting mainly of Hagen siblings (the two brothers, Lukas and Clemens, on violin and cello respectively, with the sister, Veronika, on viola), though with one outlier, Rainer Schmidt, on the second violin? I can’t say whether being members of the same family helps with harmonizing over the decades, but whatever accounts for it, this is one perfectly synchronized group. Yet that is the least of it. What they bring to their music is a form of unobtrusive, undemonstrative attention that allows every little detail to become audible and visible. And the beauty of the occasion was that Widmann—who has previously made recordings with the Hagens and has allowed them to premiere some of his scores—seemed as much at home in this family as the players born into it.

The Pierre Boulez Saal is arranged in the round, so wherever you sit, somebody is bound to have his back turned to you. In this case, the Hagens all chose to turn in one direction during the first half of the program and the other way after the interval. Luckily for me, this brought them face-to-face with me for the whole of the marvelously played Brahms quintet. I could see the violist scrunching up her mouth when she got to a persnickety passage and smiling at Widmann, who sat next to her, when they were about to play a measure together. I could see Widmann himself charmingly and easily glancing around at the other members of the group even as he focused intensely on the clarinet score. And best of all, perhaps, I could watch the cellist as he performed his essential role in this quintet. I have listened to this quintet many times in recordings (to which I have now added an additional recording, the one made by the Hagens), and I could probably have told you that the cello sounded beautiful in it. But what I could not have discerned, without seeing it for myself, is the way that instrument continues to set the keynote for certain passages even when its sound is nearly drowned under those of the higher instruments.

The whole evening was a delight, and so was the aftermath, when my Berlin friend Martin and I resorted to the Pierre Boulez Saal bar for a post-concert glass of wine. Tucked into our corner of the lobby, next to a lovely former-East-German couple who had come to Berlin from Magdeburg to celebrate their wedding anniversary (and who eagerly joined in our praise for the concert), we were in a good position to watch the musicians emerging, with instruments in hand, from the Green Room downstairs. First came the two unrelated violinists; after that the cellist along with his sister, the violist; and finally Widmann himself, carrying his clarinet case. Each appearance provoked a round of applause from the remaining drinkers. And when Widmann came out at the end, I smilingly raised my glass of wine to him, at which he smiled back and gave a slight bow in my direction. “Only in Berlin!” I sighed to Martin.


Still, it’s not as if I can’t hear good music in New York. One night before departing for Berlin, and only four days after our disastrous election, I was lucky enough to attend an equally good though far less intimate concert at Alice Tully Hall. The first half consisted of Matthew Polenzani making his Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center debut in a rendition of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, which he was apparently performing for the first time. Polenzani, whom I don’t recall ever seeing before, has a strong but also delicate tenor voice and a charmingly understated stage manner. He greeted the front row of audience members by acknowledging he was glad not to see anyone he knew out there, and he carefully pitched his volume at a level that was below an opera-level blast yet audible throughout the chamber-music hall. I would never have guessed this was his first Schwanengesang—he delivered it like a master, and the Schubertian feeling of love for life, combined with an intense regret about leaving it, was all there, intact. Ken Noda, too, did an excellent job with the piano accompaniment, so that it really felt like a team effort, which the audience applauded delightedly.

If I had been arranging the program, I might have figured that would make a good close to the evening, but the CMS programmers are smarter about such things than I am. In second place, after the intermission, they put Schumann’s Piano Quintet. I like and admire the Schumann quartet that the Hagens played, but I adore the piano quintet, and have done ever since Mark Morris used it as the score to his revelatory V. Every one of the young CMS musicians who played in the Schumann on that Saturday night—Gloria Chen on piano, Sean Lee and Richard Lin on violins, Milena Pájaro-van de Stadt on viola, and my old favorite, Nicholas Canellakis, on cello—did a wonderful job of putting across each movement’s character. I had forgotten, since my last hearing, that this work gives us at least two thrilling endings, in the last two movements; one might even argue that each movement has its own distinctive ending, existing almost as a full piece of music in itself. In any case, the whole performance was a joy—enough of a joy to penetrate the dour mood of the New York audience and lift us up into our own form of escapism, without our even having to leave town.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Peoples’ Symphony Concerts

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

Something interesting and unusual is going on in New York’s musical world, and it has been going on for 125 years. So why doesn’t everybody in the city know about it already? How long does it take for a great secret to get out?

