To attend an astonishingly good concert is always a surprise. If one chooses carefully, one expects competent and even enjoyable performances; but to expect overwhelming delight and reverberating emotional depth would be useless and self-defeating, since these come so rarely. Last week, though, I went to two concerts that had these remarkable qualities. And when I add that both were free (or nearly so: one requested, but did not demand, a fifteen-dollar donation), you will perhaps imagine that I have landed in some sort of musical paradise.
Perhaps I have. This is New York at the beginning of the fall season, a year into the Great Recession, with small musical venues somehow managing to be livelier and more profuse than ever. There’s Bargemusic, my old favorite, and the Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, my newer one; and now we also have (Le) Poisson Rouge, a night-clubby environment where inventive classical music mixes with indie rock and jazz on a near-daily basis. None of these tried-and-true locations, however, was the setting for last week’s two great concerts, which I suppose was also part of the surprise.
The first, on September 15th, was an organ concert by Paul Jacobs held atThe Juilliard School’s Paul Hall. Jacobs, who teaches organ at Juilliard, looks about nineteen but is actually thirty-two. He has been an organ virtuoso since his mid-teens, when he became the head organist in his hometown parish, located in semi-rural Washington, Pennsylvania. His relationship to the great organ works of the past is intense, intimate, and unaffected—or rather, I would say that certain mannerisms and speech habits which might seem like affectations in anyone else are utterly genuine in him. (He referred, during one of his brief spoken introductions, to something said by “Mr. Handel,” as if the man had just walked out of the room.) On that Tuesday night he was playing Bach—specifically, the six trios that Bach wrote for organ, notoriously difficult works which require the organist to play one melodic line with his left hand, another on a different keyboard with his right, and a “continuo” with both feet on the pedals. “It is of course amusing to watch a human being performing music with all four limbs,” Jacobs told us before setting off on the first of these six trios, “but I would suggest that at times, especially in the middle movements, you might want close your eyes… Forget about me, and just listen to the music.”
The music, which I had never concentratedly heard before, was remarkable. During the first movement of each trio, I found myself busily trying to track each of the melodies in the strand; that nearly gave me a headache, so I then just let it go and allowed Bach to run things. This he did with his usual aplomb, making it seem as if it was the easiest and most natural thing in the world to string up a sequence of notes and then turn it upside down three beats later on the opposite hand, all the while making sure that everything (even the feet) meshed harmonically. By the time we reached each trio’s final movement—which was always fast, and always followed a slower, more pensive middle movement—I felt no need to try to follow anything: the music just swept me along at its cantering pace. And all the while Paul Jacobs steered his Apollonian steeds with strength, skill, and subtlety, so that Bach’s dazzling sun could rise and fall in perfect rhythm six times in ninety minutes.
Toward the end of the concert, Jacobs thanked us for being such a good audience—not in a smarmy or perfunctory way, but by remarking on the utter absence of coughing or paper-rustling in the slow movements. This was true: it was a good audience, something I hadn’t even noticed because I was so focused on the performance itself. But of course it was in part the courtesy of that rapt audience—all so delighted to have been admitted free to this amazing event, and all nearly pinching themselves to make sure the dream was real—that made me able to take in the music as I did.
Another good audience, though of a different kind, attended the September 19th concert put on by a group called counter)induction at the Tenri Cultural Institute on West 13th Street. The low-priced requested donation, the fact that tickets couldn’t be obtained in advance, and the youthfulness of the players and organizers meant that there were lots of young people in the audience, but the middle-aged and the elderly were well-represented, too. All of us squeezed into a spare, gallery-like space where most found folding chairs but some sat on the floor; in the end there were so many that we completely surrounded the performers, who were only about five or ten feet away from those of us in the front row. This had its disadvantages in the Henryk Górecki piece that opened the program; called Genesis I: Elementi, it featured occasionally abrasive squawks and squeals on a cello, a viola, and a violin. But I wouldn’t have given up the mild discomfort of the too-close sound for anything. That slight initial pain made the world premiere by Mohammed Fairouz, which immediately followed the Górecki, seem positively lyrical—and indeed it was quite lyrical in places, when the viola and the clarinet wove their folk-like melodies together. The twenty-four-year-old Fairouz (who was present at the event, and who shyly got up from the audience to take his bows with the musicians) is obviously very talented, with a distinct musical voice of his own already. I just wish that in this piece,Kalas, he had let that voice emerge solely through the two instruments, rather than elaborating his theme with spoken words in the first and last movements.
He certainly had a chance to observe just how expressive non-verbal music can be, in the part of the program that followed the intermission, when four excellent musicians—Steven Beck on the piano, Miranda Cuckson on the violin, Sumire Kudo on the cello, and Benjamin Fingland on the clarinet—took on Olivier Messiaen’s Quatour pour la fin du temps. (A fifth, the violist Jessica Meyer, who had performed beautifully in the evening’s first two pieces, simply turned pages for the pianist in this one.) Messiaen’s quartet, composed and first played in a World War Two prison camp, is one of the most gripping, devastating, transcendant pieces of music written during the twentieth century. At this performance its eight sections seemed to go by in a flash, and yet each felt like a full lifetime of music: I guess that’s what’s meant, in part, by “the end of time.” Luckily for atheist listeners like me, Messiaen’s explicitly religious intentions were all buried in the program notes, and so we could absorb the music on its own terms, taking in whatever aspirations and despairs it happened to carry. As each soloist—first the clarinetist, then the cellist, then the violinist—played his or her special part, I kept thinking, “It can’t get any better than this,” and yet it did. Only the piano, the instrument Messiaen himself played in that first performance in 1941, got no moment to itself, no chance to speak directly to the audience; but in its constancy, its generous support for the other instruments, and its long, quiet, punctuated fade to silence at the end, it came to seem as powerful and expressive as the other three.
It was a perfect piece of music, played perfectly. And as I gazed around at the other reverent listeners, sitting absolutely still on floor and chair, encircling the performers in that otherwise bare room, I sensed that this was the thing itself: that all-engrossing, time-suspending, private yet communal experience that is the very essence of live music.
—September 21, 2009