Since Christian Tetzlaff is‚ and has been for decades, my favorite violinist in the whole world, I take every available opportunity to hear him. And this has meant that two or three times I’ve been privileged to hear the Tetzlaff Trio—most recently at the 92nd Street Y, where they played last night.
There are actually only two Tetzlaffs in the trio: Christian on the violin and his sister Tanja on the cello. For many years their excellent third member was the pianist Lars Vogt, with whom they had worked so closely and so long that he almost seemed like a third sibling. But last September Vogt died of cancer, tragically young. On this latest tour, he has been replaced by his student, Kiveli Dörken.
She may not be a full Tetzlaff yet, but Dörken more than held up her end in this concert. Her sound was perhaps a bit too emphatic in the Beethoven that opened the program (Op. 1, No. 3), but even there her skills were obvious and her playing suitably delicate in the quiet parts. By the Dvorak (No. 2, Op. 26), which came second, she had calmed down considerably, and when the trio reached the end of its program—the enchanting Schubert Piano Trio No. 1—her performance could not have been bettered by anyone.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that Schubert piece played more beautifully than I did last night. The accord among the three players was perfect; the way they picked up each other’s themes, alternated their trills and pizzicatos, occasionally joined together in unison, and even left a few momentary silences was a pleasure to behold. Watching the cellist as she intermittently glanced aside at the violinist, I felt that the word “automatic” did not do just to the sibling connection: their shared sense of the music lies deeper than practice or technicality, extending down to some place that’s bred in the bone. What is magical is that the trio allows this close tie to become manifest, and yet still makes room for a third person in its embrace.
As a soloist, Christian Tetzlaff is known for his lightness of touch—he can sometimes play so softly that you feel yourself leaning in to hear the notes—and also for his intense musicality, whereby he seems to be channeling the composer’s own character in every dynamic or rhythmic shift. I have heard him do this with Bach’s challenging partitas and sonatas (twice, in fact, both times at the 92nd Street Y); most recently, I heard him do it in Kurt Weill’s judderingly twentieth-century Concerto for Violin and Wind Instruments, played under the masterful baton of Vladimir Jurowski at Berlin’s Konzerthaus. In other words, he is superb at the full range of the violin’s repertoire. But in the Tetzlaff Trio he has mostly chosen to perform works of the Beethoven-Schubert-Brahms-Dvorak period, an amazing era of just over a century that produced a plethora of great piano trio music.
On Tuesday night we were treated to that period in full, because the encore—a Brahms slow movement—was drawn from a piano trio that had Vogt recorded with the Tetzlaffs back in 2014. This achingly emotional Brahms encore was their explicit tribute to their lost comrade, but the evening’s program as a whole was dedicated to him. Perhaps as a result, the entire concert felt moving and triumphant, joyful and sad all at once, just as the best music should be.