Klezmer at the Kammermusiksaal

Posted on November 12, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Every  once in a while, it makes sense to take a big gamble on unknown musicians. Occasionally the results can be disappointing, even annoying. But when they are good, they are well worth the risk.

On Wednesday night, I hit the jackpot with She’Koyokh. No, I had never heard of them either, and I had no idea why the Berlin Philharmonic had chosen to sponsor them as special guests in its World Music series. All I knew was that they would be playing something billed as “klezmer,” which somehow also included Roma, Kurdish, Turkish, Serbian, and other Eastern European melodies. Since klezmer, in my experience, has always been pretty exclusively Jewish, I was curious to see what this would entail.

It turns out that She’Koyokh, which apparently means something like “Well done!” in Yiddish, consists of seven musicians from London, one of whom is Serbian and another Turkish. None of the names and none of the faces looked Jewish to me (but then, we American Jews have always been told that English Jews don’t look Jewish). Yet the group has been featuring klezmer music for all twenty-five years of its peripatetic existence, and several of its members—in particular the outstanding clarinetist, Susi Evans—play klezmer with other groups as well.

I knew I was going to like these folks the minute they appeared on the stage of the Kammermusiksaal, where I have previously seen relatively sedate chamber performances. This raggle-taggle crowd was dressed entirely in their own particular costumes, which veered from pseudo-ethnic dress (on the part of the skilled violinist, Meg Hamilton) to sparkly-skinny punk (Evans) to glamorously chic (the amazing singer, Cigdem Aslan) to mildly formal (the excellent accordionist Zivolid Nikolic, who also happened to have a wonderful tenor voice) to schlump-casual (the guitarist Matt Bacon, the percussionist Christina Borgenstierna, and the double-bass-player Paul Moylan—all of whom were a joy to hear, both as backup and as soloists).

The instrumental numbers sounded a lot like klezmer I’ve heard before, though with none of the familiar, overplayed bar-mitzvah-party melodies. But they also included rhythms and sounds I heard long ago in Balkan folk-dancing sessions (and indeed, the group tried to get us on our feet to dance a Serbian kola at one point, though with mixed results, due mainly to audience inability to distinguish left from right). The vocal numbers—primarily performed by Aslan, though with backup from Evans and Nikolic, who also had his own Serbian solo—ranged from Ladino to Kurdish to Roma, with one entirely made-up song (in Turkish, I think) set by Aslan to a Greek melody she loved. I didn’t recognize any of the songs, either, though I did recognize the sensibility: broken-hearted, intense, and with the jagged tonal qualities that had affinities with many other Middle Eastern melodies.

Particularly in the speedy, catchy instrumental passages, I found it hard to keep my feet and body still. (I, who complained so bitterly about my over-active seatmate at the Steve Reich concert!)  And yet I also felt tears coming to my eyes at moments: a tribute, I suppose, to the way this lively music emerged from conditions of suppression and oppression, flaunting its very existence as a separate genre, whining and wheedling its way into possibly dubious ears. The whole evening had a modestly celebratory quality, which was well-matched by the self-effacing English patter that the speakers (mainly Susi Evans) carried on between pieces. The audience clearly loved the group, stamping and whistling their approval throughout—there were actually audible cries of “No! No!” when the approaching end of the set was mentioned—but I think they mainly failed to get the understated British humor. My favorite such moment occurred when Evans announced that she would now be playing a piece by the famous klezmer clarinettist David Harris, “so famous that he was known as the Jewish Benny Goodman—who was of course Jewish,” she added in a quick aside. I and one or two others burst out laughing; no one else did, for reasons that escaped me. Because German audiences are afraid to laugh at anything about Jews? Because no one else took in the quietly ironic joke? No matter. We all adored the show, and that’s what counts.

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The Berlin Philharmonic

Posted on November 8, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

I always try, when I’m visiting Berlin, to start off the musical part of my stay with something especially good. This is not hard to do, since almost everything Berlin offers musically is good. But this time I appeared to be hitting the jackpot. On my first full day here, November 7, I would be just in time to catch Ivan Fischer conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante and Mahler’s Fifth.

I have been following Fischer for decades—first when he combined performances of his own Budapest Symphony Orchestra with guest postings elsewhere, and then, after he was exiled during Orban’s regime, at his various appearances in Berlin. Most recently, I heard him conduct a very moving Philip Glass choral work at the Konzerthaus with that venue’s in-house symphony. So I was especially looking forward to what he would do with the fabled Berlin Phil in their own beautifully designed concert hall.

Imagine my distress, therefore, when I learned from that morning’s paper that he had been replaced at the last minute by a youngish (and unknown to me) Colombian conductor, Andrés Orozo-Estrada. In the course of the day I gradually managed to piece together the back story. Fischer, who is used to being in charge, had wanted the players to rearrange their normal seating for the Mahler—specifically, by moving the eight double-basses from the righthand side of the stage to the center, just behind the woodwinds. The musicians, a strong-willed group, had rebelled, pointing out that in their hall there was no back wall at the center to reflect the strings’ resonant notes, and moreover, that the presence of this large group of massive instruments would block the sightlines between the other players. I have seen some of Fischer’s rearrangements before—in particular, an occasion when he memorably put the strings on the outside of the orchestral semi-circle and the brass and winds inside—and I am always up for his experiments. But the Berlin Phil musicians had already tried this particular rearrangement with him in an earlier performance of Mahler’s First, and they resisted this time. Both sides agreed to disagree, and the eminent conductor was replaced at the last minute by Orozco-Estrada.

