Living in a place like Berkeley, one can sometimes feel deprived of great music, as if it is all happening somewhere else, in the great capital cities of the world. But I have never, in New York or London or Berlin, had the kind of musical day I had here on Saturday.
In the afternoon, I went over to the Berkeley campus, where Cal Performances was treating the public to a free “master class” rehearsal of the UC student orchestra, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. There had been a similar master class for student conductors in the morning, which I regretfully missed—a regret that increased exponentially when I heard how interesting it had been. But the rehearsal I saw was more than satisfying; it was a thrilling gift.
Dudamel—who, since he took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has aged slightly in appearance but has not lost one whit of his youthful vigor and charm—began by simply allowing the very good student orchestra to play the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s challenging Fourth Symphony. Okay, I thought, watching him, he’s pleasant enough to watch, but so what? Then he began to “work” the orchestra through certain passages in that movement, and the fireworks began. He made the strings repeatedly play a section of triplet measures that they insisted on separating, whereas he wanted the whole thing to flow: “You are cutting it,” he told them. “When you go to a party do you bring a cake already cut in slices? No, you bring the whole cake and cut it there.” Later he told the violas that they needed to come up strong, because if “you were wallflowers before, now you are at the center of the party.” He corrected the woodwinds for anticipating the speed of their crescendo: “It’s like you have a surprise for someone, and you tell them the surprise,” he admonished. But all his admonishments came with kindness and affection: “That is too short, my dears,” he told the brass about their blasts of sound, which he wanted less like percussion and more like an extended musical note. Often he sang what he wanted, to show pacing or feeling. And the apt metaphors just kept tumbling out of him, with unbelievable speed and variety. But metaphor was far from his only recourse. When he wanted the strings to enter on a louder note, even though their score was marked “piano,” he explained in detail that context was everything, and that the very loud sounds that preceded their entrance meant that even their piano had to be louder to stand up. “It’s like—it’s like—it’s not like anything. Just play it louder,” he ended up, as if mocking his own tendency toward profuse metaphor.
And the great thing was, you could hear the difference, even with this student orchestra. And the people around me—the amateur musicians and Cal students and high school students and arts patrons who had taken this free opportunity to hear Dudamel teach—could also hear the difference, as I could tell by the way they nodded and smiled. It was a grand lesson in music and how it works, and I wholeheartedly wished every child and adult in America could have it.
Once he had finished rehearsing the first movement, Dudamel’s allotted time was almost up, but he didn’t want to scrimp on the musical experience. So he had the oboe play the solo part from the beginning of the second movement—”Just because I want to hear it,” the conductor said, folding his arms and preparing to do nothing. “You start,” he nodded to the oboist, “and then you follow him,” he indicated to the rest of the orchestra. After listening carefully and with evident pleasure to this favorite passage, he moved the students immediately into the rousing fourth and final movement, with its brassy exuberance and frenetically bowed strings and clashing cymbals and pounding drums, during which he went wild himself with conducting. Naturally, at the end, the audience exploded in grateful applause—a sound markedly different in volume and tone from the merely acceptable level of clapping that had greeted the end of the first movement’s initial performance. They knew what they had been given.
For any normal day, or week, or even month, that would have been enough. But I was scheduled that night to hear the recently formed Tetzlaff Trio—Christian Tetzlaff, my favorite solo violinist; his sister Tanja Tetzlaff, a terrific cellist; and the accomplished pianist Lars Vogt—play under the auspices of San Francisco Performances. Appearing in the beautifully refurbished Herbst Theater (where earlier in the month I had been treated to a great concert by my beloved Pacifica Quartet, also thanks to San Francisco Performances), the Tetzlaff Trio was doing Schumann’s Piano Trio in F Major, Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio, and Brahms’s Piano Trio in B Major—three of the great pieces written for this particular combination of instruments. The Schumann was lovely, and demonstrated how musically attuned these three players were to each other as well as to the music, but it did not fully prepare me for how astonishing this rendering of the Dumky would be. I own the Beaux Arts Trio recording and I love it, but what the Tetzlaff Trio played was essentially a new piece. Especially in the quiet passages, where Christian Tetzlaff seemed almost to breath over the strings to produce his delicate runs of notes, I heard things I had never heard before—and meanwhile the fast, exciting passages were as resounding and as danceable as ever. “How can the Brahms top this? How could anything top this?” I said to my seatmate.
But comparisons faded to nothing when they began the Brahms after the intermission, because this too became something novel and exciting. And then, when they played as an encore the second movement of Dvorak’s F minor trio, it turned out that this was something new, at least to many of us in the audience—a wonderful piece of music that we were hearing for the first time in the best possible hands. Afterward, I asked Tanja Tetzlaff how it was that they managed to make something so unexpected out of pieces we had heard so many times before. “We are just following the score,” she said, “the dynamics and the tempi exactly the way they are marked. Most others don’t play it that way.” Well, maybe. I think it’s more that this marvelous trio—like the Tetzlaff Quartet, to which Christian and Tanja also belong, and like Christian Tetzlaff himself, in all his unforgettable solo performances—understands something about the music that the rest of the world has somehow failed to grasp. In a way, it was like seeing that afternoon’s Dudamel lessons transmuted into knowledge at the highest possible level: This is what the composer is demanding of you, the score is saying to these fine musicians, and this is what you must give your audiences at the lovely surprise party you are creating for them. And so they did.