Seeing The Hard Nut Once Again

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is a Christmas confection, but I first saw it in the summer. It was August of 1995, and my husband and I and our ten-year-old son traveled north from London to catch the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival. We were already fans of the Mark Morris Dance Group—I had fallen in love with L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato when it first premiered in America in 1990, and had subsequently helped organize a Berkeley conference around it—but we had no specific expectations for The Hard Nut and were basically just there for fun.

And it was fun. In that 1995 production, Morris himself had two roles—as a drunken party guest in the first-act Christmas party and, in the second half, as the leader of the Arabian women, a seductress with come-hither eyes and a swirling diaphanous caftan. Kraig Patterson played the black maid in toeshoes; a rather hefty opera singer, Peter Wing Healey, took the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum; the charming and diminutive June Omura played the rambunctious Fritz; and the incomparable Rob Besserer performed the central part of Herr Drosselmeier. The sets based on Charles Burns comics and the costumes of the party guests hilariously recalled the Sixties in a way that was both stylized and accurate. The party itself was a tremendous kick, and the various national dances performed in the second half were vigorous, playful, and (as always in Mark Morris) perfectly attuned to the music. I might have wished that some of the lovers’ duet between Marie and the Nutcracker Prince had been reduced a bit, or perhaps turned into dancing instead of kissing, and I might have found myself getting impatient with some of Tchaikovsky’s most romantic passages. (What was wrong with me?) I hope I noticed how beautiful the snowflake scene was, but more likely I was just thrilled by it, as first-time audiences always are.

After the performance, since we were acquainted with the dancers from their Berkeley visits, my family went around to the stage door to greet them in that foreign land. We were whisked inside and our son was instantly taken off to the dressing-rooms, where he was treated like the company mascot. Then he reappeared with a couple of company members, who informed us that the whole troupe had been invited to a party at the Lord Provost of Edinburgh’s official chambers: would we like to come along with them? Of course we would! So we climbed into their touring bus and spent the rest of the evening in one of the grandest public spaces I have ever partied in, complete with festive food, a bevy of excited dancers, a smattering of Edinburgh worthies, and the Lord Provost himself (who, if memory serves, gallantly shook my small son’s hand).

In the years since then, The Hard Nut was repeatedly performed in Berkeley around Christmas time, and we began to give a party for the dancers after the last performance. My husband and I felt like slightly less comic versions of Mr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum; at one point we even considered buying a videotape of a log fire to play on our TV during the party, just as the Stahlbaums do. My son became adept at serving the dancers their drinks—mainly bottles of beer retrieved from the ice-filled bathtub, which was the only place in the house big enough to chill that quantity of beer. The dancers ate and drank and smoked and laughed and mingled with the poets, writers, and academics we had assembled to meet them. At one party they even sang Christmas carols, accompanied on our out-of-tune old upright by Ethan Iverson, who is now a noted jazz performer in The Bad Plus but was then the dance group’s music director.

We haven’t given that MMDG holiday party for quite a while now—our schedule and the dancers’ made it impossible—but we still try to catch The Hard Nut whenever we can, and I have probably seen it at least ten times over the course of fifteen years. This year, my husband and I and our twenty-five-year old son and his girlfriend (herself a former dancer), along with almost all the freshmen in my Hunter Honors College arts class, caught it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Things have changed, of course. Morris hasn’t danced the Arabian princess role in a while, and this year he even gave up the drunken party guest in order to take over the part of Mr. Stahlbaum. Peter Wing Healey has long since been replaced by John Heginbotham, who dances the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum with such delicate beauty and emotional authenticity that stagehands have been known to fall in love with “her” until they learn, to their disappointment, that she is really a he. Marie and her Nutcracker Prince are now embodied by Lauren Grant and David Leventhal, a real-life married couple (both marvelous dancers) who manage to make even the kisses seem like dance. Passages that seemed slow or merely routine to me at first, such as the scene changes (which get some of the best music), or the thrilling way all the different characters come back in mismatched sets at the end, now make complete emotional sense. I have come to love the music—all the music. And though I regret the absence of key dancers from the company’s past, I appreciate the uniformly high skills of the new people who have arisen to take the roles of snowflakes, flowers, rats, GI Joes, and others.

