A couple of weeks ago I went to a perfectly nice concert in Carnegie’s Weill Hall. It was the New York debut of a very talented young Scandinavian cellist named Andreas Brantelid, accompanied on the piano by the older and also talented Bengt Forsberg, and they were playing what looked in advance to be an interesting program: Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata, Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 2, Debussy’s Sonata in D Minor, and Prokofiev’s sole cello sonata. And in the event it was interesting, and pleasant, and completely unannoying. But it was not thrilling. I have the feeling that the problem lay less in the performers than in the wide variety of profoundly exciting performances I had already witnessed that week. The nice little concert in Weill, which I would have killed for during the largely vacant months I spend elsewhere, just did not live up to the rest of New York’s late-winter riches.
The week began, for me, with a Saturday night solo recital by Andras Schiff in Avery Fisher Hall. Schiff is always worth hearing (I was to hear him again two days later, in conjunction with the New York Philharmonic), but there is a special appeal to hearing him alone onstage, because he always makes something unexpected out of the music. In this case, he played four pieces—two each by Mendelssohn and Schumann—and made them sound like nothing I had ever heard before. In the case of two of them, Mendelssohn’sVariations sérieuses in D Minor and Schumann’s Sonata No. 1, I believe I actually had never heard them before; but what he made of the more familiar Mendelssohn and Schumann Fantasies that he played after the intermission was equally surprising. Whether he is uncovering rarely played works or investigating familiar ones, Schiff is always discovering something. Going to one of his solo concerts is like listening in on a private session between a pianist and his piano—not that there is any tentativeness or redoing of errors, but there is a kind of openness and exploration that one expects to hear only in private.
That was followed, on Sunday afternoon, by just about the best performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony I have ever heard (and I have heard Gergiev do it with the Mariinsky Orchestra, which was my previous standard of comparison). In this case, the young Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski was leading his home orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra—again at Avery Fisher Hall, but this time under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Presents “Great Performers” series. The marvelous Shostakovich symphony in C Minor, written in 1936 but unplayed until after Stalin’s death, might just be Shostakovich’s best work on that scale; it is at any rate one of his most thrilling, with ear-splitting cacophanous vivacity countered by moments of quiet tenderness and a trailing-off ending that is filled with something close to mortal terror. And Jurowski and his London chums did it full justice.
Then it was Monday night and the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, for whom these musicians always play their best. Friends who had been to a previous night of this program advised me in the strongest terms to leave at intermission and skip the Hindemith Symphony in E Flat—and though I am not prone to taking other people’s advice, this suggestion was so emphatic (“It was horribly annoying; it left me in a terrible mood,” said one friend, and “It was composing indicative of the most rigid mind,” said another) that I happily obeyed. This left me with a one-hour gemlike concert—Andras Schiff performing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 as Muti led the Philharmonic beautifully in the background. It was the kind of perfect experience that made you wish all concerts lasted just an hour, and it only heightened my admiration for Schiff, and for Brahms.
On Tuesday and Wednesday nights Valery Gergiev was conducting his own excellent Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus in a concert version of Berlioz’s Les Troyens at Carnegie Hall. Though I am not normally a big Berlioz fan, I have learned to go to anything of his that Gergiev conducts, and this was no exception. The solo performances were great, the chorus was outstanding, and the orchestra was, as usual, beyond reproach. I basked in the ninety-minute intermissionless first part on Tuesday, and though I had to stay home on Wednesday to rest up for my big Thursday event, my friends who went to both halves said the second half was, if anything, even better. But that is the thing about New York: one lacks the pure bodily endurance to go to everything, even if conflicts, price, and distance were not a factor.
And then on Thursday I attended what, for me, was the high point of the week: William Kentridge’s terrific new production of Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, with Gergiev conducting the Met’s orchestra. I am going to write about this production in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, so I won’t say any more for now, except to comment that the three collaborators—Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge—turn out to share a sensibility that makes the sum of their collaboration even better than the individual parts. I went back to the Metropolitan Opera House less than two weeks later to seeThe Nose again, and if I could, I would go twice a month for the rest of my life.
So you can imagine what Brantelid and Forsberg were up against, coming on the Friday after all that. I only hope I someday have a chance to hear them again with a more open mind and a less depleted heart.
—March 25, 2010