Conductors

Posted on November 23, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

For the first twenty or thirty years of my concert-going existence, I thought that the composer was everything. And then, a few years back, I began to notice how much difference a conductor could make. But even this realization did not emerge into a fully conscious concert-choosing principle until earlier this month, when events forced it to the forefront of my mind. As a result, my current position (and I understand that this is as foolish, in its way, as my earlier absolutist stance) is that the identity of the conductor is the only reliable factor.

What led me, half-amazed, to this startling conclusion was a pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall. The first, which took place on November 2, involved the last-minute substitution of Lorin Maazel for James Levine as conductor of the Boston Symphony. The second, on November 13, was the culmination of a three-concert appearance by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. A certain amount of the difference, I suppose, can be written off to the relative discomfort of musicians faced with an unfamiliar conductor: that is, the Boston players are used to playing with Levine and were suddenly stuck with a pinch-hitting Maazel, whereas Rattle and his Berlin performers have had years to build on their joint and separate strengths. But that alone does not begin to explain the discrepancy in the performances.

Like many other people, I am a Beethoven addict, so I was really looking forward to hearing James Levine conduct the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, and even when his slower-than-expected recovery from back-surgery made him unavailable, I hoped that the excellent Boston Symphony would be able to stand up without him. I suspected that Maazel might be an irritating presence (a few visits to the New York Philharmonic had been enough to teach me that), but for some reason I figured that even he couldn’t ruin Beethoven. I was wrong.

The Sixth Symphony was bad enough—bad enough so I might ordinarily have left at the intermission, if I hadn’t been drawn in by the ghoulish, train-wreck horror of watching great music reduced to rubble—but the Seventh, which is one of my favorites, was downright appalling. It wasn’t just the sound: those arbitrarily slowed-down or speeded-up passages; the weird intrusions of oompah-sounding beats that were meant to underly the rest, but had been brought too forcefully to the surface; the distressingly cavalier way in which the piece’s normally powerful tension was punctured by something I can only call whimsy. But it was also the sight of Maazel, swinging his arms as if they were an elephant’s trunk, grasping at the protuberant notes with a greedily extended hand, and in general emphasizing with his body the destruction he was wreaking in the music. After a while I found it best just to rest my head against the back of my seat and contemplate Stern Auditorium’s lovely ceiling. I had never noticed before how soothing and helpful all that gold leaf can be when you are trying to lift yourself above the sordidness of your aural surroundings.

Brahms is one of those composers I always forget I like. When I am asked to name my favorites, he never comes to mind. But the three concerts given by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic—and in particular the third concert, which presented Brahms’s Third and Fourth Symphonies separated by a sliver of Schoenberg—made me realize how fully he belongs with the other symphonic gods. Every subtle balancing act performed by Brahms, every shift of the melody from winds to strings and back, could be appreciated to the full in this concert. What you sensed, listening to these great performers, was how much Brahms understood and loved the symphony orchestra. The different timbres of the instruments, their varying capacities for loudness or softness, the way they could be made to echo and reinforce each other, were all second-nature to him. (Or perhaps not second-nature at all: Brahms threw away a great deal of his work, so the perfection we hear in these two final symphonies could well be laborious experience disguised as natural ease.) And what surprised me in particular at the Berlin Philharmonic concert was that I had never consciously perceived this in Brahms before.

Simon Rattle has occasionally been criticized for letting the Berlin musicians go their own way (mainly by people who valued the autocratic manner of Herbert von Karajan), but only someone who had never watched him in rehearsals could think this. What we see up there on the concert stage is merely the tip of the iceberg, the final moment in which they all bring to fruition what they have worked so hard, together, to create. Sometimes, yes, Rattle seems to rock back on his heels in passive appreciation of his wonderful musicians’ talent—but it only seems that way. In each tiny flick of his fingers, each fleeting expression of his face, as well as in his wilder moments of full-bodied enthusiasm, he is drawing out a performance whose every note has been contemplated and worked on in advance. The orchestra, under him, seems less like a pack of talented individuals than a single multi-faceted instrument responding to his delicate touch. And yet they remain individuals, too, as their piercingly good solos attest. Nothing of Brahms is lost in a performance like this. One could almost imagine, in such circumstances, that he is the equal of Beethoven.

—November 23, 2009


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Violinists

Posted on November 16, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

Musicians are fond of saying that Shostakovich’s compositions only really come to life when they are played before a live audience. It also helps, I’ve found, when they are performed by excellent players. In the last year alone, I’ve been exposed for the first time to two Shostakovich pieces—the First Violin Concerto from 1948 and the Second Violin Concerto from 1967—that struck me as among the high points of his achievement as a composer. And I have no doubt that part of my enthusiasm stems from the remarkable violinists who played the solo parts in these galvanizing performances.