Marvelously, Kraig Patterson is still the maid and June Omura is still Fritz; sadly, Rob Besserer has retired, and I miss him terribly, no matter who is dancing Herr Drosselmeier. But this year an impressive young dancer named William Smith III took on that demanding role, and I have great hopes for him. Smith has the necessary acting ability as well as the grace and strength to dance the part, and though I still see Besserer’s shadow around him (especially in the incredibly moving sequence—perhaps my favorite thing in all of dance—when Drosselmeier has a duet with his younger Nutcracker self, and then the snowflakes fly, and then the aging magician walks diagonally upstage through them, causing the spinning flakes to fall still as he passes), I can almost imagine a time when I will be able to admire his performance for itself alone.

—December 18, 2010

 

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Edmund de Waal’s Hare

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

Every once in a while a book comes out that is so great, all you have to do is summarize the plot to hint at its greatness. It’s not that Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is a heavily plotted work: it’s a family memoir, for one thing, or a work of cultural history, or a strange, Lilliputian-telescope view into massive world events, so it depends for its plot on what really happened. And it depends for its effectiveness on its masterful storytelling voice: de Waal, though he is actually a potter by profession, is the kind of cunningly sensitive writer one only runs across a few times per decade. Still, when I have simply told you what the book is about, I suspect that many of you will want to rush out and read it.

On several visits to Japan—where he was, among other things, learning his trade as a potter—de Waal, the English son of a half-Dutch Anglican clergyman, became close to his Great Uncle Iggie. Ignace Ephrussi, an elderly gay man who had lived in Japan for many years with his younger Japanese partner, was the brother of de Waal’s Austrian-Jewish grandmother; he also turned out to be the proud possessor of a unique and wonderful collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that had been handed down in the Ephrussi family since the late nineteenth century. Edmund, upon learning that he is to be the eventual heir to the collection, decides to investigate the history of these small, expertly designed, witty yet beautiful Japanese objects. In the course of examining who owned them over the course of a century and more, he gives us an astonishing look into several distinctly memorable corners of European, Asian, and even American culture and history.

The original collector was Charles Ephrussi, part of the Paris branch of this international Jewish banking clan (which seems to have been second only to the Rothschilds, with whom it freely intermarried). Having spread out from Odessa to Vienna and Paris, the Ephrussis quickly acquired enough polish to spawn art collectors as well as bankers—and Charles, who was apparently a fine amateur art critic as well as an early exponent of japonisme, was perhaps the most artistic of the lot. A dandy and boulevardier, he was friends with Manet, Pissarro, Degas, and Proust, and in fact he seems to have been the primary model for Charles Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. (Swann wrote about Vermeer, Ephrussi wrote about Dürer; each hobnobbed with aristocrats until falling out with them over the Dreyfus affair; each had a beautiful, willful mistress who wore Japanese kimonos; and so on, through many similar parallels.) In 1899, a few years before his own death, Charles gave his netsuke collection as a wedding present to his younger cousin Victor, a member of the Vienna branch of the family.

So now the tiny objects move, in their fancy display case, to the center of Freud’s, Schnitzler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Karl Kraus’s world. The vitrine occupies the dressing-room of Victor’s wife Emmy, where the children (including Iggie) are allowed to play with the valuable netsuke—the hare with amber eyes, the monk bent over his begging dish, the various kinds of fruits and vegetables, creatures and humans and objects—as if they were merely toys. And there they remain, through all the vicissitudes of the first third of the twentieth century, until the family finally flees Vienna in 1938.

