Great Performers

In this wintry New York spring, I have thus far managed to attend two Great Performers concerts at Lincoln Center. Both of them, not at all to my surprise, completely lived up to the series name.

The first, on March 28, featured my favorite violinist, Christian Tetzlaff, playing four of the six Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin. I have heard him do the whole sequence twice at the 92nd Street Y, and each time it was one of the most thrilling musical experiences of my life. If this Alice Tully event felt slightly less overwhelming, that may have been because the gargantuan physical effort required to play all six had been reduced to the length of a normal chamber-music concert. But by laying aside the marathon aspects, Tetzlaff in a way made it easier for us to pay attention to the straightforward musical pleasures. With the first sonata and partita omitted, we were able to leap directly into the glories of the middle section, which ended just before the intermission on what many people consider the high point of the whole series, the Chaconne of Partita 2. Certainly this is an amazing movement, composed as if for two or three violins but with only one player sounding all the notes on his verifiably solo instrument. It was as if Bach said to himself, “I think I’ll compose something impossible and then see if someone comes along in the next four hundred years who is able to play it well.”

Yet even at this most difficult, strenuous point in the concert, Tetzlaff’s playing seemed effortless—not slight or facile in any way, but also not diligently self-congratulatory. It felt completely natural: an odd thing to say, I realize, about a performance of such supernatural delicacy and tonality, but that is the impression Tetzlaff always leaves me with, a sense that the music is emanating without strain from his own body. And when he reached the final two movements of the third partita—a Bourrée and a Gigue that his swaying body and tapping feet visibly confirmed as dance rhythms—we could feel the joyous triumph of this partnership, a pairing between player and composer so closely matched that one could no longer tell the dancer from the dance.

Something oddly similar happened in the second Great Performance, on April 19, where the singer and the pianist, Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, exhibited their own uncanny capacity to merge their separate artistic natures into one.  Instead of Bach, we had high German romanticism, in the forms of songs by Schumann and Brahms based on poems by Heinrich Heine. In my youth, I would have scoffed at the idea that I would ever have enjoyed a concert of German lieder. I think my youthful attitude was similar to Lucky Jim’s when he complained about “filthy Mozart”: not so much a philistine response as a sign of class resentment. (The two may overlap, but whereas philistinism is almost always thoughtless, class resentment can be and often is well-grounded.) But what Padmore cleverly did, in this case, was to defuse some of that class element by speaking at the beginning about the people behind these pieces. By lending character and plot to the evening—in terms of Clara Schumann’s relationship with both men, their personalities in relation to hers, and the very different moods they evoked from Heine’s poems—he made the performance something other than a mere lieder recital, something more human and easily graspable. And that is how he embodied the songs as well: as living documents representing intense relationships, between man and woman, between artist and self.

Padmore’s introduction also served to emphasize the piano’s important role in these pieces, by pointing out that Clara, the noted pianist for whom they were written, would have sounded them out in the privacy of her own home, and that Brahms himself performed on the piano in some of the early concerts. In doing so, he shifted the sense of the evening from a tenor recital with accompanying pianist (which is the way these things are so often billed) to a full collaboration between singer and musician. And Paul Lewis more than lived up to that expectation, lending his own aura of quiet charm and infinite craftsmanship to the evening’s performance. Often it would be left to the pianist to finish the songs, to elaborate their emotions and then delicately close them down. One of my favorite examples of this occurred during the first half, in Schumann’s Liederkreis, where the singer stands silent as the piano sounds three repeated notes in an ending. Lewis drew out the spaces between the notes, as if to tease us with the possibility of endlessness—and then, between the second and final notes, he flicked a glance toward us, as if to say, “Are you ready and waiting now?” Padmore’s grin at this point was one signal of their intense solidarity; another, more solemn instance occurred at the end of the concert, when the tenor, having had his impassioned say in the Dichterliebe, stood in silence, his clenched, upraised fist gradually opening and dropping to his side, as the piano had the final wrenching word.