The First Concerto, though completed during a gloomy period when Shostakovich was distinctly out of favor with the Soviet regime (it remained unperformed until after Stalin’s death), is nonetheless the work of a vigorous and still youthful composer. This vibrant, intense, complicated piece makes huge demands on the violinist’s technical abilities, even as it also requires a near-theatrical immersion in the music’s extreme emotions. Last May I heard Christian Tetzlaff perform it as part of a New York Philharmonic concert under the baton of David Zinman (who was substituting at the last minute for an indisposed Esa-Pekka Salonen). Tetzlaff was very much on my radar: I had heard him do an astonishing Brahms Violin Concerto with James Levine’s Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall the previous fall, and had then rushed out to hear his excellent chamber group, the Tetzlaff Quartet, play at Zankel some weeks later. I was, in other words, already an avid fan. Even so, I was not prepared for the thrill of hearing him do the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto. The performance was so powerfully alive, so alert to every twist and turn in the music, that I was almost breathless when it was finished.

And then the same thing happened all over again when I heard Guy Braunstein perform the piece this October in Berlin. Braunstein, of whom I had never heard, was playing with the Berlin Philharmonic under the conductor Semyon Bychkov, who was also unknown to me; I was there purely because I never miss a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic when I am on their home turf. To my amazement, the First Violin Concerto sounded just as remarkable in Braunstein’s hands as it had in Tetzlaff’s. The virtuosity was perhaps a bit more evident—Tetzlaff makes everything, even Bach partitas, look easy—and possibly the eerier, darker tones in the piece were brought forward a bit more by the Russian conductor. But in any case it was once again a thrilling, invigorating musical experience, the kind of thing that makes you feel more alive than you do in your normal life. And Braunstein (whom I’ve just heard again with the Berlin Philharmonic in New York: he is their leading concertmaster, as good at Brahms as he is at Shostakovich) is now firmly ensconced on my radar, too.

I was grateful in an entirely different way for Gidon Kremer’s movingly elegiac performance of the Second Violin Concerto, which I heard on that same October trip to Berlin. In the kind of weirdly mismatched program to which Shostakovich’s divided nature so often lends itself, Daniel Barenboim and his Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra had paired the haunting, fragmentary, disturbingly profound late violin concerto—written when Shostakovich’s old friends, including one beloved violinist, had started to die off around him—with the bombastic, generally annoying, if dutifully philo-semitic Thirteenth Symphony, which takes Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” as its departure point. I have disliked the Thirteenth Symphony when I’ve heard it in New York, and I disliked it again in a different way in Berlin. But Kremer’s first-act rendition of the violin concerto was such a revelation that I forgave all. Well, not completely all: when I went back the very next night to hear Gidon Kremer perform his magic once again (this time from a seat about twenty feet away, so that even the silences and near-silences came across as undiluted emotion), I made sure to leave at the intermission so as to preserve my ecstatic state. Live music, alas, cannot be preserved for long, and by the time I was having my solo dinner at the counter of Lutter & Wegner, I could barely recapture the feeling of being in the concert hall under Kremer’s wondrous spell. But I could remember having that feeling, and that memory will stay with me for as long as I am alive and conscious.

—November 16, 2009

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Lightning Strikes Twice

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

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


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A Rainy Night

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

In this horrible-weather month that New Yorkers have been calling “spring” (but that we Californians would have no hesitation in labeling “winter”), Monday the 20th stood out as a particularly unpleasant night. After taunting us with a hint of summer warmth on the preceding Friday and Saturday, the climate had turned nasty again, with a cold, pelting rain that chilled the bones and made all ventures outdoors seem pointless. I wanted nothing more than to huddle inside by the radiator, but I had committed myself to attending the always-overbooked Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center—personally committed myself, by wangling two tickets from the Movado Hour’s endearing curator, Pedja Muzajevic, but also morally committed myself, in the sense that two deserving, music-loving souls could have sat in those free seats if my husband and I had chosen in advance to stay home. So we grudgingly covered ourselves in rain-repellent equipment and set out.

And it’s a lucky thing we did. I mean, it’s not as if we were taking a great risk: the Movado Hour is always pleasant, and not only because its structural outlines—free tickets, free drinks, a cabaret-style setting, and a single intermissionless hour of professionally performed music—conspire to make it so. With his wide connections in the music world, Muzajevic (who is himself an excellent pianist) has managed over the years to lure in an astonishing array of chamber-music performers, from the youthful Brooklyn Riders to the eminent Bella Davidovich. But even against that high standard, Monday night’s performance by the St. Lawrence String Quartet proved to be something special.