For about thirty seconds at the beginning of the Haydn, I regretted not hearing Fischer perform. Then I just let it all go. The four soloists in the Sinfonia Concertante, drawn from the ranks of the Berlin Phil itself—Noah Bendix-Balgley on violin, Bruno Delepelaire on cello, Jonathan Kelly on oboe, and Stefan Schweigert on bassoon—were all notably terrific, and they probably could have done their job whoever was conducting. As they wove Haydn’s rollicking melodies in and out of each other’s singular voices, and then combined with the collective voices of the orchestra, I felt entirely at peace and satisfied (just as Haydn always wants us to feel). I may have grumbled at times about the lack of good places to eat near the Philharmonie or its distance from the nearest subway stop, but really, what was there to complain about in this acoustically perfect, surprisingly intimate hall? It was heaven. Oh, and the conducting was fine: a bit antic here and there, yet never intrusive, never disruptive.

But it was in the Mahler that Orozco-Estrada truly came into his own. The motions of his body that had seemed slightly exaggerated or excessively sharp in relation to the Haydn now fitted the music perfectly: his rhythms and Mahler’s blended exactly. The Fifth is my favorite Mahler symphony, and I have heard some great performances, but none better than this. And with an attentive audience—which this one was, thank god—the silences between the five movements can be almost as expressive as the music itself. From my excellent seat, I could see every one of the players, and I could sense how important it was for them to see each other, especially the brass, who would have been blocked by the central double-basses. I could measure, for instance, the way the basses’ pizzicato on the far right echoed and balanced the harp notes coming from the far left. The orchestra was so precisely coordinated that when the eight cellos played on their own—led by the dashing Mr. Delepelaire, and backed up only by the quietly flickering beat of one drum—they sounded like a single instrument. As the final movement rose to its ultimate crescendo (a point at which I always watch the cymbalist, as he doubles and then redoubles his pace), I thought to myself that though it might have been interesting to hear Fischer’s version, this version of Mahler’s Fifth had turned out to be perfect. And you can’t do better than that.

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On Second Thought

Posted on November 7, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Well, it turns out I’m not really the daily-posting type. Nothing of interest happened yesterday. I went to the one photography show I had picked out in advance, enticingly titled “Projections Onto the East,” but it turned out to be a total dud, without any discernible relationship to the title. Its only redeeming feature was the venue, a strange pseudo-antiquity called the Schinkel Pavilion, constructed during GDR times and previously invisible to me, despite the fact that I must have passed by it half a dozen times.

I did go to Dussmann and encountered my Berlin book piled in stacks on the nonfiction table of the English Bookshop. So that was a thrill. I even took a photo so as to be able to savor the pleasure over time.

I will be back tomorrow only if I have anything to say.

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Hooray for America! And onward to Berlin…

Posted on November 4, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

I had always planned to delay my November trip to Berlin until after the midterms, and wow, am I glad I did. To celebrate yesterday’s election results in the midst of my fellow citizens has been a joy beyond imagining. There are still horrors to come, no doubt—we have not gotten rid of the central villain and his devious henchmen yet—but to know that a sizable majority of Americans (including Texans! including South Carolinians!) are absolutely fed up with this administration is satisfaction enough for now. I haven’t felt this good about my native country for years.

On Friday I will arrive in Berlin for the first time since my book about the city came out. (I’ve been told I’ll even be able to see Berlin Before and After stacked on bookstore tables, a thrill I have yet to experience here in the States.) I have a full schedule planned, including three operas, seven concerts, several photography shows, the usual round of art exhibits, and a number of dinners with friends—and that’s not counting the unplanned parts, which Berlin specializes in. So I thought I would try something new on this visit. Each morning, starting on Saturday the 7th, I will try to write a post about what I have seen or done or discovered during the day before. If I can keep it up, perhaps I will end up producing my own modest portrait of the city that was so beautifully captured by Franz Hessel, Joseph Roth, and Billy Wilder in their journalistic accounts from a century ago.

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Mozart and More Mozart

Posted on October 22, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

What could be nicer? Two nights in a row listening to Mozart at Carnegie Hall—first an intimate Zankel concert featuring Emmanuel Ax and The Knights, suitably adored by the assembled aficionados; next a solo recital by Yunchan Lim in the larger Stern Hall, packed to the full with thousands of clamoring fans. Both were terrific evenings, and if I mildly preferred the first, that probably says more about my chamber-music leanings than about the quality of either performance.

