In the course of this November and December, here in New York City, I’ve been able to hear some of the most noteworthy violinists in the world, playing wondrous pieces of music that I have either loved forever or else proceeded to fall in love with on the spot. The players were big names—Gidon Kremer, Maxim Vengerov, Augustin Hadelich—and their performances were exquisite. And yet the violin concert that has most stuck with me, from the past month or so, is one that featured no famous names at all. But I will get to that at the end of this post.
First up on my schedule, on November 21, was my final concert of the season at the New York Philharmonic. I had chosen the program entirely because Augustin Hadelich was to appear on it; I’d never heard of the conductor (Dima Siobodeniouk) nor the composer of the requisite introductory premiere (Sebastian Fagerlund), and the prospect of sitting through Sibelius’s amorphous Symphony No. 2 in the second half was not particularly enticing. But Hadelich, whom I had heard only once before, was scheduled to play Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra just before the intermission.
It was an astounding performance in every way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Barber live, if at all; I expect it’s extremely difficult to play. Hadelich is one of those musicians who make difficulty seem easy or at least natural. He’s not a show-off, but he’s tremendously virtuosic, yet at the same time he makes every note count toward the ultimate goal of feeling. With his strangely masklike face (he was in a terrible fire at the age of fifteen), he presents an unusual, compelling figure onstage—as if he were an endearing new form of superhuman, perhaps, purpose-built for violin-playing. And the Barber concerto—what a thing that is! I’m almost afraid to go to another performance of it, for fear I won’t love it as much as I did this time.
I’ve been to many performances by the eminent violinist Gidon Kremer, from small gatherings at the Baryshnikov Arts Center to full-scale orchestral appearances at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and I always love to hear him play. So do others, to judge by the wild enthusiasm that greeted his appearance at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on December 4. It was billed as a tribute to the great (and still living) Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and the program included three lovely Pärt pieces (Für Alina, Fratres, and Mozart-Adagio) in its first half, along with a moving work by a Georgian composer unknown to me, Giya Kancheli, called Middelheim. Kremer was joined in these pieces by an excellent cellist, Giedre Dirvanauskaite, and an equally excellent pianist, Georgijs Osokins, and the three of them made Zankel seem just the right size for the chamber music they were playing. I also appreciated the little solo by Valentin Silvestrov (a Ukrainian, born in 1937) that Kremer performed at the start of the second half, as a gesture of support for a friend and his besieged country. But then came a pounding, overwhelming, seemingly endless Rachmaninoff work—the Trio élégiaque—to conclude the program. In my worst moods, I wonder why people persist in playing Rachmaninoff at all; at my more charitable, I feel he’s totally unsuitable for a piercingly emotional, tenderly intimate concert like this one was. Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to conclude the Zankel evening with him? But Kremer’s devoted audience, which spring to its feet at the conclusion, seemed not to mind.
Just last night I was back at Carnegie again—big Carnegie, by which I mean Stern Hall—to hear what promised to be a perfect program, billed as “Maxim Vengerov and Friends” playing Brahms. The first half consisted of the dream-team of Vengerov, Vilde Frang, James Ehnes, Daniel Müller-Schott, and Yefim Bronfman performing the Piano Quintet in F Minor; in the second half, Anthony McGill replaced Bronfman and they played the Clarinet Quintet in B Minor. These are among my two favorite pieces of music—I stream them frequently, often together—and one couldn’t ask for better musicians. Perhaps my expectations were too high. But something about the evening disappointed. It may have been the sight of those five little musicians stranded on the huge Stern stage, which really isn’t suitable for chamber music. But I think it also has something to do with the fact that these all-star groups, brought together for a specific concert, somehow lack the unity of long-time collaborators who have been playing the work together for ages. My ear isn’t good enough to pick up exactly how this works: it’s not that there were any missed cues, or anything like that. But the overall performance lacked a sense of coherent interpretation, of new insight imposed on the old score, that you only get when the players are intimately acquainted with each other and the music. I am not sorry I went; it was a perfectly pleasant evening. But it just felt a little flat.
The opposite was true of the Chamber Music Society concert featuring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that I heard at Alice Tully Hall on December 6. I was drawn to the concert by the other composer names (Bach, Handel, Corelli, Telemann) that were featured in the first half of the program, and indeed, I was a little nervous about sitting through a live performance of such an old chestnut as the Four Seasons, which I felt I had outgrown sometime during my college years. But boy, was I wrong. It turns out that each season features a remarkable solo performance by one of the five violinists needed to produce all the necessary sound effects, which also require a violist, a cellist, a double-bass player, and a harpsichordist. The CMS group handled this by allowing a different violinist—first Chad Hoopes, then Julian Rhee, then Kristin Lee, then Richard Lin—to take the lead for each season, and then having them retire to the second row to play backup for the others. The fifth violinist, Arnaud Sussmann (who was the only CMS name I recognized from other concerts) genially played backup the whole time; but then, he had garnered his time in the limelight earlier, when he gave an absolutely stellar performance in Bach’s Concerto in E Major for Violin, Strings and Continuo right before the intermission. There was something truly delightful about seeing these incredibly skilled musicians collaborating in this way—putting each other forward, supporting each other, and having a great time doing it. We in the audience had a great time, too, and as I left Alice Tully Hall, I murmured to my companion, “I wish the Democratic Party had as deep a bench of presidential candidates as CMS does of talented violinists.”