I have heard and liked this group in other venues, but there is no comparison between those more standard concerts and the way these four accomplished string players let loose, technically and emotionally, in the smaller, more intimate arena of the Movado Hour. I’ve now heard them twice in that setting—in the first Movado concert I ever attended, back in the fall of 2005, and in this latest one—and each time the experience was galvanizing.

This time, the program began with an intense, very specific, and quite moving rendition of Mendelssohn’s last composition, Opus 80, the string quartet he wrote just after his beloved sister’s death. I had heard this same quartet pretty recently, in last year’s “late-style” concert by the Brentanos at Weill Hall, but this time it was like a different piece of music, more alive and immediate than anything I normally associate with that composer. It was as if the St. Lawrence players had located the Beethoven side of Mendelssohn and proceeded to bring it out. So already, two minutes into the first Allegro movement, I had forgotten about the rain and the cold and my clammy feet, and had been transported into the here-and-now of a great performance.

And then came the pleasure of a complete surprise. For the second half of their program, the SLSQ gave us the Quartet No. 3 by R. Murray Schafer, a living Canadian composer of whom I (and, I’m willing to bet, at least half the audience) had never heard. The performance—from which the piece itself is inseparable, because it is the kind of piece that can only exist in live performance—was like nothing I had seen or heard before. Beginning with the cellist bowing alone onstage in complete darkness, the quartet gradually lightened, and expanded, to include the other three instruments, as their players strolled in from all directions in the course of the first movement. The entire foursome then engaged in a wild second movement that was like a cross between a Bartok quartet (seasoned with a bit of George Crumb) and an Inuit shouting match—their bows looked as frayed as their voices sounded, by the end of it. Finally, we got a trance-like last movement in which the long, slow notes held in unison bled indeterminately from one tone to another: not music, as I am used to thinking of it, so much as enveloping atmosphere. It created, at any rate, its own climate, not to mention its own world—so much so that I was startled, when I emerged onto the street, to discover that it was still raining in New York.

—April 21, 2009

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Wagnerian Time

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

Whether you find it easy or difficult to lend yourself to Wagner’s overwhelmingly powerful agenda—and I am still not sure where I stand on this question—you will be aware of having to alter something in yourself to accommodate his patently unreasonable demands. They are unreasonable by design: self-restraint was never part of his mode, and easy entertainment never part of his goal. He wants to make you capitulate to him. This wish —this need, I should call it—is perhaps what makes him so astute on the subject of compulsion, whether of one being by another, or of one being by forces beyond his own control (such as fate, or love). That compelled figure can be either mortal or immortal, king or commoner, male or female, young or old: nothing gets you out of having to submit, in Wagner’s world.

As an audience member, you are most likely to experience this sense of submission in respect to time. It’s not just that the operas are four or five hours long. It’s also that, minute by minute, you are being asked to suspend your desire for completion in a way that no previous opera asked you to. Handel may run the same lines three or four times over in a single aria, but the boredom factor can be dealt with by antic staging, and in any case it always comes to an end fairly quickly. You cannot stage a Wagner opera so that we don’t notice the passage of time. We are meant to notice it. Fairly near the beginning of the evening, we may ask ourselves: Are these two people ever going to stop singing at each other in this way? Are they ever going to get off this ship, or this mountaintop, or this blasted heath? And the answer is no, they are not; it is going to go on for so long that eventually, if the performance is good enough, you will forget about the very idea of an ending. And once you have reached that mental state, you will begin to enjoy, indeed wallow in, the sense of endlessness. The eternal present tense of the music—the way, melodically as well as narratively, it refuses to reach a conclusion—will come to seem like a form of immortality that is being temporarily granted to you.

The production of Tristan and Isolde that I saw last Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House, performed under the baton of Daniel Barenboim, was able to induce this dreamy yet alert state of suspension, and that in itself is high praise. In his conducting debut at the Met, Barenboim drew from the orchestra a galvanizing, moving, delicate performance that made the five hours pass in—well, if not a trice, then a very brief five hours. Even the difficult horn solo (performed by Pedro R. Díaz) was pure and perfect: a hard detail to get right, and one that seemed indicative of the whole production’s musical attentiveness. In this drama about the intense delights and torments of love, where the tragedy could only be deferred and not averted, there was something both sympathetic and generous about the way Barenboim allowed us to cling to each passage, each note.