But here I am going to stop telling you the story, because I don’t want to ruin the surprises that Edmund de Waal has very carefully set up. This book is as much about the discoveries he makes, and how he makes them, as it is about the objects and their surroundings; it alternates between a you-are-there sort of historical recreation (describing, for instance, how the children must have felt as they played hide-and-seek behind the tapestries in the grand Palais Ephrussi) and a more personal communication with the reader, here and now. It is a delight from start to finish—though a painful delight, in many places, given the history of the Jews over that century—and I could barely put it down to go about my normal life. Now that I have finished reading it, I wish I had it all to do over again. And so, like Iggie handing the netsuke on to the next generation, I am handing this incredibly valuable story on to you.

 

—August 26, 2010

 

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Two More Canadian Shows

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A while back I recommended Slings and Arrows as an alternative for those who were suffering Wire withdrawal, and as time has continued to burnish my memory of watching that great Shakespearean series, I feel even more strongly about it. But television-watchers must have continual new fodder, and so I have had to seek out some of the other Canadian shows available on Netflix to fill the continuing gap. (The presence of Treme on “real” television has done nothing, it turns out, to feed my Wire hunger: beautifully shot as that new show is, it simply lacks the hateful characters, the devious misdeeds, in short the necessary violence that made the earlier David Simon series such a masterpiece.)

My two new discoveries are both set in Vancouver, and both are Chris Haddock productions. (I presume that Chris Haddock is, in some sense, the Canadian David Simon, since he creates, writes, and occasionally directs his own very personally inflected, somewhat grungy TV programs—but all I really know about him is that his name appears on these two shows.) The first one I found, which was made earlier, is Da Vinci’s Inquest, and it features a coroner named Dominic Da Vinci, a Vancouver citizen of Italian descent (though you could have fooled me: he looks and sounds Irish).

As with The Wire, the higher-ups among the “good guys” in Da Vinci’s Inquest are as bad as any of the perps, and a great deal of the pleasure of the series comes from hating them and their machinations. Da Vinci himself is an appealingly working-class guy (his father was a stonemason, as we learn in one episode), who is not a medical doctor himself but is in charge of a group of medical pathologists, including his own ex-wife. The ensemble acting in this show is terrific, and so are the bleak but also beautiful shots of Vancouver; but the main thing that makes the series stand out is that we get no real solutions to the murders. Oh, we may find out who committed the crime; we may even, occasionally, see that person brought to justice. But either the problem is too large to be solved by a single conviction, or the perpetrator is too connected with powerful interests to be punished sufficiently, or the crime itself is not, in legal terms, a crime, but simply the kind of accident that arises when society doesn’t care enough about its poorest, weakest members. Da Vinci’s Inquest is resolutely skeptical in its outlook—one might almost call it anarchic, if that didn’t imply a lack of concern, and Da Vinci himself is nothing if not concerned. He is the kind of subdued hero you can’t bear to part with, and the abrupt end of the series after a mere two or three seasons comes as a terrible blow.

Luckily, you can then turn to Intelligence, which I must say is the most addictive television program I have ever watched in my life. Even The Wire had its occasional longueurs, its moments when I was ready to nap if I had to sit through one more long speech about something; but I cannot open up a new disk of Intelligence without watching every single episode on it, even if this takes me to the small hours of the morning. The plots are so convoluted and the resolutions so infrequent that you begin to feel that you and the characters are juggling a million balls in the air, and yet the various people in this show are so persuasive, so viscerally present, that you never forget for a minute who they are and what they are doing in the plot.

At least one central character in Intelligence, the mob boss Jimmy Reardon, is played by an actor carried over from Da Vinci—that is, the excellent Ian Tracey. Other roles are filled by people I feel I have seen before in Canadian shows and movies (and sometimes American ones: James Garner’s old Rockford Files sidekick, Stuart Margolin, appears in a few episodes of Season One). There is a black crime-unit inspector, Mary Spaulding (played by Klea Scott), who eventually heads up her own spy shop, as well as variously backstabbing or helpful male colleagues who work with her; and there are many other mobsters with whom Jimmy routinely deals, including his partner Ronny, his bodyguard Bob, his sometime antagonist Dante, and his occasional ally, Fan. (Dante represents the Italian “biker” group, Fan the Vietnamese crew; all these people are engaged mainly in drug-dealing and money-laundering, though they do a sideline in murder and mayhem as well.)

