This week the Czech Philharmonic came to Carnegie Hall for three concerts in a row, and so did a huge number of Czechs. You could distinguish them from the normal Carnegie denizens because a) they were all dressed up—the men in suits or even black-tie, the women in glittery dresses—whereas we locals have taken to attending Carnegie concerts in jeans and sweaters; b) they were incredibly silent at the breaks between music, and incredibly vocal in their applause at the end; and c) they were all speaking Czech with each other. Just being in their midst was kind of like visiting a foreign country, without even having to go to an airport. The friendly and extremely knowledgeable man I sat next to on Wednesday night had come all the way from Prague for these three concerts, and I gather much of the rest of the crowd had done the same. On Thursday night they were even joined by the Czech president, who sat in one of the first-tier boxes and benevolently bowed to the crowd when he was introduced from the stage.
But how, you may well ask, was the music? Well, pretty stupendous, on the whole. I missed Tuesday night’s concert (for reasons that will be explained at the end of this post), but on Wednesday we were treated to Dvorak’s Violin Concerto featuring Gil Shaham, followed by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and on Thursday we had Daniil Trifonov in Dvorak’s Piano Concerto, with Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass to conclude the program. Both soloists were outstanding in completely different ways: Shaham looked like he was having a great time amid his fellow players, nodding and smiling at them in the moments when he wasn’t playing, and moving around freely, as a violinist can, whereas Trifonov remained hunched over the piano keys, communing with the instrument as if it and he belonged to their own superhuman species. What the two performances shared was their remarkable virtuosity, even beyond what was demanded by the complicated scores. If I had to judge by the audience response alone, I would say that the enthusiasm expressed for these two soloists was even greater than that accorded to the absent Mahler and Janacek—and that is saying a lot, because those huge symphonic pieces were performed beautifully, and the audience knew it.
Both evenings, plus the one I missed, were led by the terrific conductor Semyon Bychkov. I have only heard him once before, in a guest appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic, but I remembered his name because he was so good—and now, at the helm of his own orchestra, he was even better. In the time this Russian-born, American-trained, European-domiciled conductor has been leading the Czech Philharmonic, he has been able to infuse them with something of his own personality and at the same time bring out their own. In fact, I would say that “personality” is one of the triumphant attributes of this excellent orchestra, especially in the way they performed the huge symphonic pieces (or symphonic and choral, in the case of the Glagolitic Mass). Other fine orchestras feature amazingly exact precision, or subtlety of dynamic range, or some other technical skill; the Czechs are notable for their intensity, which manifests itself in the emotion-infused music they produce. Somehow, they and Bychkov together managed to create the sense that the whole gigantic room was feeling the same thing at once—a feeling that was reinforced when the Czech-led audience began to clap loudly and yell “Bravo” repeatedly at the end.
And where was I on Tuesday night? In the underground chamber space at Carnegie, Zankel Hall, listening to the countertenor Iestyn Davies sing mainly seventeenth-century German songs by the likes of Buxtehude, Geist, and Johann Christoph Bach, all the while accompanied by an English group called Fretwork. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world—not only because the music itself was lovely and soothing, if often melancholy, but because the sight of five people all playing various-sized viols (with one more player in the background on organ and virginal) was itself intriguing and unusual. Have you ever seen a viol, that ancestor of the violin, the viola, and the cello? It’s played like a viola de gamba—that is, gripped between the knees of the musician—and the bow is held from the inside rather than the outside, if you see what I mean, so that the whole experience of watching such a concert takes one back to a different period entirely. This was a kind of travel that no airport could have accomplished, and I was exceedingly grateful for it. Even more, though, I was grateful to be present in the same room with Iestyn Davies’ voice, an unearthly sound that can fill the whole of Carnegie’s large hall if it needs to (I have heard him do it, with the English Concert’s Rodelinda last spring), but that comes across as even more remarkable at close range. Neither male nor female, neither childish nor fully adult, the vocal music emitted by a great countertenor—and Davies is one of the greatest—sounds like nothing so much as the heartfelt expression of a ghost or spirit. It can truly make the hairs rise on the back of your neck. In contrast to Wednesday’s and Thursday’s delightfully human and overwhelmingly present experience, Tuesday’s concert seemed to offer a muted, lowkey, but nonetheless tangible access to a magical, hidden, ancestrally known world—one I generally don’t believe in, except when such music has its way with me.