The Knights is a small orchestra—there looked to be only about twenty musicians onstage, though the number could have been more—based in Brooklyn and founded in 2007 by two brothers, Colin and Eric Jacobsen. Colin (who also helped found the quartet group Brooklyn Rider) is still the concertmaster of The Knights, and Eric is still the conductor: they always give each other a hug before the start of each concert, at least in the performances I’ve seen. Often this group combines modern and older music in a wildly adventurous fashion, but this time they decided to confine themselves entirely to Mozart’s period, and it was a smart choice. After a brief opening “Overture” by an eighteenth-century composer I’d never heard of, Joseph Bologne (it was apparently a Carnegie Hall premiere, for reasons that are not hard to discern: it sounded like every other pleasant-background piece composed in that plentiful century), they launched into two of Mozart’s most charming piano concertos, both with Ax as the soloist.

I thought we had reached the pinnacle of delight when he played the first one, Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major. But then, in the second half, when he launched into No. 25 in C Major, I realized there were further peaks to scale. Both were beautifully done, with the orchestra backing him up perfectly: quietly on the strings when they needed to foreground the keyboard, responsively on the flute, oboe, and bassoon when other voices intertwined with the piano’s notes. It’s no surprise that Manny Ax is beloved by everyone in the music world: you can see both his generosity and his modesty when he plays with a group like this. And that in turn infused our sense of the music, so that we seemed to be welcomed into the enterprise as if we too were part of what was taking place onstage.

Listening to Yunchan Lim in the elegantly appointed but vast Stern Hall is an entirely different order of experience. You out there in the audience are a witness, not a participant, and what you are witnessing is a very private person communing directly with his composer and his piano. This pianist and these piano sonatas are an ideal match: he knows how to bring out their varieties of dynamic range, their combination of colors, their difficult finger-work that somehow ends up sounding flowing and easy. In the first of multiple Carnegie concerts he’ll be giving this year that all feature Mozart’s piano sonatas, he chose to start with the C Major (K. 279), the D Major (K. 284), the F Major (K. 332), and the A Minor (K. 310), plus a brief “Fantasy in D Minor” (K. 397) that opened the second half of the show. As I expected to, I liked the A Minor sonata best (I always feel Mozart’s beaming attitude benefits from a bit of minor-key melancholy). But more than my memory of the individual pieces, I retain a retrospective sense of an unmitigatedly pleasurable evening. It was like having electrodes wired into my brain that kept transmitting signals of calm, peace, relaxation, enjoyment…all in short supply in the rest of our life these days.

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3 x 18

Posted on October 19, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

In retrospect, I wonder what possessed me when I arranged to hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians played three times in a row, over a three-and-a-half-hour span, at the Park Avenue Armory. Well, to be honest, I know what some of the rationale was, including 1) I have loved Music for 18 Musicians from the very first time I heard it live; 2) I‘ve admired almost every performance or artwork or combination of the two that I’ve seen at the Park Avenue Armory over the years; and 3) it was a very hot ticket and I was exceedingly lucky to get one.

Walking into the Drill Hall on Saturday night, I was immediately given the sense that I was at an event. The lighting—superbly designed throughout the show by Urs Schönebaum—gave us a starry dark-blue sky, illuminated by concentric rings of small white spotlights that circled above our heads, even as we were taking our seats in either the beach-style recliners or the well-raked bleachers surrounding the ground-level stage. My seat (Section 400, C10) left nothing to be desired: I was three risers up in a comfortable chair, directly facing the action on the stage. And since the first of the three performances was to be by the Steve Reich Ensemble itself, I knew I was bound to enjoy it.

I felt ready for it all.

But things started to go wrong the minute those highly skilled musicians—dressed identically, as always, in white shirts and black slacks, as if to disappear as individuals into the music—began their performance at the center of the staging area. The problem was not with the music, which was perfect and entrancing. The problem was the woman sitting next to me. At the first few rhythmic notes that emanated from the strings, the pianos, and the marimbas (soon to be supplemented by clarinets, bass clarinets, xylophones, a metallophone, and women’s voices), she began an unbroken, regularly timed, self-induced waggling and wiggling of her head, body, arms, and hands. It was as if she were attending a Golden Gate Park happening amid all her similarly mind-altered friends. At its best, this kind of thing can make me crazy, but at a Steve Reich concert, where everything depends on the interplay among the complex and slightly altering rhythms, a distraction of this sort makes me want to kill. I looked around the Drill Hall: my oblivious seatmate was the only person visibly performing in this manner.

We had been told we could move around freely during the intermissionless three-plus hours, so I got up out of my seat and took an empty one a row down from me. I was foiled, however, by the late arrival of its possessor, and therefore had to return to my own hag-haunted place. For a while I tried to block out the unnecessary motions by holding my hand up to the side of my face; I also tried to focus more than I otherwise would have on the wonderful lighting effects, which gave me a reason to turn my head away from the stage. But I desperately wanted to watch those players, with their intense focus and their charmingly coordinated exchanges of position and their utter mastery of this seemingly repetitive but actually quite complicated piece, so again and again I was drawn back to watching the center, with all that peripheral nonsense still in view.