The government figures sent out from Ottawa to oversee and intrude on Mary Spaulding’s difficult work do not impress one with their sincerity and intelligence, but the worst characters by far are the Americans from the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA. These people are so persuasively despicable that you are likely to find yourself mentally turning Canadian in response. (Reading in this morning’s paper about how Canada has handled Toyota differently from the way the U.S. has, for instance, I found myself unwittingly thinking: yes, we do things more sensibly here in Canada…a direct result of last night’s immersion in Intelligence.) At this point I only have one disk left to go in the second — and last available — season of the show, and I am already trying to figure out how I’m going to cope with that painful withdrawal.
—May 6, 2010

 

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An Excess of Riches

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A couple of weeks ago I went to a perfectly nice concert in Carnegie’s Weill Hall. It was the New York debut of a very talented young Scandinavian cellist named Andreas Brantelid, accompanied on the piano by the older and also talented Bengt Forsberg, and they were playing what looked in advance to be an interesting program: Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata, Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 2, Debussy’s Sonata in D Minor, and Prokofiev’s sole cello sonata. And in the event it was interesting, and pleasant, and completely unannoying. But it was not thrilling. I have the feeling that the problem lay less in the performers than in the wide variety of profoundly exciting performances I had already witnessed that week. The nice little concert in Weill, which I would have killed for during the largely vacant months I spend elsewhere, just did not live up to the rest of New York’s late-winter riches.

The week began, for me, with a Saturday night solo recital by Andras Schiff in Avery Fisher Hall. Schiff is always worth hearing (I was to hear him again two days later, in conjunction with the New York Philharmonic), but there is a special appeal to hearing him alone onstage, because he always makes something unexpected out of the music. In this case, he played four pieces—two each by Mendelssohn and Schumann—and made them sound like nothing I had ever heard before. In the case of two of them, Mendelssohn’sVariations sérieuses in D Minor and Schumann’s Sonata No. 1, I believe I actually had never heard them before; but what he made of the more familiar Mendelssohn and Schumann Fantasies that he played after the intermission was equally surprising. Whether he is uncovering rarely played works or investigating familiar ones, Schiff is always discovering something. Going to one of his solo concerts is like listening in on a private session between a pianist and his piano—not that there is any tentativeness or redoing of errors, but there is a kind of openness and exploration that one expects to hear only in private.

That was followed, on Sunday afternoon, by just about the best performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony I have ever heard (and I have heard Gergiev do it with the Mariinsky Orchestra, which was my previous standard of comparison). In this case, the young Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski was leading his home orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra—again at Avery Fisher Hall, but this time under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Presents “Great Performers” series. The marvelous Shostakovich symphony in C Minor, written in 1936 but unplayed until after Stalin’s death, might just be Shostakovich’s best work on that scale; it is at any rate one of his most thrilling, with ear-splitting cacophanous vivacity countered by moments of quiet tenderness and a trailing-off ending that is filled with something close to mortal terror. And Jurowski and his London chums did it full justice.

Then it was Monday night and the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, for whom these musicians always play their best. Friends who had been to a previous night of this program advised me in the strongest terms to leave at intermission and skip the Hindemith Symphony in E Flat—and though I am not prone to taking other people’s advice, this suggestion was so emphatic (“It was horribly annoying; it left me in a terrible mood,” said one friend, and “It was composing indicative of the most rigid mind,” said another) that I happily obeyed. This left me with a one-hour gemlike concert—Andras Schiff performing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 as Muti led the Philharmonic beautifully in the background. It was the kind of perfect experience that made you wish all concerts lasted just an hour, and it only heightened my admiration for Schiff, and for Brahms.