Imagine a concert series that caters to people who love music but have very little cash to spare. Tickets might cost in the range of $9 to $10—that is, about half the price of a movie these days, and less than a tenth of a Carnegie or New York Philharmonic seat. Yet the bargain-basement prices would not be reflected in the line-up of musical artists. On the contrary, the performers would be selected from the cream of the international crop. People like Yefim Bronfman, Steven Isserlis, and Joshua Bell would be pleased to lend their services, at vastly reduced prices, to these appreciative but comparatively impecunious audiences. And the audiences, in turn, would show their appreciation by being silent as mice during the concerts and deafeningly loud during the applause.

Too good to be true? Then you obviously haven’t been to one of the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts.

This organization, which was founded in 1900 by the conductor Franz X. Arens, has had only three directors in its century-and-a-quarter of existence: Mr. Arens from 1900 to 1914, Joseph Mann for the fifty-nine years from 1914 to 1973, and Frank Salomon for the fifty-one years from 1973 to the present. In a few months, in 2025, that fifty-one will become fifty-two, and PSC will complete its 125th anniversary season. Among the artists lined up for the three series this year are the soloists Paul Lewis and Augustin Hadelich (both of whom I’ve praised in this blog), ensembles like Takacs Quartet and the Knights (ditto), and even new music celebrities like the composer Timo Andres, appearing with the Calder Quartet. The concerts take place in PSC’s usual venues—that is, Washington Irving High School downtown and The Town Hall midtown—and are priced at their usual rate of $56 or $58 per series of six. If you want to get fancy and have a seat with a slightly better view, you can pay $84 per series at Washington Irving, or $90 at the slightly plusher Town Hall. And if you can’t make up your mind to go until late in the series, you can still get a single concert seat at the quite reasonable cost of $30.

I had dropped in on one or two of these performances before, at the single-ticket $30 rate, but it wasn’t until this fall that I made up my mind to see what the whole project was about. The first concert I went to, featuring the always-thrilling Takacs Quartet, took place on October 19 at a substitute location, the High School of Fashion Industries on West 24th Street, because the Washington Irving auditorium was temporarily unavailable.  No problem:  it was a delight to experience that venue, with its lobby displays of student clubs and its WPA-era murals inside the theater. The décor matched the old-lefty audience: the elderly guy next to me particularly wanted me to notice the mural’s rendering of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which he referred to as if it were part of his and my joint labor history. This same old guy is the one who first told me about the $56 series price.  “They just send you a wad of tickets and you get to use them up as the concerts come along,” he said happily. My particular gent appeared to be on his own, but many in the audience were clearly long-term friends or at least old acquaintances gathering for the millionth time.

That Takacs concert, consisting of Haydn, Britten, and Beethoven, was thoroughly satisfying, even if the acoustics were not quite as good as they would have been in, say, Berkeley’s Hertz Hall or Carnegie’s Zankel. But the sound quality itself mattered less than the feeling of life in the room: living musicians playing live music to lively audiences. Even better, I thought, was the Paul Lewis concert at The Town Hall a week later, on the afternoon of Sunday, October 27. From my comfortable seat in the balcony I could look down on Lewis’s hands and see every moment of his all-Schubert program; I could also hear every delicate note with no trouble. As he always does, Lewis played with consummate skill but no pretension. He spoke not a word, until he shyly announced a slow Schubert movement as his encore, and he responded to the thunderous applause with his usual graceful, modest bows. When Schubert sonatas are performed before your very eyes (and he will have performed the whole cycle for this audience, by the time he finishes), I feel that one’s attention is being sharpened in a way it is not when you just listen to the recordings. The recordings are great, of course—one wouldn’t want to live without Mitsuko Uchida’s or Richard Goode’s recordings, or for that matter those of Paul Lewis—but there is something special about seeing and hearing the magic take place on the spot, right there in front of you.

Frank Salomon introduced both of these concerts in a way that suggested we were all his extended family—that we would be interested in the anecdotes about his personal history with PSC, and acquainted with the names of the long-ago and recent participants. He tended to act as if his predecessor, Joseph Mann, had just walked out of the room, though it had been over a half century since the reins were handed over. When I wrote to him after the Takacs concert inquiring about that pesky apostrophe in Peoples’ Symphony Concerts (I myself would have punctuated it People’s, if I meant “for the people,” though I acknowledged that they might be referring to “the peoples of the world”), he answered: “When I joined PSC in 1972 working with my predecessor Joseph Mann, it was made clear to me that the apostrophe had to go after the ‘s.’ Yes, peoples’ of the world…” I like a man who knows a good tradition when he sees it, and who perpetuates it to the best of his ability. I like and admire the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts hugely, and if I lived in New York fulltime, I would certainly buy all three series every year.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Knights and Other Nights

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

There are eight million music stories in the naked city. Here are three of them:

October 24:  Last Thursday marked my official return to Carnegie Hall this season, and it helped that I was hearing The Knights. This small, vigorous orchestra, founded and still led by the brothers Colin Jacobsen (violinist) and Eric Jacobsen (conductor), is a perfect match with Carnegie’s medium-sized, acoustically warm Zankel Hall, which is large enough to accommodate the sold-out crowd of fans and small enough to feel intimate. The Knights always manage to surprise me, and this time the surprise was better than ever. I had been drawn to the program by the weird combination of the jazz-inflected (orchestral adaptations of George Gershwin and Keith Jarrett pieces) and the classical (Beethoven’s Fourth), but what I had not expected was to be impressed and delighted by the final piece on the program: a world premiere by the youngish composer Michael Schachter. To say it stood up against the Beethoven would be ridiculous—nobody stands up against Beethoven, and nobody is meant to—but it didn’t pale by comparison, and it more than held its own with the Michael Atkinson jazz adaptations. In particular, it outshone, at least in my eyes, the version of Rhapsody in Blue that opened the program—a much-loved piece on which Schachter had explicitly based his own new Being and Becoming: Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra. What tied the whole program together, in addition to the fact that it was bookended with twin rhapsodies, was the stellar performance of pianist Aaron Diehl. First on the piano in Rhapsody in Blue, then on a harpsichord in the three-part Suite from Jarrett’s Book of Ways, and finally back on the piano for the Schachter premiere, Diehl elegantly and skillfully made each of his solo parts glow, even as he blended in beautifully with The Knights. It was hard to say whether the music alone or the powerful feeling of collaboration onstage was the most pleasing element of the evening, but who cares? And now that I have been treated for the first time to a work by Michael Schachter, I will certainly keep my eye out for him in future.

October 25: The next night, Friday, I had signed myself up for something unusual: an installment in the “Un-Silent Film” series at the New School’s College of Performing Arts. In this case, the program consisted of the 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning, with a live accompaniment composed a number of years ago by Philip Glass. Because the tickets were free, the event in the New School’s Tishman Auditorium attracted a wildly enthusiastic crowd, ranging from neighborhood oldsters to savvy undergraduates to costumed New Yorkers of all kinds. The movie, which occupied that strange middle range between sound and silence—it had titles, but you could also hear the characters speaking—was memorable but a bit creaky, especially when you compare it to Tod Browning’s masterpiece, Freaks, which he made only a year later. But the musical performance by five College of Performing Arts students, led by the Philip Glass Ensemble veteran Michael Riesman, was top-of-the-line, and the combination of the two was just right for the Friday before Halloween, in an only-in-Greenwich-Village kind of way.

October 26: I rounded out my trio of musical evenings by going on Saturday night to hear another kind of trio—that is, the Ethan Iverson Trio at Birdland, a venerable midtown jazz venue. I am not a jazz afficionado, though I sometimes get taken to performances by my more knowledgeable friends and relatives, but in this case I myself had chosen the concert. I’ve known Ethan Iverson for decades, ever since he was the music director of the Mark Morris Dance Company, and I’ve followed him on both coasts and through numerous incarnations—as participant in the groundbreaking Bad Plus, as an independent jazz composer, as the adapter of Beatles songs and Burt Bacharach songs for recent Mark Morris productions, and as a performer in previous versions of the Ethan Iverson Trio. The present combo, if you ask me, is the best yet, with Ethan himself on the piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Peter Erskine on drums. The three of them melded so subtly and beautifully together than they felt as if they had been playing these semi-improvised, carefully composed pieces for years. They are all masters, so no one had anything to prove, and nobody tried to outshine the other two. Every piece on the program was good, and many of them struck me as quite personal: “There Is No Choice,” for instance, which Ethan introduced by saying, “They say opposites attract, but sometimes what attracts you is people of similar viewpoints”—his quiet way, I assumed, of alluding to the upcoming election. (In his Substack newsletter, Transitional Technology, Iverson has already, and unusually, stressed the importance of casting a vote for Kamala Harris.)  Or “That Was Interesting,” a lively piece which Ethan introduced by telling us that his midwestern aunts used to greet his fledgling efforts at producing art with exactly that phrase. The performance as a whole felt familial, in the best possible way, and the audience responded accordingly.