At the end of this first rendition of Music for 18 Musicians, there was a moment—actually a prolonged few seconds—of absolute silence from the stage and the audience. That was wonderful. Then there was the customary applause, soon enough followed a brief but portentous episode on the violin by the composer Caroline Shaw, who appeared in person, first being draped in a succession of robes by nameless acolytes, and then playing her Viaduct interlude for us. Luckily the performance was such that no head-wagging could occur to it.

My dreaded seatmate started up again, though, as soon as the Manhattan School of Music students, embodied in a group called Tactus, had taken their various places around the edge of the stage area and started in on Music for 18 Musicians once again. These were the second-round performers, and they came across as notably different from the Steve Reich Ensemble. They were dressed quite variously in what I took to be their own clothes—mostly casual, a few with fancy touches—and they were all young and eager to engage. The new problem (as if I needed another) was that they too were now making extraneous motions of body, hands, and head, as if this stringently uninterpretable piece had to be made somehow more human for us. My irritation at unnecessary distraction now had the whole performance area to contend with, and though this slightly diminished my irate focus on my neighbor—I have only so much irritation to go around—it did not improve my mood.

That choreographer-assisted brand of exuberant individuality struck me as exactly the wrong direction for a performance of Music for 18 Musicians to take. One of the many beauties of the piece, as the Steve Reich musicians had shown, is the way it conveys the machine-like traits of precision and repetition along with the very human qualities of variability and exhaustion. There is something precious and extremely moving about the moments when a single marimba player, on the verge of wearing out after a long period of intense note-playing, gives way to another player hovering at his or her shoulder, mallets at the ready, who takes over without any break in the rhythm. Such images were utterly gone from the student performance—and so, I have to say, was the exactness that stems from a closely clustered group of players. One could recognize that this was supposed to be the same piece of music as the one we had just heard, but in its new, relaxed incarnation, it was definitely fuzzier and less on-the-mark. I suppose a more cheerful audience member (or a relative of the students) would have thought it more folksy and casual and “fun,” but my temper had worn too thin to appreciate it.

The hellish occupant of C9 decided to depart during the brief break between the second and third renditions. I thought that might leave me free to enjoy the final performance of the piece by Alarm Will Sound, the ensemble led by Alan Pierson, whose idea this whole extravaganza was. But by then I was too crabby—and perhaps too worn out—to put up with the staging and the costuming. This time the musicians did not move around, but nor were they grouped tightly together, as the Steve Reich players had been. So their coordinated precision in rendering the score, while noticeable better than the students’, was still at a disadvantage. Worse, though, were the priestly robes that all of them, men and women, wore to convey the sacredness of this particular piece of modern music. I don’t mean cassocks and dog collars and that type of priest-garb: these costumes were brightly colored Renaissance-Faire-style draperies, apparently connoting some obscure ancient religion, or perhaps one that has yet to come into being.

Maybe because I was overexposed to such trappings during my California childhood, this sort of thing really gets up my atheistic nose—especially, as I’ve suggested, when it is applied to something that is as grandly, emphatically self-sufficient as Music for 18 Musicians. Some artworks are not meant to be brought into our daily interpretive world, with its clamoring need for instant accessibility and comprehension. Some things are best left aloof and mysterious and alluring, free from any encapsulating meanings one might try to apply to them. And Music for 18 Musicians, as I am now convinced more than ever, is one of those artworks.

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Takács and Denk

Posted on October 17, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Ah, to be back at Carnegie Hall! Like European aristocrats, intellectuals, and bohemians of the early twentieth century, I am privileged to participate in a Season, which really only gets started when I attend my first Carnegie concert of the fall. And to have it be a chamber music concert in Zankel Hall is icing on the cake.

Last night’s program featured five expert musicians—the Takács string quartet and Jeremy Denk—who have worked beautifully together in the past, so it was about as close to a sure thing as you can get. In the first half of the program, the Takács were alone onstage playing Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F Minor, followed by a 2020 piece by the young composer Carlos Simon called The Warmth of Other Suns. The Simon was well-intentioned but a bit boring, I felt; but then, I am not contemporary music’s most sympathetic fan, so you might want to ignore my opinion on this. The Mendelssohn was lovely (it generally is, unless performed by incompetent players), but somehow I found the experience of listening to it pleasant rather than thrilling. It was a good chance, though, to hear the newest member of the Takács ensemble, the cellist Mihai Marica, who recently replaced the last founding Hungarian in the group. Mihai’s tone is gorgeously mellow and his presence a genial one—something that is often true, I find, of cellists in string quartets, since they don’t have to keep an instrument tucked under their chins and can therefore glance around in a friendly fashion.

But it was only in the second half of the program that all of these fine musicians truly came into their own. Jeremy Denk had been brought in to perform the powerful, intense, but nonetheless collaborative piano part in César Franck’s Piano Quartet in F Minor; the four string players were his utterly worthy partners. It’s amazing to think that this ever-astonishing piece of music was composed nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. When you hear it onstage, especially in an intimate auditorium like Zankel’s, it feels fresh out of the gate, ready to grab you by the throat and shake you until you give in. (I realize I have mixed horse-racing and lion-taming metaphors here, but that is how various, not to mention exciting and emphatic, this piano quintet feels.) As an encore, they gave us the Scherzo from Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major: an emotional change of pace from the Franck, but equally difficult to do well. Listening to them, I realized that many of my favorite pieces of chamber music are piano quintets, from Schumann’s to Shostakovich’s, and that made me even gladder that these five excellent musicians have decided to team up occasionally.  I look forward to many more thrilling adventures with them.