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights Valery Gergiev was conducting his own excellent Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus in a concert version of Berlioz’s Les Troyens at Carnegie Hall. Though I am not normally a big Berlioz fan, I have learned to go to anything of his that Gergiev conducts, and this was no exception. The solo performances were great, the chorus was outstanding, and the orchestra was, as usual, beyond reproach. I basked in the ninety-minute intermissionless first part on Tuesday, and though I had to stay home on Wednesday to rest up for my big Thursday event, my friends who went to both halves said the second half was, if anything, even better. But that is the thing about New York: one lacks the pure bodily endurance to go to everything, even if conflicts, price, and distance were not a factor.

And then on Thursday I attended what, for me, was the high point of the week: William Kentridge’s terrific new production of Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, with Gergiev conducting the Met’s orchestra. I am going to write about this production in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, so I won’t say any more for now, except to comment that the three collaborators—Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge—turn out to share a sensibility that makes the sum of their collaboration even better than the individual parts. I went back to the Metropolitan Opera House less than two weeks later to seeThe Nose again, and if I could, I would go twice a month for the rest of my life.

So you can imagine what Brantelid and Forsberg were up against, coming on the Friday after all that. I only hope I someday have a chance to hear them again with a more open mind and a less depleted heart.

—March 25, 2010


 

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Bell & Jackiw

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

I know it sounds like the name of one of those semi-shady Dickensian firms of solicitors, but my title actually refers to the two star performers in last weekend’s events at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. In two separate programs presented by Cal Performances, Bay Area audiences were treated to surprisingly intimate encounters — surprising in a hall that size, I mean — with Stefan Jackiw and Joshua Bell, two of the best solo violinists in America today. What was interesting to me was how different the two experiences were.

Let me start with the Joshua Bell concert on Sunday, February 21, since that was in some ways the more predictable pleasure. The audience for the sold-out event was expecting wonders from Bell, which had the inevitable side-effect of making the marvels in question seem somewhat less wondrous. It’s not that it was a boring program — quite the contrary. Anything that starts with a Bach sonata, progresses through Grieg and Schumann, and ends up with the ravishing Ravel Sonata for Violin and Piano is bound to produce excitement. In Bell’s case, because he is even better at romantic and modern pieces than he is at baroque, the concert was a steady progression from good to great. He was accompanied, or let us say partnered, by the wonderful pianist Jeremy Denk, who is himself an acclaimed soloist, but who has the kind of self-effacing modesty and attentiveness to his fellow-performer that makes him the ideal second figure for a concert of this kind. The entire afternoon was completely enjoyable, and the Ravel was more than that: it was eye-opening, pleasurably startling, foot-tappingly jazzy, and obviously difficult to pull off with such finesse. Having heard this singular performance, I will never think of Maurice Ravel in the same way again.

The Friday night concert with Stefan Jackiw was in many ways the opposite kind of situation. Jackiw appeared as the soloist in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, performed by the Russian National Orchestra under the direction of Mikhail Pletnev. I have to admit that I was drawn to the concert by the presence of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony later in the program; I had never even heard of the young soloist scheduled to play in the violin concerto. Boy, was I in for a surprise, and so was everyone else. Jackiw, a tall, willowy young man with beautiful half-Asian features and the aura of listening for instructions from outer space (or from wherever it is that dead composers reside), performed his part with such verve, such delicacy, such feeling for the details and the overall shape of the piece, as well as such truly remarkable technical ability, that the audience burst into applause after the first movement as well as after the Finale. This was not a sign of audience ignorance, as it sometimes is: they all kept appropriately silent in all the other movement breaks of the evening. But this first appearance by the previously unknown soloist was so overwhelming that they — or, I should say, we—could hardly keep our hands in our laps.

