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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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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