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Proske’s Macbeth

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Let me start by saying that the music was terrific. A number of times last night, as I sat watching Louisa Proske’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth (now running at the Metropolitan Opera), I was struck by the beauty of the sounds reaching my ears. It was almost distracting, the way the voices melded so harmoniously together, or the orchestra so skillfully played around those voices. I do not love Verdi the way I love, say, Handel, so I did not expect this reaction. Verdi, on his own, does not usually send me wild with delight. So I have to assume that something about the production foregrounded the opera’s musical strengths.

Previously, when I’ve gone to a Louisa Proske opera (which I’ve been doing for a decade or more), I’ve been totally swallowed up by the enactment of character onstage. This happened through plot, through music, through dialogue, and above all through physical action. Whether she was engaging with Così fan tutte, Carmen, or Don Giovanni, Proske managed through her dramatic interpretations to bring something new to each opera, something that was nonetheless true to its old, original self. I wouldn’t say the music was ever secondary in these earlier productions, but it was one of many factors that made the opera work, blending indiscernibly with whatever else we were taking in from the stage.

But the stage, in these cases, was always quite small. Whether it was at Heartbeat Opera (the company she founded with Ethan Heard), or another small New York opera company to which she was temporarily on loan, a Proske production was always playing to an audience of about a hundred or at most two hundred people. I often sat as close as I could get to the singer-actors, which meant I was about ten or fifteen feet away. These young, as-yet-to-be-discovered singers could do just about anything—with their voices, but also with their faces and their bodies. And because we were sitting so close to them, we in the audience could distinguish every subtle detail of the performance.

The Metropolitan Opera is the opposite experience in many ways. It’s not just that the stage and the auditorium are huge, so that any gesture needs to be huge to project. It’s also that the habits and needs of such a large-scale opera company mean that casting has to be planned years in advance. The determining factor is thus not the director’s judgment about character suitability, but the star power of the singers. Some of these singers—I’m thinking of people like Peter Mattei, Luca Pisaroni, Nina Stemme—happen to be excellent actors as well, but at the Met that is considered an extra, not a necessity. (This is not, I should add, a problem with all the world’s major opera houses. At the Komische Oper in Berlin—where Proske performed as a child singer and then trained as a young assistant—I’ve watched a number of fine productions that featured actor-singers with great physical and emotive as well as musical abilities. But the Met has yet to catch up in this regard.)

So part of the reason I was perhaps excessively focused on the music last night was that other elements of the production left something to be desired. All the principal singers—Quinn Kelsey as Macbeth, Lisa Davidsen as Lady Macbeth, Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo, and Freddie De Tommasso as Macduff—had gorgeous voices (though Davidsen’s was only truly effective in the upper reaches of her soprano range: she tended to be near-inaudible when she had to reach down to the lower notes). But none of these principals, and virtually none of the other named singers, had any gestural or dance ability to speak of. They moved slowly and grandly into position, from which they delivered their stunning arias, and then they strode off again.

This was not to say that the production was ever static. Proske had countered the relative immobility of her singers by a flurry of action on the part of other people and things. The Met’s grand revolve came into frequent play, moving both clockwise and counterclockwise—though not in any symbolic way, as it did in last season’s marvelous production of Innocence, but just because that enabled the singers to move from one post-apocalyptic space to another without any wasted motion. At various times, tall shadows and drifting smoke pervaded the stony scenery, as if to emphasize that we were nearing End Times. And throughout the production, a series of dancers—from the three Cossack-like figures who danced on the banquet table, to the warriors who fought with splendid leaps and turns, to the ever-present witches (there were way more than three of them) who spun and pranced and hobbled their way through almost every scene—enlivened the stage for us. In a talk she delivered two days after the opera’s opening, Proske said that she eagerly demanded dancers because it would give her extra weeks of rehearsal time. But that seems to me a less-than-serious explanation. She needed those dancers to provide the visual, physically elemental quality that is usually a keynote of her opera productions.

Still, the exploration of character—which has always been another keynote for her—could not be accomplished by any of this surrounding frenzy of activity. As I watched and listened to this Macbeth, I began to ask myself, as I never do in the staged version of the Shakespeare play, how we were supposed to feel about the Macbeths themselves. Are they tyrannical monsters whose deaths we should welcome, as the happy-ending celebrations in the opera announced? Or are they occasionally sympathetic mortal creatures trapped by their own flaws (or by the machinations of the gods, which may come to the same thing)? What, precisely, is the point of this plot?  “Do not murder other people to improve your own status” seems a bit flat. “Do not base your decisions on the words of fortune-tellers, witches, or other spiritual mediums,” while good advice, hardly seems strong enough to support a whole tragedy.

