A Reopened Carnegie Hall

On Thursday night I took a friend to Carnegie Hall to hear Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang play a concert of Bach, Busoni, and Shostakovich. My friend hadn’t heard live music in nearly two years, and she was utterly thrilled to be back in that beautiful space—never mind the program.

Luckily, the music was terrific, too.

I say this having already been to two prior Carnegie concerts this fall. On October 14 I heard the Orchestra of St. Luke’s playing Handel’s Water Music and other baroque gems in the big auditorium; and then on October 19, a skillful new cello/piano pair named Zlatimir Fung and Mishka Rushdie Momen performed a number of Romantic pieces in Weill Hall. Those concerts were fine but not, to my ear, especially stirring. My main complaint about both was the attempt to create new pieces—a Bach meld of disparate symphonic pieces in the former case, a cello version of Franck’s eloquent violin sonata in the latter—which I found less than satisfying.

Possibly the fact that I was coming off some amazing September concerts in Europe (Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes in Berlin, Simon Rattle and the London Symphony in Amsterdam) also dampened my appreciation. I, for one, have not been starved of good live music during this pandemic period, and I am therefore able to be extremely picky. But I was a rarity in those October Carnegie audiences, which went wild in each case. People are so glad to be hearing live music again that they leap to their feet in a standing ovation at the first opportunity—as if Carnegie Hall had somehow turned into Broadway.

When Kavakos and Wang performed, though, I thought the standing ovation was warranted. Yuja Wang stayed demurely in the background throughout (though with her trademark eye-catching gown, you couldn’t stop looking at her) and did a marvelous job of suiting the piano’s dynamics to the inherently quieter violin. Leonidas Kavakos, whom I’d never heard in person before, was a wonder, especially in the Busoni and the Shostakovich. (To my surprise, the Bach Violin Sonata No. 3 was the least thrilling of the pieces played; maybe it was just too short to sink in.) I’ve never heard pizzicato done as audibly and as well as Kavakos did it in these two works, so that it actually seemed musical rather than merely rhythmic.

I haven’t listened to much Busoni, but this performance of the masterful Violin Sonata No. 2 in E Minor made me think I should seek out more of him. The duo’s account of the thrilling Presto movement was so overwhelming that the audience burst into spontaneous applause at its close; Kavakos had to wave his bow at us to indicate that there was still one movement to come. In that long final movement, and indeed throughout the whole piece, the delicate transitions from loud to soft and virtuosic to melancholy were a delight to witness.

Shostakovich’s chamber music is of course dear to my heart, and this 1968 Violin Sonata, which was composed for his friend David Oistrakh toward the end of the composer’s life, was a joy to hear live. Coming straight after the Busoni, it exemplified the strange contradictoriness of Shostakovich’s approach: a seeming simplicity (single notes hanging in space, single instruments playing off against each other one at a time), combined with a complexity of feeling and a constantly shifting rhythm and key. Both Wang and Kavakos got to show off their virtuosic skills at times, but my favorite parts were the more tender moments when they melded together. It was a brilliant way to end the program, and it made the whole experience of being back at Carnegie as exciting for me as it evidently was for the rest of the audience.

(By the way, for those of you still hesitant about being in an enclosed room: Stern Auditorium is so vast that you might as well be outdoors, and the precautions—everyone double-vaccinated, everyone masked throughout—are enough to allow you to relax into the performance. Or so I think.)