Given that it’s the shortest month of the year, this February contained a surprising number of excellent performances. I will return to some of these at a later point, when I write about them (or aspects of them) in the print edition of The Threepenny Review. But for now I just want to take note of them, and of my delight in them.
Jonathan Biss and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra: The always-marvelous Biss was in town for three performances with this excellent chamber orchestra, on February 9, 10, and 11 at Cal Performances‘ Zellerbach Hall. I caught two of them and heard from friends that the third was equally good. All three featured a Beethoven piano concerto paired, in each case, with a commissioned piece that was meant to allude to, or match up with, or in some other way echo that particular concerto. I heard the 3rd (paired with a Timo Andres commission) and the 4th (paired with a Salvatore Sciarrino commission), and though I mildly enjoyed each of the new pieces, the stand-out in each show was obviously Biss’s performance of the Beethoven concerto. The Fourth, on the Saturday night, was particularly outstanding: I have heard Biss do this before, but each time he seems to do it better, reminding me why it is my favorite of all the Beethoven concertos (even better than the Emperor, I think, which is the one I missed by not going on Sunday). The orchestra supported him beautifully, for which its young guest conductor, Joshua Weilerstein, deserved a great deal of the credit. Altogether, a hugely successful mini-series.
Mark Morris’s Pepperland: This new piece by my favorite choreographer was commissioned by (among others) the City of Liverpool to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The dance premiered in England last year, but I restrained myself from flying over for it, knowing that it would soon be out in America. Still, I couldn’t resist flying to Seattle for its first American appearance on February 16, 17, and 18. It was hugely worth it—not only because the dance and music are both terrific, but because Seattle is where Morris grew up, and the hometown crowd was thrillingly enthusiastic about him and about the piece. I saw the one-hour work twice, once on Friday and once on Saturday, and my overall impression is that this may be the most fun piece Morris has ever done. The dancing is lively and often humorous, the costumes are gorgeous, and the music—half adapted by jazz musician Ethan Iverson from six original Beatles songs, and half composed by Iverson to bridge the spaces between those songs—is a thorough-going delight. (In addition to the expected vocalist, keyboard instruments, and percussion, it also features a soprano sax, a trombone, and a bizarre twentieth-century invention called the theremin, which is a pleasure to watch as well as to hear.) It was Iverson’s and Morris’s clever idea to include “Penny Lane” among the songs, even though it does not actually appear on the Sgt. Pepper album—but as dance and as song, it was my favorite element of the evening, and I couldn’t get the tune out of my head for the rest of the weekend. I predict that this Mark Morris work will be a big hit in the other places to which it is coming—particularly in Berkeley, to which Cal Performances is bringing it in September.
The Danish String Quartet: These talented young guys—three Danes and a Norwegian—are always a pleasure to hear, and at their San Francisco Performances concert on February 19 they gave us an added dose of pleasure by including Scandianavian folk music in their program. In fact, the whole program—beginning with Bartok’s First Quartet, and ending with one of Beethoven’s Razumovskys—had been designed to reflect the connections between folk and classical music, and in this it hugely succeeded. Not that the Bartok and the Beethoven aren’t great in themselves; but to hear them played in this lively, sensitive fashion, by a group of people who truly have an international and democratic sense of what music can be, gave them a new edge. The folk tunes that bridged the two classical works—arranged for string quartet by the players themselves, and derived mainly from songs that are still sung in the far north and remote island sections of Denmark—were completely unfamiliar to me, and yet they gave me the same feeling of tuneful satisfaction that, say, “Penny Lane” and the other Beatles melodies had offered during the prior weekend. Whereas Pepperland is mostly upbeat, however, these Scandinavian songs all seem to be in a minor key, with chord combinations that might remind you of medieval religious music. Paradoxically (or perhaps not so paradoxically, given the present state of our nation and our world), that melancholy element was a great part of the evening’s charm.
Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, and Leonidas Kavakos: I haven’t been to this yet—it’s happening tonight, again at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall—but how can this trio be anything but great? In New York I would have to fight through crowds to hear them at Carnegie Hall, but here, thanks to the ever-brilliant Cal Performances, I can just walk down the street and get a terrific earful. The perfect capstone to a musically satisfying month.