This is not to say that the production had no shortcomings. The supporting performers—Michelle DeYoung as Brangäne, Gerd Grochowski as Kurwenal, and, spectacularly, René Pape as King Marke—were all terrific, but I had some problems with the two leads. Katarina Dalayman was an adequate if not spellbinding Isolde: her clear soprano voice was just sweet enough, and strong enough, to convey the role’s emotional power. Peter Seiffert, the tenor who sang Tristan, was somewhat worse. He got through the part with no major missteps (and I gather, given the role’s difficulty, that this is half the battle), but it always seemed as if he was working, not singing. I never once fell into that adoring swoon which the greatest Wagnerian tenors can produce; the music of his voice just didn’t feel like music. And because Seiffert was comparatively mundane while Pape was unbelievably thrilling, the whole plot got thrown weirdly off-balance. What Isolde in her right mind would have chosen this Tristan over this King Marke?

Still, plot is the least of our concerns with Wagner. Even words (though he paid close attention to them) are not much of a focus in this opera. Once you grasp the basic outlines of the story, you can forget about anxiously checking in with your supertitles every few seconds: they won’t tell you anything that the music isn’t already conveying much more powerfully. So you are freed up to watch that elegantly simply, surprisingly evocative geometric set (designed by Jürgen Rose), and to bask in the gloriously rich lighting (done by Max Keller), and to admire the stillness that is so often central to what these characters are doing. As Tristan and Isolde endlessly sing of their passion and their sorrows, Kurwenal and Brangäne, their attendants, may be holding a single pose for what seems like half an hour or more. Unmoving, statuesque, often silhouetted against the brightly lit set, they are our stand-ins onstage—ordinary bystanders who have been frozen into timelessness, and who have nothing better to do with themselves than to listen for as long as it takes, which might be forever.
—December 2, 2008

 

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Programming

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

I would have gone to hear Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Timeno matter what else was on the program. But by putting it together with other French twentieth-century pieces by Darius Milhaud, Pierre Boulez, and Maurice Ravel, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center made my experience of the Messiaen even stronger and more affecting — or, if that is not possible, they at any rate gave me a greater appreciation than ever of Messiaen’s particular genius.

The three short pieces that filled the first half of the October 3rd program at the New York Ethical Culture Society were, each in its own way, entertainments. One could see the composers playing with musical forms: Milhaud, in his 1923 piano quintet suite from The Creation of the World, was playing with jazz; Boulez, in his 1984 Derive I for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and vibraphone, was playing with cacophony; and Ravel, in his 1924 Tzigane, was playing with gypsy-violin virtuosity. All this (with the possible exception of the Boulez) was extremely pleasurable to hear and to watch, especially in the hands of the masterful Chamber Music Society musicians. But I never lost myself in the music: I was conscious, throughout, of my exact degree of appreciation for the skill involved on the part of composers and players, and I was also conscious of myself, sitting among audience members at a New York concert. It was, in other words, the standard “good concert” experience.

All of this melted away in the face of the program’s second half, which was entirely taken up by the Quartet for the End of Time. Part of this has to do with sheer length: at nearly fifty minutes, Messiaen’s beautifully austere piece requires a different kind of concentration from us, almost a different mode of listening. The austerity is not always severe — there is birdsong here, and unexpected melodiousness to counter the harshness, and surprising transitions between near-silence and ear-threatening loudness; plenty to keep the attention riveted. And part of it, of course, has to do with the story behind the music: written for fellow musicians in a Polish prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War, rehearsed and performed under the supervision of a strangely tolerant camp commander, with a first audience that consisted entirely of other camp prisoners, the Quartet for the End of Time has a special, intimate connection with the horrors of the twentieth century. But this connection would mean nothing if the music did not bear it out — and in Friday night’s performance the music soared.

It was fascinating, in a way, to watch the very musicians who had done the fun, visibly virtuosic work of the first half turn themselves into mere (though that is hardly the right word) transmitters of Messiaen’s creation. Paul Watkins and David Shifrin, who had been skillful in the Boulez, became vehicles of pure feeling here; I don’t know which was more powerful, the painfully expressive music that Watkins pulled out of his cello in his solo moments, or the uncanny way Shifrin seemed to bring his clarinet sound from an almost inaudible distance into the very room where we sat. But perhaps the most transfixing moments of the piece occurred toward the end, where Daniel Hope performed the searing violin part against Gilbert Kalish’s self-effacing but perfect piano accompaniment. Hope, who used to be the violinist in the now-disbanded Beaux Arts Trio (and who has said, of his years with Menahem Pressler, that they turned him from a good violinist into a good musician), had performed with delightful, nearly acrobatic skill in the Ravel Tzigane, showing us all his fast-finger abilities at once. It was hard to believe that this man who had “showed off” so successfully in the Ravel was the same musician who now seemed to disappear into the Messiaen music. In the especially quiet passages, he almost seemed to close in on himself, as if he too were straining to hear the notes; throughout, he managed to convey the impression that the violin was playing itself, while he was merely its Bunraku-like human attendant. And yet the skill required to carry off this final, marvelous piece of music was more than anything he had demonstrated before. This, among other things, was what the program succeeded in showing us: that in the greatest music, pleasurable virtuosity drops away to reveal something even richer and more moving—something that looks like simplicity, but is not.
—October 5, 2008