When I watch a good stage production of this play, I become so involved in the intense relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and their differing paths to deterioration, that I never stop to ask myself why I should care. Here there was no such relationship. The two bodies, Davidsen’s and Kelsey’s, barely manifested any chemistry between them. Their only tender moment came after the first murder, when she washed his bloody hands one at a time with a wet rag, exactly as a mother might wash her child’s. 

There was definitely something going on in this production about mothers, babies, and childbirth. This theme—which Proske highlighted in a central dance sequence involving a pregnant witch—clearly harks back to the language of the play itself. Macduff only can kill Macbeth because he is “not of woman born,” having been “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb. Lady Macbeth famously urges Macbeth to commit the first murder by arguing that even as she suckled a child, she would have “pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.” Proske studied and directed the Shakespeare play at Cambridge University (where one of the favored assignments has always been Wilson Knight’s essay “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”), so she has undoubtedly been thinking about such issues for a long time. But amidst the swirl of activity onstage at the Met, these moments of revelatory insight into the drama itself had no coherence, no emotional strength. If you wanted emotional satisfaction from this Macbeth, your only option was to fall back on Verdi’s music.

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Tragedy and Celebration

Posted on September 19, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

I am at least as big a Gustavo Dudamel fan as the next person, as my years of positive reviews demonstrate. But enough is enough. The New York Philharmonic is now turning him into the poster boy for music—literally so in the case of the September program cover, which is dominated by a garishly colored portrait of Dudamel in the heroic style of L.A. street murals. It’s one thing to support populist musical outreach as a means of bringing new people into the concert halls; it’s quite another to replace the music with the frontman. At Friday night’s concert in David Geffen Hall, the screaming applause that greeted the maestro’s entrance, before he had even lifted his baton, vastly outweighed anything garnered by the musicians, including the two living composers who each in turn came to the stage. Something is wrong with this picture.

So let me turn for a moment to the music itself. For this early fall concert—his official reunion with the symphony he has now taken over—Dudamel put together three pieces that in different ways embodied our need for life-affirming moments amid tragic surroundings. The first was John Adams’s 2002 choral work “On the Transmigration of Souls,” written in response to a commission after 9/11. The second was “Invisible House,” a world-premiere by the young (or at any rate youngish: she is still in her very early forties) Ukrainian composer Zosha Di Castri. And the third was Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, written in 1944, when Russia was in the depths of the Second World War.

The Adams piece was the one that most explicitly addressed the tragedy at its heart. It began with recorded sounds: first indeterminate city sounds (including street traffic and sirens), then human voices, some of which spoke the names of the dead and others with messages about their loss. Into these words and sounds crept a kind of soft but jagged music, at once chromatic and disjunctive: nothing like Adams’s usual style, but something keyed to the moment and its complicated feelings. The choral passages, rendered by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, were almost anti-melodic, anti-operatic in their brevity and harshness; at one point they amounted to a sort of collective scream. I wanted to resist the piety—I am by nature suspicious of anything involving the words “transmigration” and “souls”—but the music took over, plunging me into a memory of how terrible that moment in our history was: how devastating the images on the screens, how sickening the sounds of the bodies falling to earth. I recognized the composer’s gesture toward some kind of soothing release (“My desire in writing this piece,” Adams has said, “is to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy”), but rather than elevating me, the music only made me sad. That is no small thing, I suppose, for a non-narrative work to achieve, and I am glad to have had the experience. But even as I had it, I couldn’t help wondering how a family member of one of the lost 3,000 would have felt in response to this work.

Zosha Di Castri’s “Invisible House,” just completed this year, wears its Ukrainian roots on its sleeve. The music itself derives in part from Ukrainian folk melodies, and in the scarier, louder, more emphatic passages—particularly in the use of percussion, including percussive sound from non-percussive instruments—one can’t help hearing the ongoing war in Ukraine. But mingled in with these darker elements was a sense of joy, or delight, or exuberance. One could feel the young composer’s thrill at having a whole huge orchestra to play with, a widely varied set of instruments at her command. One could even sense her sly sense of humor, especially at the moment when she made a couple of the percussionists clap their hands instead of using their drumsticks and drums. For her, perhaps, this was a piece about memory and a return to origins, but for us in the audience it was a much more immediate experience. I would have to hear it again to know how good it is, as a piece of music, but for the fifteen minutes I was in its presence, I actively enjoyed it.

Neither of these two preliminaries, however, could begin to compete with the final piece on the program, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. It was the first symphony he composed after returning to Russia from an eighteen-year self-imposed exile, and he wrote it in relative comfort, cossetted in an arts colony as bombs fell on Moscow and citizens starved in Leningrad. Yet something of that outside despair enters the picture, even at its jolliest. The slow first and third movements, while melodic and entrancing, are weighted down with a tinge of anxiety. The final Allegro giacoso movement may promise us pure playfulness, but instead it offers excitement, novelty, and a powerful sense of an ending. Even the marvelous second movement, with its Allegro marcato pacing and its thrillingly chipper theme (one of my favorite passages, I think, in all of Prokofiev’s work), takes on a range of different colors as it moves from mirth to severity and back again. Dudamel was at his best in conducting this piece, which he did without a score and with enormous vigor and enthusiasm. It seemed he and his musicians were inside the symphony itself, for its whole compelling three quarters of an hour, and I felt ensconced in there with them. My only regret was that Prokofiev—unlike Adams, unlike Di Castri—was unable to take a celebratory bow from the stage. He died on March 3, 1953, the same day as Stalin, so almost no one (outside of Shostakovich and a few other devoted friends) attended his funeral.