He would have won my regard under any circumstances, but my sense of appreciation was augmented by the fact that the rest of the concert into which he had been sandwiched was noticeably unpleasant. We began with a series of Yeats poems set to music by the conductor himself (always, or at least usually, a bad sign); we ended, after the intermission, with the most lackluster, blandly noncommittal performance of the Shostakovich symphony imaginable. Granted, this is a very strange, intentionally unreadable piece of music — unreadable in the way a face is, when it wants to keep its owner’s feelings hidden. But that unreadability turned into downright shallowness and impenetrability in the hands of Pletnev and his Russian National Orchestra, who refused to commit themselves to any kind of coherent interpretation.

Luckily, I had the Jackiw performance to reflect back on as I tried to ignore the jazz-lite sounds emanating from the orchestra during its repeated (and excessive) encores. These curtain-closers, too, were in marked contrast to Jackiw’s own brief encore, a haunting, moving rendition of a Bach Largo that showed he was as good at slow, quiet music as he was at the more virtuosic and excitable outpourings of Tchaikovsky. A rare gem indeed.

—February 22, 2010

 

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Comparative Beethoven

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A fascinating experiment is now underway at Alice Tully Hall. Under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, six different quartet groups have been enlisted to present all of Beethoven’s works for string quartet in the course of a single month. From a listener’s perspective, the point of the exercise is not to evaluate Beethoven—the vote has long been in on that one—but to observe the relative merits of each group’s handling of these ever-surprising masterpieces.

Every one of the six concerts features an early, a middle, and a late quartet (the sixteen string quartets having been bulked out to eighteen not only with a separate performance of the Grosse Fugue, which is standard, but also with a quartet version of the Opus 14, No. 1 piano sonata), so one can assume that some central adjudication took place. I don’t know exactly how much choice each ensemble had over which program it got to play; what I do know is that the order of the programs, and even the order of the pieces within each program, had been set in advance by the long-dead funders of the entire cycle. That is, what we are getting here at Lincoln Center is a version of the “Slee Cycle,” endowed in the 1950s by a Buffalo, New York couple named Frederick and Alice Slee. Their only requirement, apparently, was that the pieces be played in the same order every time—the order they themselves had set—and this is indeed how they have been played at the University of Buffalo every year since 1955.

My first surprise, at the Brentano Quartet’s opening-night performance on February 5th, was to discover that we were going to hear Opus 127 first. This late quartet in E-flat major would be the gem of any evening’s program (some might even consider it the gem of the whole series), and it seemed a bit perverse to open with it. But the Brentanos are well-equipped to cope with the perverse, especially if it’s a choice between that and the conventional. They are probably the most blatantly virtuosic of the six excellent ensembles in the series—their first violinist, in particular, has technical skills of an incredibly high order—and the result is that their interpretations tend to be highly colored and notably theatrical.

This can be just right for certain pieces, as it was for the Razumovsky No. 3, with which the Brentanos closed their program. All three Razumovsky quartets are designed to showcase virtuosity (they were written, after all, for a show-off violinist, the Russian Count Razumovsky), and their beauty lies in their extremity: the quick changes in speed or volume, the sudden unexpected pauses, the melodic switchbacks and diversions. The Alice Tully audience roared its approval after the Brentanos’ show-stopping performance, and it became clear at that point how well-suited they were to an opening-night program that put this piece last.

But that rousing conclusion also clarified, for me, what had been wrong with their rendition of Opus 127. They had played this subtle, delicate, immensely moving quartet as if it were a Razumovsky. By exaggerating the pauses, introducing sudden dynamic shifts, and emphasizing odd notes in a given passage, they gave it a colorful theatricality that was exactly wrong for it. If you love the Opus 127 quartet, then one of the things you most love—no, let me drop this pose of benevolent authority—one of the things I most love is that cascading downward series, that waterfall of thirty-six consecutive sixteenth notes, with which Beethoven slides us into the close of the Finale. Up until then, the whole final movement has been a series of repeated but slightly varied pleasures of a reassuring, almost triumphant nature; at their culmination, which takes place just before this moment, we are lifted up to ethereal levels by the very highest, sweetest notes of the violin. And then we plunge down that cascade, and it’s as if we’re in free-fall—but the free-fall of a dream, where we are perfectly safe from harm even as we are enchanted by the thrill of flying.