 

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Slings and Arrows

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

Everyone who has seen at least two seasons of The Wire considers it the greatest television ever made. And it is. But a close runner-up, to my mind, is Slings and Arrows, a program about a group of Shakespearean actors that ran on Canadian television from 2003 to 2006. Different as it is from The Wire—it is billed, for one thing, as a comedy, though I would debate that categorization—Slings and Arrows shares some of the David Simon show’s crucial elements: beautifully written scripts, wonderful acting, a deeply informed sense of how particular institutions work on the inside, and, above all, enormous respect for the audience’s intelligence.

If you plan to rent this show on Netflix, as I just did, be forewarned that it is addictive. You will receive your DVD containing three episodes—half of each season—and you will plan on sedately watching one each night. But as soon as you have finished the first, you will be unable to resist moving on to the second, and then, no matter how late it is, the third; so if you want to get a reasonable night’s sleep, it’s safest just to allocate a full three hours on the night the disk arrives.

The plot centers on something called the New Burbage Festival (think Stratford, Ontario), which exists to present Shakespeare plays, but also promotes ghastly new Canadian playwrights, develops “hard-edged” musicals, and supplements its dwindling resources with forays into dreadful commercial ventures. At the beginning of the first season, the festival’s artistic director, Oliver Welles, is hit by a truck and dies; he reappears thereafter only as a ghost. I can become impatient with this ghost routine (I hated it in Six Feet Under, for instance—but then, I hated that whole series), but I can also be entranced by it, as I was in Topper, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Truly, Madly, Deeply. In Slings and Arrows, Oliver-as-ghost is essential if occasionally annoying: in fact, his annoying quality is part of what makes him essential.

The only person who can see and hear Oliver, in the first two seasons of the show, is Geoffrey, the certifiably crazy, very attractive, somewhat fumbling, deeply sensitive actor-turned-director who is drafted into Oliver’s job. Geoffrey and Oliver have an old history (Oliver directed Geoffrey in his most famous performance, as Hamlet, during which he went crazy and had to leave acting forever), so when Oliver appears in front of Geoffrey and starts ordering him around, their interaction has the quality of an old couple’s disagreements. To complicate this history, the production that Oliver left unfinished at his death, and that Geoffrey has to take over directing, is Hamlet.

But I have not begun to indicate the complicated strands of plot and character that make up each six-episode season. We get to know all the onstage actors—Ellen, the temperamental female lead, who is also Geoffrey’s former and future lover; Frank and Cyril, the two old English homosexuals who play all the spear-carrying parts; Jerry, the slightly pathetic guy who is always the understudy for the main role; plus the American movie star imported to play Hamlet, the self-important blow-hard who takes on Macbeth, the aging Canadian Shakespearean who becomes Lear, and the series of pretty ingenues who portray Ophelia, Juliet, and Cordelia. (The last of these roles is played by Sarah Polley, the brilliant young actress who directed the film Away From Her and whose real-life father, Michael Polley, plays one of the two gay old Englishmen.) Behind them are the administrators who run the New Burbage Festival— most notably Richard, the number-crunching executive director, and Anna, his put-upon assistant—along with some hilarious sidekicks, my favorite of whom is Darren, the violently pretentious, patently idiotic, theater-hating director who is Geoffrey’s nemesis. And behind them are all the schemers, moneymakers, board-members, ministers of culture, advertising executives, and other disreputable types who inhabit the nether regions of any corporate enterprise, but especially a non-profit corporate enterprise that runs to many millions of dollars every year. Art and money mingle cleverly in this series, and one of the more amusing plot strands involves the “re-branding” of New Burbage during Season Two, engineered by a glossy con-man who calls himself Sanjay. (He is not Indian, but has Zen pretensions.) It is this sort of wit that has caused the series to be labeled a comedy, I suppose, and there will indeed be many moments when you laugh out loud. But the humor is dark and frightening and accurate, and the sadness that underlies the humor is palpable and often foregrounded.