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An Excerpt from Berlin Before and After

Posted on September 1, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

(I wanted to give you a little foretaste of the book that’s coming out on September 8.)

They’re called Stolpersteine, or “stumble-stones,” but it’s not actually that easy to stumble on them. By this I mean not only that one is unlikely to stumble over them—they are set flush with the pavement, and off to the side of the main sidewalk—but also that one doesn’t generally stumble upon them. You practically have to be looking for them to spot them.

When I’m in Berlin I mainly stay in or near the Kreuzberg district, which by now contains over 700 of these little square markers in the ground. Yet it took me decades to run across one on my own, without having it pointed out to me. In fact, it wasn’t until I spent a week in Mitte, which at latest count possesses 943 stumble-stones, that I began to notice them sprinkled near the sidewalks along Swinemünder Strasse, Wolliner Strasse, Brunnenstrasse, and Bernauer Strasse.

Each time I saw one there, I’d stop to read it. The little brass plaques, always in German, followed the same formula over and over again: Here lived So-and-so, born in such-and-such a year, deported on this exact date to this specific camp, murdered on this other exact date. (Not all the deportees died, and even those who survived have been granted the right to a plaque, so some lack the final murder date.) Occasionally there would be a single plaque alone; more often there would be a family of three, or five, or six, with birthdates indicating which were the parents and which were the children.

Researching their history, I learned that these Stolpersteine were the brainchild of a German artist named Gunter Demnig. In the early 1990s, he started by planting a series of these “stones” in Cologne to commemorate the Sinti and Roma who had been deported and murdered by the Nazis. Gradually the project expanded to include any victims of the Third Reich. By the time his idea spread to Berlin, most of those being memorialized turned out to be Jews. Demnig’s basic principle, as described on the Stolpersteine website, was to mark the location of “the last freely chosen residence of the person being commemorated.” In other words, these were the homes where the Jews and other persecuted people lived their lives, not the locations to which they were forcibly relocated—though in Berlin the addresses rarely represent the actual buildings they lived in, because so much has been destroyed and rebuilt since then.

There are thousands of these little brass markers all over the city, but most of them are clustered in the districts where many Jews lived before 1933, like Mitte and Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf. The total quantities for each district, along with the specific addresses where the plaques are located, are listed on the website, but since new stumble-stones can be requested and installed as information becomes available, these statistics are constantly in flux. Occasionally a district or neighborhood may choose to emphasize its own stumble-stones in a special way: a Kreuzberg friend of mine, for instance, wasn’t even aware that he had one on his street until he saw a candle burning on top of it on All Soul’s Day. But for the most part they remain only half-visible, so much a part of the fabric of daily life that people don’t actively notice them.

Once I’d spotted the plaques in Mitte, I became determined to find them nearer my usual haunts. In the course of one two-week period spent on Maybachufer, on the border between Kreuzberg and Neukölln, I began to take photos of all the ones I could locate. On the first day, venturing across the canal, I found them at Paul-Lincke-Ufer 41 (a single brass square for Horst Lothar Koppel), at Kotbusserstrasse 13 (a family of three, the Wolfs), and at Oranienstrasse 66 (a family of six, the Sultans). Koppel was deported but not killed. The two Wolf parents and their six-year-old daughter were all murdered on the same day—May 5, 1942—at the extermination camp in Chelmno. Of the six Sultans, four apparently survived the camps; the other two, of grandparent age, killed themselves (“Selbstmord vor der Deportation”) before they could be deported.

In the following days I took five more photos in the streets near my flat: a family of three, the Peses, at Bürknerstrasse 16; a single person, Elise Poser, at Kottbusser Damm 88–89; a family of five, the Breits, at Schönleinstrasse 28; a family of three, the Adlers, at Friedelstrasse 47; and just down the street, at Friedelstrasse 49, another family, the Heilfrons, consisting of two parents and two children. With the exception of the fifteen-year-old daughter in the Pese household, who “fled to England” in 1939—no doubt as part of the Kindertransport—all of these people were murdered, mainly at Auschwitz and Minsk.

At this point I became too depressed, or maybe just too sad, to continue taking photographs. No passersby looked down at the plaques, not even when I was standing there taking pictures of them, and I couldn’t fault this, because I myself had walked by them often. Elise Poser’s marker, for instance, sits diagonally on the busy corner nearest my local subway entrance, and I had probably passed by it—perhaps even stepped over it—dozens of times. The plaques themselves do not cry out for attention. Only a hand’s-width square, set in close alignment with the others in their group, they are placed off to the side of the pedestrian’s normal path, in the cobblestone strips that separate the concrete sidewalks from the house-fronts. And since most of them are old by now, the weathered brass has little or no metallic sheen to attract the eye, so you are unlikely to spot them even if you are glancing at the ground.

