Over the past month, I’ve been finding the best music in places where I didn’t necessarily expect it, and less good music in places where I did. When this oddity occurred once, it didn’t seem worth remarking on, but now that it has happened over and over again, I’m forced to think about it.
The first such occasion for comparison involved the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House, viewed in relation to that much more famous orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, which lies catty-corner from it across Lincoln Center Plaza. In early March I was lucky enough enough to hear one of the performances of the Met’s Peter Grimes under the guest baton of Donald Runnicles, and man, was that music great. Since a great deal of the opera consists of purely musical interludes that Britten called “Seascapes,” and since John Doyle’s production very intelligently did absolutely nothing with the stage picture during those interludes, we could for once really hear the wonderful orchestration. The stark, looming, flat set, which some critics complained about, seemed to me a boon: it ricocheted the musicians’ excellent playing right back into our ears, so that we almost appeared to be surrounded by the auditory world of that harsh coastal village. I, who normally go straight for the narrative line in opera, was content to sit back and let the weird, poetic, slightly disjunctive libretto wash over me; I seemed to be taking in the tragedy of the central character more through the music than through the words, even though those words happened to be in English this time. And, as a Californian, I felt a strong if somewhat indefensible local pride in the fact that the Met audience was going absolutely wild over Our Donald’s conducting. (Okay, so he’s Scottish—but he has spent the past fifteen years as music director of the San Francisco Opera, and his imminent departure is the Bay Area’s great loss.)
In contrast, the New York Philharmonic was completely limp under Alan Gilbert, its prospective new leader. If his Haydn is anything to go by, we are in for a boring sequel to the current, largely insufferable reign of Lorin Maazel. Ironically, the best thing about the Philharmonic concert was its singing: in this case by Dawn Upshaw, who did her usual stellar job presenting some multi-lingual Berio songs. When a soloist like this sings out at full strength (or when, as happened later in the month, the Westminster Choir under Kurt Mazur does an enthralling performance of the St. Matthew Passion), you realize that Avery Fisher Hall is really only suitable for powerful vocal works, whereas it turns out that the Met can accommodate a purely instrumental sound quite nicely.
The St. Matthew Passion was the second religious work I heard in a secular location this month, and both nods to the Easter season were distinctly improved by their removal from a church setting. The previous instance was Handel’s Messiah, performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Time Warner Center’s Rose Theater. This is a very pleasant, well-lit hall, suitable for jazz or modern dance or chamber music, and it gave a warm, welcoming sound to the period instruments playing under Laurence Cummings’ skillful direction. The chorus was excellent in this concert, too (they were something called the English Voices), and the soloists were competent, if not compelling. What really made the piece work for me, though, was its translation from required Christmas fare to voluntary musical treat. Even the people who stood up for the Hallelujah Chorus didn’t bother me, as their behavior would have done in a church (implying, as it would have there, that I too should be standing up). It was kind of sweet to see them doing this in a concert hall—bravely, individually, or in scattered groups of two or three or five—as if to welcome the actual arrival of their invisible god, who apparently deigns to descend even during the off-season and in the oddest places.
By far the severest contrast between place and performance occurred just last week, at two different chamber music concerts. The first, on Tuesday the 18th, was the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s presentation of “The Pressler Connection,” a tribute to the grand old pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio that was also his tribute, in essence, to the rising generation. Joined by five youthful and talented string players, Menahem Pressler gave us deeply persuasive, musically involving renditions of Mozart’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major and Schubert’s Trout Quintet. (In between, three of the youngsters did a terrific job on a Dvorak trio.) What was so amazing about these performances was the collaborative musicianship, the way each player was clearly listening to and responding to all the others, so that the finished product they brought forth actually felt like a living piece of music, a newly born organism, even though it had been written down centuries earlier. The concert was so touchingly intimate and alive that I barely noticed the horribly uncomfortable pews of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the inhospitable setting to which the CMSLC has been banished during the renovation of Alice Tully Hall.
No chamber music auditorium in New York could be nicer than Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, a perfect gem of a small space, complete with chandeliers and other fin-de-siècle flourishes, to which I went on Wednesday the 19th for a performance of the Brentano String Quartet. I was very much looking forward to the program, especially Shostakovich’s intensely moving Fifteenth Quartet, but also Mendelssohn’s final string quartet and Brahms’s late clarinet quintet. (This was a program devoted to the idea of late style.) To my disappointment, though, the playing didn’t live up to its glorious setting. It wasn’t that the Brentanos weren’t technically perfect; in fact, the problem may have been that each of the four musicians (five, if we count the visiting clarinetist) was too focused on his or her own perfection, to the exclusion of anything else. The Shostakovich, in particular, is a piece that needs to be inhabited— collaboratively, thoughtfully, dramatically lived in — in order to come alive; you can’t just play the notes. The Brentanos played the notes, and, sitting in my lovely, comfortable, enjoyable seat in that perfect auditorium, I felt absolutely nothing.
— March 28, 2008