In order to feel this lovely motion, or emotion, you have to sense the separate, equal weight of each one of those sixteenth notes. And that is what the Brentanos deprived us of. They played the whole sequence in a terrible rush, as if it were a flourish or a trill—as if speed itself were a virtue. It can be a virtue, and when it is, the Brentanos are the best in the game at it. But on Opus 127, it was a mistake.

Perhaps this explains why I found the second concert in the series, the February 7th performance by the Daedalus Quartet, so calmly satisfying. As they progressed through their more sensibly arranged program, the Daedalus players just got better and better. They were strong, if a bit rough at times, in the “Harp” quartet, with which they opened; they performed Opus 18, No. 2 with consummate skill; and their rendering of the late, great Opus 131 was stupendous. This astonishing C-sharp minor quartet is the one that many people—myself, I suppose, included—would consider the pinnacle of the whole series, and the Daedalus Quartet did it full justice. The four players disappeared into the music: we could practically see the work’s complicated structure taking place before our very eyes, and the emphatic, repeated chords that swept us movingly through the final Allegro were done with both verve and stateliness. This was ensemble playing at its best, and Beethoven at hisbest.

The CMSLC Beethoven series continues through February, and audiences in the New York area have four more opportunities to hear a range of fine players: the Borromeo Quartet on February 9th, the Pacifica Quartet on February 19th, the St. Lawrence String Quartet on February 21st, and the Miró Quartet on February 23rd. Those of you who already know the quartets well and cherish your favorite recordings can indulge, if you wish, in this entertaining game of comparisons. And those who are new to the Beethoven string quartets can have something even better: the irreplaceable thrill of first hearing these grand masterpieces played live.

***

Since I am writing for the first time about concerts in the recently renovated Alice Tully Hall, I should say a word about the remodeling, which was completed almost exactly a year ago. In a word: it’s terrific. Inside the auditorium, the whole atmosphere is warm and gently enveloping, from the LED lights that glow softly behind the rich-hued wood to the flexible-sized stage, which can alternately extend out into the audience or retract to a narrower strip. In the orchestra section, there are now no bad seats: the graciously wide passages that separated the rows are still there, the acoustical dead spots have been eliminated, and the sightlines are great all the way to the back. I am less enthusiastic about the balcony seats—they feel a bit like Siberia, in terms of both temperature and distance from the stage—but this problem can no doubt be partially rectified with a thermostat adjustment. Certain oddities occur here and there (one step on the orchestra’s lefthand aisle, for instance, is a fraction of an inch higher than its neighbors, so people come close to tripping when they go down it: you can hear the repeated thump if you are sitting nearby), but these flaws are minor compared to the overall success of the design. It is now the perfect setting in which to hear string quartets. And the glass-walled lobby, with its dawn-to-dusk café, is a tremendous new urban amenity. Like the wonderful High Line, which is also a Diller Scofidio + Renfro achievement, the Alice Tully café is one of those great public spaces that enhances its whole neighborhood, blending participatory street life with comfortable seclusion in a way that no one could have predicted until it was an accomplished fact. Bravo!

—February 8, 2010

 

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But Is It Opera?

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

This question was raised, in my own mind and that of several other audience members I spoke to, by the Metropolitan Opera’s admittedly terrific new production of Leos Janacek’s last operatic work, From the House of the Dead. Based on the Dostoyevsky novel about a nineteenth-century Russian prison settlement, the Janacek version retains the period characters (a nobleman, a bunch of peasants, a dishonored village girl, the requisite brutal guards) while suggesting that the prison in question is also, or instead, one of Stalin’s gulags. The situation, at least as portrayed in the synopsis, is designed to wring our hearts and unsettle our minds. And yet the potentially powerful emotions failed to emerge in performance: the libretto’s series of singing heads, each telling his own sorry tale of wrongful imprisonment or criminal guilt, never really coalesced into individual characters for whom we could feel any pity or terror.