A final note: Every variety of music venue has its own implied rules of behavior, its own set of courtesies and discourtesies. At Zankel, it was basically sedate classical-music behavior, though a few people clapped after the first Beethoven movement (a sign of audience inclusiveness, and therefore welcome, if you ask me), and many people augmented their final applause with approving shouts. At Tishman Auditorium, there were rare moments of isolated weirdness—the middle-aged woman next to me leaned forward into my space and started to film the whole thing on her iPhone, until I emphatically shut her down—but mainly the audience was silently appreciative for the entire seventy-five-minute performance; even the scattered chuckles at the film’s evident datedness were quiet and respectful. But at Birdland, where the management requires patrons to purchase drinks and/or food, a rudeness problem arose in the very first row of tables (which happened to be right near where I was sitting). Even after the set had actually begun, and far into it, two young women, both extremely drunk, continued to play with their iPhones, chat with their boyfriends through said phones, speak aloud to each other in non-whispery voices, burst into fits of unrestrained giggling, and other audience-disturbing behavior. Because I am not a jazz-club regular, I had no idea how such things should be handled, but Birdland evidently did. After receiving one or two whispered warnings from a shaven-headed man who looked like a bouncer but was probably just the manager, the two were gently escorted out by their (and our) waitress, with no visible fuss whatsoever. When the waitress returned, everyone in my corner thanked her profusely. And since I had not allowed these two entitled little jerks, even at their worst, to distract me completely from the beauty of the music, I felt that overall it was a win-win.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ainadamar

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

Whoever decided to hire a choreographer as the director of Osvaldo Goliijov’s Ainadamar at the Metropolitan Opera made an excellent choice, because the opera desperately needed the addition of dance to make it work. The plot is thin to begin with—an aging Catalan actress, Margarita Xirgu, recalls her early collaboration and friendship with the brilliant, martyred Federico García Lorca, and then passes his legacy on to her students in Montevideo, Uruguay—and is not helped along by its vague division into three “images.” The music, though pleasant, does little to propel the opera forward: a combination of Latin-inflected songs and weird sound effects (horses galloping, fans snapping open, heavy poles dropping onto the stage), it possesses crescendos but no high points and melodies without memorability. But the director/choreographer Deborah Colker, who enlisted an additional choreographer, Antonio Najarro, to help her with the flamenco bits, manages to use dance as the glue that keeps the piece together—until, at least, the point when it ultimately falls apart.

The performance I saw last night began with a single male flamenco dancer onstage, posing, turning, and stamping to a rat-a-tat sound that could have been either flamenco heels or simulated gunfire. Or no, the performance actually began before that, when the conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya sneaked into the pit and instantly started the overture, without pausing for the usual audience applause at his appearance. I liked that very much, and I also liked the way dance was incorporated everywhere in the scenes that followed: convoys of women who could move gracefully and in perfect unison to the flamenco-esque rhythms they were singing; soloists and chorus members who could sharply and simultaneously snap open their fans with skill and panache; and a whole stageful of people moving at once, on various levels of the complicated set, to the habanera-like tune they were giving voice to. I was wowed by the soloists, particularly Angel Blue as Margarita, Elena Villalón as her student Nuria, and Daniela Mack as Lorca himself. Some of my friends objected to the fact that Lorca was played by a woman—as if homosexuality were somehow being equated with girliness or effeminacy—but I found Mack’s portrayal both persuasive and powerful. Her rich contralto could plunge low enough to sound like a man’s register, and the way she stood and gestured in her white suit seemed perfectly masculine to me. Even her small size, especially when she stood next to the grand, maternally proportioned Angel Blue, felt right for Federico, who was only five foot seven in real life.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when the production lost me. It was about an hour into the intermissionless, eighty-minute opera. The scene was an imagined one (there is no detailed record of Lorca’s 1936 murder at the hands of the Falangists), in which a priest visited the doomed playwright and his two fellow condemned men—yes, three, as in the Crucifixion—and got them to “confess” their crimes, though they had not committed any. Then all three were shot at once and fell dead on the stage, silently. “Brilliant,” I thought. “How smart of Colker to eliminate the movie-cliché sound of an execution’s gunfire, and instead to leave us with the silence of a Goya or a Manet.” But I thought this too soon. Only minutes later, we got a full blast of percussive machine-gun fire incorporated into the music, complete with chorus members repeatedly throwing their arms about as if they’d been shot.

It was truly trashy, and from then on the opera was a mess, with people dying and returning from the dead, scenes changing as if within a shower (literally: there were huge droplets on a big circular plastic curtain), and wailing tributes to Lorca’s legacy that did nothing to enhance his seriously earned reputation. Even though this ending accounted for only a third or even a quarter of the opera’s brief length, it felt endless to me. As Dr. Johnson said about Paradise Lost (though with less reason, if you ask me), “None ever wished it longer.”