It’s hard to separate the acting and the writing in this show, because the people who wrote it seem so deeply inside the actor’s life that the lines are designed for perfect, convincing delivery. There is a reason for this: the people who wrote it are actors, and they all appear in the show. The three writers who are credited with every episode are Susan Coyne (who plays the long-suffering Anna), Mark McKinney (who plays the alternately foolish, evil, and endearing Richard), and Bob Martin (who appears briefly in Season One as Terry, an accountant taking a Change Your Corporate Life With Shakespeare workshop which Geoffrey undermines by turning it into a real acting class). I don’t know what kind of Shakespearean credentials these three have, but somebody in the crowd has thought long and carefully about how these plays work and what makes them wonderful. The series, as a whole, is an argument in favor of Shakespeare as a writer for the living stage, and against the kind of corporate dumbing-down that Shakespeare festivals often indulge in. This is not just a general argument: when Geoffrey, speaking to his actors, hazards a guess at how Ophelia’s mind works or contemplates what makes Lear’s fate moving, we learn something profound about the play itself. And even the people who can’t perform their parts properly (the egotistical Macbeth, the hateful initial Ophelia, the TV-star-turned Goneril, the mumbling Kent) show us something about how those roles function in their respective plays.

About ten percent of each season’s dialogue (at a guess) consists of lines from the specific Shakespeare tragedy that’s being performed by the company during that period. Just as the play’s language fuses with and enriches the script, its themes extend off the stage into the lives of the actors, managers, and behind-the-scenes players. The first couple of seasons feature Hamlet and Macbeth (with a side venture into Romeo and Juliet), and those two ghost-ridden plays naturally offer plenty of scope for Oliver’s supernatural appearances; in the third season the play is King Lear, which has no ghost, but in which the dying actor who plays the dying Lear begins to see and hear Oliver, just as Geoffrey always has. This kind of gentle but profound shift (nothing much is made of it in the script—it just starts happening, and we notice) is exactly what Slings and Arrows is best at. Subtlety is its finest mode, which is a rare thing indeed for something that is also so markedly satirical.

The show as a whole does that remarkable thing Shakespeare himself manages: to offer at once both comedy and tragedy, self-mockery and sincerity, manifestly artificial language and immediate psychological reality. Despite the fact that it is TV rather than staged performance, the emotions it provokes resemble those I have previously felt only in the live theater. As I watched the final episode of the third season last night, with tears in my eyes throughout the whole last twenty minutes—for Lear, for the actor playing Lear, for all the other players in the series, and for myself at the fact that it was coming to an end—I wondered how I was ever going to replace it.

—May 4, 2008

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In the Oddest Places

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

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

 

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Vertigo, Etcetera

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

I made a special effort to catch what was being billed as the “New York premiere” of the Vertigo Quartet at the February 3rd Schneider Concert, part of a series held on Sunday afternoons at the New School. Actually, this very young ensemble, formed at the Curtis Institute in 2005, has been playing across the river at Bargemusic since last year, but apparently Manhattan does not consider Brooklyn a part of New York. I began following these four musicians avidly after hearing them do a masterful and moving rendition of Shostakovich’s Twelfth Quartet nearly a year ago; since then they have given equally amazing performances of Beethoven’s Opus 131, Corigliano’s massively complex 1995 string quartet, and Shostakovich’s Seventh. This time, at the New School, they played pieces by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and William Walton, and though the strikingly elderly audience had doubtless turned out to hear the nineteenth-century works, it was Walton’s String Quartet in A minor that turned out to be the surprising high point of a generally terrific concert. The Vertigos excel at difficult modern music, and that is not merely for technical reasons—that is, this is not just a matter of young fingers and young sensibilities keeping up with fast, jarring rhythms and harsh chords. What these four players have, above all, is a feeling for the drama and meaning of a musical piece. When you hear them play a quartet, from whatever century, you can sense that they have actually asked themselves what the composer thought he was doing at each moment in the music. Their subtle shifts in volume and pacing, the responsive echoes in their various melodic voices, and the significant silences they occasionally introduce are all part of that effort to convey meaning. It’s as if they are performers in a play as well as musicians on a stage, and their alertness to the composer’s intentions is as rewarding as an actor’s allegiance to a playwright’s words. The group’s name, by the way, comes from Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo, rather than from the dizzying sensation itself. The violinists are Jose-Maria Blumenschein and Johannes Dickbauer, the violist is Lily Francis, and the cellist is Nicholas Canellakis. Watch for them; they are going places.