Everything about the production itself was topnotch. Patrice Chereau’s direction was both brilliantly inventive and tactfully understated. His bestcoups de theatre—a falling cloud of rubble and garbage which was then picked up, piece by piece, by the characters onstage; a play-within-a-play performed by the inmates for each other, so that an audience on bleachers faced and mirrored us—were balanced by the stark attention he accorded to each soloist, the sense of the utter necessity of every action or prop he put onstage. Richard Perduzzi’s abstract set design complemented the direction beautifully, and so did the blessedly legible translation that was projected directly onto the walls of the set, rather than occupying its usual seat-back position. (Please, please, can we have projected supertitles become the Met standard? They are already the norm in San Francisco, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and other opera centers, and they work so much better than those horrible little seat-back screens.) Janacek’s music, which was fantastic, was fully brought to life by the marvelous conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who carried out his Met debut in a most commendably modest manner: he actually sneaked onto the podium before the opera started and just started right in with the music, eliminating the conventional moment of pre-opera applause. And the singing, from beginning to end, was excellent, especially on the part of Willard White (as the nobleman), Stefan Margita (as a disguised criminal), and, above all, Peter Mattei (as a pathetic wife-murderer). But even Mattei’s long and beautifully done solo, which combined acting, singing, and magnificent stage presence in the way this galvanizing performer always does, was not enough to raise his character to life—mainly because there was no character there to begin with.

The fault may lie partly with the novel, but other wordy Dostoyevsky texts have made it safely into operatic form (I’m thinking in particular of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, which the Met presented in a very exciting Gergiev-conducted production a few seasons ago), so I’m more inclined to think that something crucial was lost in the transition. It was the setting, I imagine, that captured Janacek’s imagination, so that even for him the characters may well have been secondary. One sees why he wanted to write this score: it’s an amazing piece of music, complete with rattling chains, mournful instrumental solos, and abrupt, scary silences. But I wish he had categorized it as an orchestral piece, or even an oratorio, rather than an opera. To give it a fullscale operatic production, as the Met has done—and the best possible production, at that—only underlines its shortcomings as a dramatic work for the stage.

That awareness did not really gel, for me, until I attended the Met’s nearly new version of Puccini’s Il Trittico about a week after the Janacek. This was the second time I had been to the Jack O’Brien production (it premiered at the Met in 2007), and I don’t even normally like Puccini. In this case, though, I have to acknowledge that the guy definitely knew how to write an opera. And not just one opera: three complete, individual operas get squished into this massive four-hour evening, and none of them is the worse for the compression. So there goes the excuse that Janacek had only ninety minutes to tell his tale in From the House of the Dead, since Puccini repeatedly managed to pack an emotional wallop into two-thirds that length. I myself could have done without the Suor Angelica segment (I can always do without religious stories about nuns who fear for their immortal souls), but the woman next to me was weeping profusely throughout it; and everyone in my row was drying her eyes, or at the very least catching his breath, after the amazingly gripping melodrama of Il Tabarro. The real surprise, though, was the final opera, Gianni Schicchi, which was truly funny in the way a well-done Molière or Ben Jonson comedy can be. (Like The Imaginary Invalid orVolpone, this plot hinges on greedy relatives around a deathbed, only in this case—and perhaps this is the sardonic Italian touch—the rich man is already dead.)

As with the Janacek, the Il Trittico production was outstanding, and the singing was truly remarkable—not only from Patricia Racette, who played the lead in all three works, but even more so from the always-astonishing Stephanie Blythe, who took three smaller roles. The sets, too, were admirable, if so outlandishly complicated that they required half-hour intervals for set-changing purposes. The whole evening, in fact, was over the top (literally so in the case of the final opera, where the entire massive set rolled downward to reveal another complete set above it). But none of this would have mattered if Puccini hadn’t done his job beforehand. He put the emotion in—along with its objective correlative, the music—and then we took it out. That’s all. It seems so simple, and yet it hardly ever happens.

—December 9, 2009

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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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