An opera like this is worth nothing if it doesn’t move you. Its creators have been handed all the materials for a wrenching emotional catharsis, and if it doesn’t get there, that is its own fault. I left Ainadamar feeling completely cold, completely untouched. And that is shocking, because in the natural course of things, even the bare story of Lorca’s fate—even just the sight of a plaque dedicated to his memory on the streets of San Francisco’s Castro District—can leave me feeling a bit weepy.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Adventurous Opera

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

Normally, at least in San Francisco, the summer music offerings tend to be safe and crowd-pleasing. At the moment, for instance, the San Francisco Symphony is advertising a series of movie-score evenings as its featured seasonal fare. (But then, the SFS appears to be in the process of an irreversible decline, following on its idiotic parting with the much-treasured maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen earlier this year.) Across the street at the San Francisco Opera, however, the tone in June has been very different, with three unusual productions on the boil at once. If they are not all equally successful, they nonetheless represent a very brave attempt to do something serious and interesting in this normally silly season.

The first of the three I attended was an import from the Komische Oper in Berlin: The Magic Flute, directed by Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade. Since Barrie Kosky is my favorite opera director in the world, I was most eager to see this production—and, perhaps predictably, I was most disappointed in its shortcomings. Since I will be publishing a full-length discussion of this Magic Flute (and one other) in the Winter issue of The Threepenny Review, I won’t go on at length here about what went wrong. Suffice to say that a brilliant idea—to borrow the methods and style of 1920s silent cinema and apply them to this fairy-tale plot—turned out to be incredibly tedious in practice. I suppose I could have shut my eyes and just enjoyed Mozart’s terrific music, but that is against my principles. So I suffered through the two-hours-plus of flat-screen presentation and delirious animation, wishing at every minute that I was back at one of the truly great Kosky operas I’ve seen in the past.

A much better production, originally directed by Christopher Alden in London in 2008 and brought to San Francisco relatively intact, has been given to Handel’s Partenope. I am a Handel fan of the first order, but even I have to acknowledge that this nearly plotless opera from 1730, featuring only six singers and lasting for well over three hours, did not represent the composer’s finest hour. Yet thanks to the lively cast and the intelligent stage design (which frequently interacted with each other, due to the cast’s special abilities), this minor opera came off as a real treat. The two countertenors, Nicholas Tamagna and Carlo Vistoli, were especially wonderful: not only did they both have beautifully pure, unforced, melodically nuanced voices, but they were also marvelously adept at the physical parts of their roles. Tamagna, in particular, had the grace and humor of a young Charlie Chaplin. His feats included singing as he fell down the stairs, singing as he twirled a top hat on a cane, singing as he danced a clever jig—you name it. The soprano Julie Fuchs was also excellent in the title role, though I could have wished she had not been made out to be a nymphomaniacal dominatrix: Handel never grudged his women a strong sex drive, but I guess Alden couldn’t quite imagine that. And Alek Shrader, the tenor who performed Emilio, was also pretty great in his part, though why Emilio had to be played as the photographer Man Ray (the entire production was set in 1920s Paris) is beyond me. Still, I didn’t mind the French-bohemian costumes, and I loved the elegant set, so I was able to let this little senseless distraction go.

The set of Innocence, the late Kaija Saariaho’s last opera, was a stunner too, but it was also an essential part of the performance: in fact, I can’t imagine a production done with a different set. This one, designed by Chloe Lamford, slowly rotated clockwise throughout the entire hour and forty minutes of the intermissionless production. One side of the huge central structure consisted of a two-story Helsinki house at which a wedding was being celebrated; the other side showed the interior floors of an international high school at which a mass shooting had taken place ten years earlier. The connection between these two events (the brother of the groom had been the shooter, while a waitress hired to serve at the party turned out to be the mother of one of the dead girls) formed the gripping plot of the opera.

I use the word “plot” advisedly. Being present at this opera was, in a way, like watching an incredibly suspenseful but also highly disturbing movie. The program acknowledged as much by stating on the synopsis page, “The story is intended to unfold in real time as we experience it as audience members. The full synopsis can be found on page 44, but please note that it does include plot spoilers.” The idea of spoilers in an opera plot is something new to me, but then again, this was the U.S. premiere of a 2021 opera. There was also the fact that Saariaho and her co-creators (Sofi Oksanen as the writer of the original Finnish libretto, Aleksi Barrière as the multi-lingual librettist and dramaturg) had chosen to take up such ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter. To say they did it tastefully or tactfully is not quite right: the impact of the production would have been far less if we did not feel the violence so viscerally, and that applies to emotional violence at least as much as to dead bodies. But it was done well and powerfully, and the music—all recitative or purely instrumental, no arias whatsoever, in Saariaho’s uniquely contemporary but never coldly abstract style—strengthened the effect throughout.