Mark Morris’s production of Purcell’s King Arthur is coming to New York City Opera for a brief run this spring. Do not miss it. I already had my full-length say about this piece when it opened in Berkeley a while back, but I plan to go again, as often as I can. Its pleasures are deep and lasting.

I wish to register my distress that the best American movie of 2007, In the Valley of Elah, went completely unrecognized by the Academy Awards. Of course we all know that the Oscars have very little to do with actual quality, that bad movies constantly win over good ones, blah blah blah. But this case seems to me more egregious than usual. In the Valley of Elahwas such a subtle, restrained, but searing look at our current foreign-policy disaster — focusing on Iraq by looking almost entirely at events that take place at home, forecasting with eerie accuracy the actual behavior of recent soldiers, and wrenching us with irresolvable emotions — that it seemed a particular shame not even to nominate it for an award. At least as disturbing was the failure of Tommy Lee Jones to win a Best Actor award for a performance that nobody else even came close to rivaling. Daniel Day Lewis gave a fine and skilled performance in There Will Be Blood, and Javier Bardem was delightfully, brilliantly scary in No Country for Old Men, but finally these were entertainments: actorly jobs well done in actorly roles. Tommy Lee Jones, in contrast, became the disillusioned veteran he played in In the Valley of Elah, to such an extent that I felt I was watching and getting to know a kind of person I have never actually met. Everything about the way Jones delivered this performance, from the tiniest movement of the corner of his eyes to the way his weary body looked from the back as he walked down a long hallway, gave depth and reality to the character, and to the character’s increasingly tragic situation. That this is, in effect, our situation — one of disillusionment and despair at the way our country’s faraway violence is bound to come home to roost — is possibly what made the movie too painful for most viewers to bear. The film’s disappearance without a trace is indicative of politics as usual: not just the petty Oscar politics about whose budget is bigger, whose dress prettier, but the larger politics of America, which prefers not to look its worst tragedies directly in the face until they have become so old as to be inert, and therefore safely convertible to “art.”

— February 26, 2008

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Short Takes

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

During a single week last month, I took my Hunter College freshmen to two dance events: a rehearsal of Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, and one of the premiere performances of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at City Center. This, to judge by the resulting discussion, gave them all they really needed to know in order to watch dance intelligently.

Unlike the professional critics (who may have been swayed by friendly feelings towards Wheeldon himself, as well as an understandable desire for something new to happen in the ballet world), my students were distinctly unimpressed by the Morphoses evening. “The dancers can certainly do amazing things with their bodies” and “I don’t know much about ballet” were the polite non-committals I got in response to my queries on the evening itself. But later, in class, they were much more forthcoming. They objected to the way the dances didn’t go with the music (or perhaps to the way the chosen music was unsuited to dance: they weren’t sure which). They liked certain of the poses the dancers took, but felt that in the end it was all posing, more gymnastics than dance. They also mildly deplored, though without a trace of politically correct stridency, the manner in which the men did all the heavy lifting and hauling — the lifted objects being mainly the women dancers, who were variously clutched, activated, and strummed as if they were mechanical dolls or musical instruments. One student backhandedly praised the final piece, Mesmerics, by remarking that at least it was more interesting to watch the eight onstage cellos playing Philip Glass’s music than it was to watch Wheeldon’s dancers.

Contrasting Mark Morris’s ensemble to the Wheeldon group, my class noted that the former had obviously worked together for a long time, and as a result the Morris dancers were “harmonious,” “precise,” and “loose.” (I am not making any of this up; those were their exact words.) My students were very impressed with the strength of the women — they commented, in particular, on the “iron thighs” of the tiniest dancer — and they were enchanted by the thrilling moment when one man ran diagonally up the stage and flung himself into the arms of another. They thought they could detect the shadows or suggestions of a story — a pointing finger asking a question, a delicately held container that collapsed into nothingness, a harried line of briefcase-bearing businessmen striding to work — but nothing, they agreed, as definite as a plot. Instead of plot, there was pattern: they were all able to describe, in minute detail, the passage in Mozart Dances in which an open circle of dancers looped around itself, with the curved line passing under an arch of hands and losing a single dancer on each loop. (They may have been helped, in this close scrutiny of form, by hearing Morris’s constant instructions called out to the dancers as they rehearsed.)

Towards the end of the discussion, one of my students said, “You know how Mark Morris told his dancers not to dance as if they had memorized the steps, but to surprise him, to make it feel new? Well, the Wheeldon dancers looked as if they had memorized the steps.” Someone else then observed that, whereas Morris had been able to say about several specific gestures “This is the first time we see that in this dance,” all the movement in the Wheeldon piece was at once so repetitious and so indistinct that you could never pinpoint a “first” time for anything.