But that unobtrusiveness is finally why I treasure them, probably more than any of Berlin’s numerous other testimonials to its lost Jewish population. Their simplicity is touching in itself, as is their repetitiveness, with the words hier wohnte, deportiert, and ermordet resounding over and over. Even the routinely elegiac phrase “here lived” can acquire a special kind of power when it marks the exact spot where a life started to turn into a death.

I also like that the markers are so egalitarian. Everyone gets the same ten-centimeter square, from the richest department-store owner to the poorest peddler, and everyone gets his or her own square. So despite the overwhelming numbers murdered by the Nazis—a number so huge, in total, that it often beggars the emotions—each doomed person counts separately here. The whole effort feels like a personal response to history, not merely an official one, and that’s probably due in part to its collaborative nature. An artist’s vision, a community’s loss, and a city’s desire to acknowledge that loss have all joined together to create this particular memorial. It’s not quite a spontaneous reaction to a tragedy (the way, say, the shrine to the murdered Ukrainians that went up in front of the Russian embassy in 2022 was), but it manages to retain some of the freshness of spontaneity. As testimony, it feels unfinished and still alive.

* * *

I don’t want you to get the idea that I spend all my time in Berlin thinking about death and destruction. Naturally one cannot be oblivious to it here, and that is surely beneficial. It is admirable, the degree to which the Germans have continued to acknowledge their crimes against humanity, and it is salutary for the rest of us to remember, too. Yet if that were all that Berlin had to offer, I would not feel compelled to keep coming back again and again.

Life, not just death, is the essential lure for me. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the life I find here, the sort that is mingled with an awareness of death, feels especially vital. This kind of hyper-aware existence is not confined to a specific activity. It can involve being alone or together with other people, out on the streets or inside buildings and apartments. But more often than not, it is an existence that includes art.

It has become clear to me, over the years, that one of the main reasons I go to Berlin is to see good paintings—or sculptures, or drawings, or photographs—and hear good music, in which category I include orchestral music, chamber music, grand opera, soloists on street corners, and infinite other variations. This is not just something I happen to do when I am there; it is often the prime motive for my visits. Before arriving, I check out what is happening at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Komische Oper, the Konzerthaus, the Staatsoper, and the Pierre Boulez Saal. I investigate what shows will be on at the Gemäldegalerie, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and the other stellar galleries and museums, and even if nothing special is scheduled, I make plans to revisit my favorite paintings.

Sometimes I find, fortuitously, that these art shows or concerts shed light on Berlin’s twentieth-century history, and when this is intelligently done, it adds to my pleasure as an audience member. But that is not why I go to them. I go because the art and music are so outstanding here that they allow the little motor in my brain to stop its eternal spinning and grinding—which is to say, they encourage a receptive, passive version of thinking that is wholly responsive to what I am seeing and hearing. It is not exactly that I forget myself. I am not, I’m afraid, the kind of person who is really capable of that. Nor do I forget that I am in Berlin. In fact, the being-in-Berlin part remains present to me even when I am most engaged in what I am witnessing, in part because Berlin manages to approach these things differently.

Art in Berlin is not escapism from real life. It is continuous with real life, just as the historical monuments and plaques and signs are often continuous with the ongoing bustle of the city. You do not leave the outer world to encounter painting or music here. You bring that outer world with you, and it enriches what you are experiencing in front of the artwork. It is a city in which the notion of an “artist” is as broadly defined as it could possibly be, and while that can be annoying (“Where are the aesthetic standards? How can every piece of crap be counted as art?” I can hear the old farts mumbling—old farts who include, at times, myself), it can also be tremendously enlivening. Contemporary artists from all over the world, including Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Tomás Saraceno, and Ai Wei Wei, have chosen to settle here, either permanently or temporarily, in part because Berlin and its galleries are so open to various forms of visual expressiveness. The art you’ll find here runs the gamut, from priceless works by Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch to profuse street graffiti by Anonymous. I adore the Vermeer and de Hooch paintings, and I make a point of visiting them whenever I am in Berlin: there are four of them, two of each, hanging in a single room at the Gemäldegalerie, where I can almost always be alone with them. But even though I of course prefer these Dutch masterpieces to any specific piece of graffiti, I am still glad the graffiti are there. They do no harm to the masterpieces—which are safe in their museum, after all—and they make the process of walking down a Berlin street much more exciting than it would otherwise be. You feel, as so often, that the walls are speaking to you, but this time in their most unofficial voices. Sometimes the artwork on those rough walls is notably skilled; more often it is just there to deliver a message of some kind. But either way, it gives you the sense that the population is alive to its surroundings and filled with the desire to communicate. That these graffiti are for the most part left in place by the authorities is also a testimony to Berlin’s current officialdom. The higher-ups understand just how important free expression is, and they value it over clean walls and orderly rules of behavior. Given the suffering caused in twentieth-century Berlin by a rigid adherence to the principles of order, it is not surprising that the present-day administrators feel a certain relief in permitting graffiti’s harmless version of disorder—harmless but not toothless, because the commentary they contain is often biting, and that adds to their wry appeal.

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