To put on a new opera with a libretto in nine different languages is challenging enough; to have it be on such a disturbing subject makes the challenge doubly or triply hard. Yet the San Francisco Opera rose to the occasion. I can’t say I approved of their side trimmings—for instance, the full-day violence-in-the-schools seminar and all its surrounding platitudes, which I took as the equivalent of the annoying modern habit of providing “triggers warnings”—but I understand why they felt they had to soften the blow. What I do approve of is the number of young people who filled the auditorium on the evening I saw the opera, along with their wholehearted enthusiasm for the production itself. I myself applauded strongly (initially for the stage crew, who took the first bow, but also for the 21 principals, 40 choristers, and 65 orchestra musicians), but what I really felt by the end of this show was exhausted, wrung out, my muscles as tense as if I had just been through some terrible event. I am very glad I saw Innocence, but I hope never to see it again—it was just too painful. Still, it is salutary to be reminded that opera, at its freshest and most original, can do this to an audience, and I am truly grateful to the San Francisco Opera for bringing me that discovery.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Berlin Music Diary

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

All told, I attended eleven musical events over the course of three weeks. As is usual in my Berlin stays, none was a waste of time. Another way of putting it is that all were at least worth the 35 to 50 euros (about 38 to 54 dollars, at current exchange rates) I spent to go to them. At prices like these, one can afford to experiment. But here I am only going to focus on the six best evenings of my stay.

April 27: This was the first of my two Tetzlaff concerts, and it was held in the larger hall of the Konzerthaus Berlin, the venerable and beautiful Schinkel auditorium located in the Gendarmenmarkt plaza. It featured the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, conducted by someone I had never seen before named Marc Albrecht, with Christian Tetzlaff performing as a soloist in the first of the two major pieces on the program. That was the German premiere of a new piece by a living composer named Christian Jost, his second violin concerto, subtitled “Concerto noir.” I don’t know if the color referred to his mood in composing it or the difficulty of the piece, but as Jost said in his personal introduction to the premiere, it was written for Tetzlaff, who can do anything. (Jost also mentioned modestly—or faux modestly, it is always hard to tell in German—that the evening’s program featured two composers: Richard Strauss, whose name would be familiar to all present, and himself, who would be less so.) It is lucky that Tetzlaff can do anything, because this concerto struck me as almost impossible to play, it was so thorny and harsh and arhythmical and fast. I imagine I have never heard as many separate notes played by a violinist in such a short period of time. And yet the rewards, in Tetzlaffian terms, were relatively skimpy, because although one could see that he was doing everything right—superlatively right—there were no supremely melodic moments in which one could savor his golden tone, and practically no variations in the dynamics, so that the soloist had to perform at an intense volume throughout. I was glad to have been present—I am always glad to be present at a Tetzlaff concert—but let’s just say that the Strauss Sinfonia domestica, agitated though it sometimes was, came as a bit of a relief after the Jost.

Much more rewarding, I would say, was my second Tetzlaff concert, which took place on April 30 in the smaller hall of the Konzerthaus. I bought the ticket because Tetzlaff was on the program, and he was indeed marvelous in the Kodaly Duo Opus 7 for violin and cello that was the penultimate event on the three-hour program. But the whole event was even better than its many parts. A memorial concert for a dead cellist and cello teacher named Boris Pergameschikow, who had taught several generations of major cello players at Berlin’s prime music academy, the event featured about ten different accomplished cellists (plus a pianist, a clarinettist, and Tetzlaff the violinist) in pieces ranging from venerable composers like Beethoven, Saint-Saens, and Debussy to modernists like Ernest Bloch, Samuel Barber, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Held as a benefit concert for the academy at which Pergamenschikow had taught—the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik—it felt like something of a family affair, with people greeting each other as they took their seats. I was in the second row, surrounded by all these devoted music fans and musicians, and practically onstage (the Kleiner Saal is very intimate) with Tetzlaff and the others. Perhaps the most moving moment came right after Tetzlaff’s terrific performance, when a whole wave of new cellists—students of two of the major ones, Nicolas Altstaedt and Claudio Bohórquez, joined their teachers and five others for a final Hymnus by Julius Klengel. The sound of fifteen or sixteen cellos playing at once, and the sight of the proud teachers winking and nodding encouragingly at their students, was nothing short of divine.

In between these two, I attended something that I normally wouldn’t even have counted as a concert, but it seems to deserve the name in retrospect. On Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse in the middle of Berlin is an old cinema called Babylon—yes, just as in Babylon Berlin—that dates from 1929, though the building that now houses it is no doubt a postwar reconstruction. Frequently they run silent films accompanied by a live band (titled, appropriately enough, the Babylon Berlin Orchestra), and the last time I was in Berlin I saw Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great Metropolis screened there in that way. This time, on April 28, what I saw and heard was Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, The Circus, accompanied live by the score that Chaplin himself had composed for it. What a complete and total delight that was!

