In mid-March, as I was leaving the Carnegie Hall concert that Christian Tetzlaff had just given with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I ran into a couple of friends. “Oh, we should have known we’d see you at this!” they said (because concerts are where we always run into each other). “We’re here for Tetzlaff. He’s our favorite violinist.” There are, of course, a great many wonderful violinists in the world today, ranging from astonishing twenty-year-old virtuosos to unforgettable seventy-year-old masters, and in such a context it might seem ridiculous to single out one above all the others. But I think that, if pushed, I would have to agree with my friends. Tetzlaff is my favorite violinist.
That March concert was one of a number of events he’s doing at Carnegie Hall this year, since he is the designated “Perspectives” artist for the 2010–2011 season. So far I’ve seen three of these performances, and each was thrilling in a different way.
The BSO event did not start out promisingly. James Levine had just canceled out due to ill health (and in fact he was soon to resign his post as BSO conductor altogether), so the young replacement conductor, though perfectly adequate, was not the charismatic leader the majority of ticket-holders had turned out to hear. And even those of us lured in by Tetzlaff’s presence were slightly underwhelmed by the first half of the program, which featured a charming but brief Mozart Rondo and then a rather senseless Harrison Birtwhistle premiere. The Birtwhistle violin concerto was at once difficult and superficial—a sort of movie-score music, complete with fake suspense and pointless drama, but without the visual accompaniment that usually makes such music bearable and even useful. At the intermission, I was wondering if it had really been worth coming out on a cold night even for a program that featured the indefatigable Christian Tetzlaff in all three works. But then, after the break, I discovered why I was there. Tetzlaff’s performance in Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto was so exciting, so forceful, so delicate, and so moving that it put everything that came before it (even the Mozart!) to shame.
Tetzlaff is a stand-out performer with an orchestra (I first heard him in Brahms’s violin concerto, also at Carnegie, and it was a revelation), and he is also a great solo player (his rendition of the complete unaccompanied Bach sonatas and partitas, performed a couple of seasons ago at the 92nd Street Y, remains one of my concert high points). But possibly his most appealing work is done at the chamber-music level, where he has a chance to be both intimate and grand at once. The other two concerts of his that I’ve seen this season were a performance by the Tetzlaff Quartet (he plays first violin, his sister plays cello) and a concert with the Ensemble ACJW, a group of young Juilliard-connected players who rope in various masters for each of their events. Both of these were held in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the attractively modern underground venue whose only flaw is a tendency to filter in the occasional noise of the subway. Even this I found forgivable, where Tetzlaff was concerned, because I was so entranced in his and his colleagues’ engrossment in the music that nothing else seemed to matter.
The Tetzlaff Quartet concert, which I attended just last weekend, was a study in subtly connected contrasts. The evening began with Haydn’s unconventional Op. 20, No. 3—not at all what you are expecting when you see a Haydn quartet listed on the program—and then moved on to Mendelssohn’s stirring, complicated Op. 13 (written, unbelievably, when the composer was only eighteen). By intermission my companion felt he already had a great concert under his belt, and he was tempted to leave before the second half, which featured Schoenberg’s First Quartet, since his prior experience of Schoenberg had not been positive. “Trust Tetzlaff,” I recommended, and at the end he agreed I had been right, for this performance of the Quartet No. 1 in D Minor was unlike anything either of us had ever heard from Schoenberg. Located somewhere between German Romanticism and the Second Viennese School, it had an expressiveness all its own—an emotionally rich if at times discordant expressiveness in which all four instruments had an equal share. Yet even in this gathering of equals, I felt I could hear Tetzlaff’s own individual voice every time it sounded, as if his violin were able to speak for him just as particularly and recognizably as a tenor’s or a baritone’s instrument does. And that eerie singularity, far from destroying the coherent feeling of the chamber group, only intensified it.
Possibly the best and certainly the most thrilling of the three concerts I heard Tetzlaff give this season was the December performance with the Ensemble ACJW. Gathered together on the relatively small Zankel stage were not only the young players and Tetzlaff himself, but also the incomparable Simon Rattle, who had been brought in to conduct, and the marvelous soprano Barbara Hannigan, who was helping the group perform an excerpt from Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre. The whole evening—which also included Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, and a suite by Rameau—was at once serious and playful: especially serious in the rendering of the solemn Metamorphosen, and especially playful in the Grand Macabre outtake (where, for instance, the sexily attired soprano at one point shoved Simon Rattle away from his conducting spot and proceeded to lead a few bars of the performance herself, until he booted her in the rear end and took back his rightful role). The whole evening was a deep, sometimes dark, sometimes exhilarating pleasure. And a great part of my own joy lay in watching Christian Tetzlaff among his fellow performers, those young musicians who had been invited to stand alongside one of the very greatest violinists of our era and play, essentially, as his equals.
—April 12, 2011