Christopher Wheeldon, in his interviews, is always talking about how he wants to lure young audiences back to ballet, and he has added numerous bells-and-whistles (brief rehearsal films before each dance, projected titles, offstage meet-the-dancer sessions) to produce this effect. Perhaps he should try offering them some good choreography.

*

A critic I much admire, Daniel Mendelsohn, has written a largely negative review of the Met’s Lucia di Lammermoor in the pages of the New York Review of Books. I attended that opera (in fact, according to mutual friends, I attended the very same performance as Mendelsohn), and I found the production enormously satisfying. Is this just a matter of different tastes applied to the same perceptions? Or have I missed something that Mendelsohn saw — or vice versa? Even what we heard seems to be in dispute, for he describes Nathalie Dessay’s voice as merely “coolly agile,” whereas I thought it was astonishingly, transcendently beautiful. But his real objections are to the acting (anesthetized and inexpressive, he thinks) and to the directing (which he labels insufficiently forceful at best, meaningless at worst). I, on the other hand, thought that the director, Mary Zimmerman, whose primary experience has been with plays, did a remarkable job of turning a potentially ludicrous plot into something credible and moving. She was able to do so, in part, because Nathalie Dessay could carry off a realistic, almost naturalistic version of her role: what Mendelsohn takes as inexpressive, I take as numb with sorrow, fear, and madness.

Complaining that Zimmerman senselessly updates the piece to the Victorian period, Mendelsohn nonetheless singles out for special praise a moment when the wedding party is assembled for a photograph — not something that could have happened, technologically, before the Victorian period. He seems not to have noticed the way the carefully framed sets (sometimes we see only a small rectangle of forest or garden or castle, placed within a larger blacked-out rectangle) echo not only the conventions of the photograph, but also the conventions of the book. Donizetti’s opera is, famously, based on Walter Scott’s popular Bride of Lammermoor, and references to it have appeared in such novels asMadame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and (fleetingly) The Leopard. Zimmerman is reminding us of these literary associations even as she is pointing out to us the difference between a staged event and a book. Among other things, a staged event — and particularly an opera — must cope with the fact that styles of expressed emotion change over time, so that what seems truthful or authentic in one era will come off as exaggerated or fake or excessively manipulative in another. Whereas a novel seeps into our brains almost subliminally, an opera prances across our consciousness, demanding that we actively take things in: through eyes and ears, brains and hearts, spoken word and musical line, scenery and accompaniment. If we are more likely to object to being manhandled in this way, perhaps we are also more likely to submit completely — as I did — once we have been won over.

*

There has been a lot of Shakespeare around New York this fall, and most of it is less appealing than it should be. BAM’s much-ballyhooed King Lear, starring Ian McKellen, was adequate but no more — and given the amount of talent onstage, that is shocking. Even more shocking was the fact that the Public Theater thought it was a good idea to host the Wooster Group’s atrocious Hamlet: not Hamlet at all, as it turned out, but Elizabeth LeCompte’s narcissistic, dictatorial mangling of the film of Richard Burton’s classic stage performance, with Rocky Horror–style live actors onstage in front of the partially erased movie. Tearing out of the auditorium in a rage, I was almost ready to swear off all “experimental” Shakespeare productions, until I remembered that the best Shakespeare I had seen all fall (the best theater I have seen all fall) was a one-night-only, free-admission, three-person version of The Tempest, staged in a deconsecrated synagogue called the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. The piece, directed by Jim Calder in collaboration with the actors, was called Tempest Tossed, and it left out large portions of Shakespeare’s dialogue, coming in at a slender ninety minutes or less. Ariel was played by a strip of orange silk fluttering on a stick, to the accompaniment of an actor’s high, witchy voice. All three actors took on multiple roles (to the point where one of them had to clasp hands with herself in the final reconciliation scene), and this turned out to be highly instructive, for it it revealed the extent to which The Tempest itself is composed of discrete three-character scenes, cobbled together almost vaudeville-style into a larger romance plot. The double and triple casting (Caliban also being the surly Boatswain, for instance, as well as one of the King’s less-than-brilliant courtiers) also illuminated the extent to which Shakespeare’s own characters mirrored and doubled each other. In other words, Calder’s and his actors’ vigorous redoing of the play was somehow extremely true to The Tempest, not only at the structural level but also at the emotional one, so that when Prospero delivered his final lines to the audience, asking to be set free by our hands, I found I had tears running down my cheeks.

— November 2, 2007

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