There are so many fine conductors in Berlin—Vladimir Jurowski and Simon Rattle, just to name two of my world favorites—that I sometimes forget to trumpet the achievements of Ivan Fischer, who has also worked primarily in that city since fleeing from his native Hungary a number of years ago. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 5, I was back in the large hall of the Konzerthaus to hear a typically great and inventive program put together and conducted by Fischer. Once again it featured the Konzerthausorchester, but this time they seemed to me to come to vibrant life in a way that had not been true under Albrecht. Or perhaps it was the program itself that brought them to life: a short and typical orchestral piece by Philip Glass called Facades, following by a Bach choral piece (the Cantata for Soloists, Chorus, and Orchestra, BWV 105), which was in turn followed by a major choral work by Philip Glass, the Passion of Ramakrishna. The soloists were outstanding, the chorus even more so, and I had a terrific seat up in the first-ring Loge, right over the conductor’s podium, which allowed me to watch Fischer’s kindly face and eloquent hands as he gestured toward the players and the singers. You might think that a Bach sandwich with Philip Glass as the bread wouldn’t work, but it succeeded beautifully, and the different kinds of spirituality in the vocal pieces, expressed in different languages (German and English), made the whole thing feel universally inviting, even to a confirmed atheist like myself.

The two concerts I had most anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—took place on the last two nights of my stay. First, on May 14, was my second chance in less than a month to hear the Danish String Quartet in a chamber-music venue. They were playing at the Pierre Boulez Saal, where the audience is seated in the round and the players are in the center, and in their comments to the audience (which were in English), they observed that it was a bit difficult to know where to face when talking. When playing, they faced each other, and if anything, this increased the sense of mutual animation and pleasure they clearly derived from each other’s company. The program was quite similar to the one I heard at Princeton last November—the Haydn Opus 20, No. 3, Shostakovich’s brief yet intense No. 7, and a selection of Irish and Scandinavian folk tunes the DSQ had adapted for string quartet—except that instead of the Britten piece they had played at Princeton, there was a very good Thomas Ades string quartet called The Four Quarters. The audience members loved the classical pieces (not to mention the players’ friendly, somewhat humorous commentary), but they went wild over the folk tunes, stamping and whistling and yelling “Woo-hoo!” when that final segment of the concert was over. Their degree of enthusiasm clearly took the DSQ musicians by surprise—not that they had expected anything less than heartfelt applause, which is what they always get, but the intensity of this prolonged response was unusual. I was happy to see them get their due from the normally restrained Germans, and I felt thrilled, as I always am with the Danes, to be part of their warm and appreciative audience.

And then, on May 15, came the concert I had prolonged my stay to hear: Simon Rattle conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the last three Mozart symphonies. Recently the MCO acquired José Maria Blumenschein as its concertmaster, and hearing this fine violinist play again after a gap of nearly fifteen years (I last heard him when he was a member of the youthful Vertigo Quartet, having just graduated from the Curtis Institute) was a pleasure in itself. But the real delight was in listening to—and seeing, because he is a very active conductor—the performance that Rattle drew out of the orchestra as a whole. The 39th and 40th Symphonies were excellent; the 41st was a revelation, and made me feel I had never really heard it done properly before. During the interval, my friend Martin and I had been discussing with each other the fact that Mozart is almost always a youthful passion; one slightly grows out of him with age, and at times perhaps even tires of his repetitions, as one never does with Beethoven. But as we were leaving the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall that night, after that singularly life-enhancing performance of the “Jupiter” symphony, I said to Martin: “Well, even Simon Rattle can’t quite turn Mozart into Beethoven. But he can make us feel nineteen again.”

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Photography Show in Berlin

Posted on May 19, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

As I hinted I was going to, I spent late April and early May in Berlin. Normally what I would be writing about here are the excellent concerts I attended—and don’t worry, I will get to them in a later post. But for now I want to focus on something much more unexpected: a rather amazing show I happened to find at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.

I actually try to avoid this museum as much as possible, because it is affiliated with the Helmut Newton Foundation, and I really can’t stand his work. But this time there was a special show I wanted to see, so on the last day of April, I wended my way up the first couple of floors, ignoring the blown-up Newton photos of breasty, naked females, and entered the top-floor gallery devoted exclusively to the work of Michael Wesely.

Wesely, who was born in Munich in 1963, has lived in Berlin since 2000. To judge by the photographs on display here—not only the most recent ones in the main exhibit called Doubleday, but the earlier examples of his time-lapse or archival work—he is particularly interested in the effects of time on our perceptions. How can we detect the still-living human element within archaic urban landscapes? How can we mark the passage of a few hours or even longer when people are assembled in public spaces? And how, most importantly, can we see both the past and present at once?

The astonishing photos that compose the project Doubleday: Berlin from 1860 to the Present Day are an attempt to answer that last question through what I hesitate to call technical means. It’s true that a great deal of technique had to go into making these entrancing, large-scale photographs, which combine Berlin as it used to look with the Berlin that surrounds us now. (“Now,” for Michael Wesely, is 2023: that is the second date on every caption in the show.) But to achieve the superimpositions in a way that does full justice to both present and past, he has had to make innumerable aesthetic and psychological decisions. Should the archival photos be left in their old sepia or black-and-white while the modern ones are in color? Yes, was his answer to that, though in some cases he has allowed a wash of color, usually blue, to unite the two eras. Which should dominate, the old or the new? His solution here was counterintuitive, for he has mainly allowed the old photos to come forward strongly, while the new images fade to ghostlike wisps in the background. How far back in time should he go for each location? This must have depended partly on what was available in the archives. But the archives he drew from were huge, so his choice, for instance, to show the Gendarmenmarkt in 1945 and 2023—partly turned to rubble by the war, but even more torn up by the recent renovation of the plaza—was clearly meant to draw a link between the two kinds of ruins. He gives us several samples of Potsdamer Platz, from several different angles and from multiple years, in some cases emphasizing just the current traffic in relation to the postwar desolation, and in other places capturing the ugly too-high buildings that stand like pale sentinels around that once-open war-torn spot.

Many of these scenes portray places I had just passed in the surrounding neighborhood: the Gedächtniskirche in 1946 and now, its “broken” shape and structure still nearly identical; the Kurfürstendamm at present and in 1962, with hordes of pedestrians from both eras milling along the sidewalks; the Budapester Strasse entrance to the Zoo in 1949, dwarfed by the high-rise building that stands behind it today and the modern cars that whizz by on the street. If you have walked around Berlin a lot, you can’t help but recognize many of the locations, and for the ones you don’t, Weseley has provided helpful captions and dates.

One of my favorite photos in the whole show is an elegant frontal image of the old Lehrter Bahnhof, taken in 1885, with a shadowy ultra-modern building (the Cube, it’s called) looming quietly behind and over it. I get a similar chill from the 1885 view of the simple and dignified old Marienkirche, with horses and carts standing in front of it and a stark white-and-silver TV tower seemingly growing out of its back. The Reichstag, too, is beautiful both as a dome-less ruin in 1945 and with a sliver of the current glass cupola peering over its head. These photos look nothing like the standard notion of a double-exposure, the kind an amateur might produce by mistake. On the contrary, each melded pair forms a single coherent image, an almost painterly view of a particular section of the city at two specific moments in time.

Given my own historical interests (I’ve recently been researching late-Weimar Berlin), I am struck by two images that draw on 1929 and 1931 for their earlier shots. The first is taken on Französische Strasse, where very little—including the Bridge of Sighs extending over the quiet street—has changed since 1929; only a faint background of bluish-tinted modern buildings and an even fainter image of a modern-day white car interrupt the old look. In the 1931 photo, taken from the Rote Rathaus and looking in the direction of Alexanderplatz, most of the blue-and-sepia image looks old; only the white column of the TV tower, dominating the right side of the picture like something that has landed from outer space, assures us that time has indeed marched on. The pedestrians in both of these pictures are all from the original era: the men (they are all men) wear clothes that, while not utterly Victorian, do not quite look like ours, and they stand next to vehicles—an open-topped car, some old-style double-decker buses—that have long since been retired. These people are just going about their normal lives, it seems, and only a few snatches of modern-day color and the faint glimpses of some as-yet-unbuilt buildings suggest that the world as they knew it is about to come to an end.

Wesely clearly knows his city and its history through and through; he can actually visualize its past when he looks at its present. Many of my Berlin friends have reported similar experiences themselves—a kind of palimpsest, in which the city as they used to know it is overlaid by the one before their eyes. But no one else, to my knowledge, has made that sense of doubleness, of constantly teetering on the brink between present and past, as viscerally accessible as Wesely has. Even his remarkable achievement, though, will someday be swallowed up by history itself. That is the thing about “now,” especially in an ever-changing city like Berlin: it is always temporary. Eventually Wesely’s 2023 will become part of the city’s past, just as my or your 2024 or 2025 or 2026 will. All of our visions of this city are always teetering, always momentary, because the only permanent thing about Berlin—as its 1929 inhabitant Joseph Roth was astute enough to observe—is its constant mutability.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment