Mark Morris at the Joyce

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

I tend to avoid the hot, muggy months in New York, so I have missed most of the Mark Morris company’s recent summer performances at the Joyce Theater. But this year I had to be in New York anyway in July, and a huge added benefit was getting to see the delicious Program B. This program invitingly contained three older gems—“Ten Suggestions” from 1981, “Going Away Party” from 1990, and “The Argument” from 1999—along with the world premiere of a new dance set to John Luther Adams’s music.

A built-in disadvantage to watching new dancers in old roles is that one might make invidious comparisons, but the current crop of Mark Morris dancers is so good that I almost, though never quite, forgot about the earlier shadows who filled those parts. Since these shadows included Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris (who were alternating in the “Ten Suggestions” solo when I first saw it in about 1990), this was inevitably a difficult task for any replacement dancer. But the marvelous Dallas McMurray, who has similarly taken on nearly impossible Mark Morris roles in the past, carried out his own version of “Ten Suggestions” with grace, aplomb, and his special brand of endearing humor. There is something eternally fascinating about watching this Pierrot-like figure in white pajamas perform a series of experimental, sometimes tentative, sometimes playful moves to Tcherepnin’s piano Bagatelles, Opus 5; the music itself ranges from bright and cheerful to thoughtful and melancholy, and so did McMurray’s gestures, which involved props such as a hula hoop, a chair and a long white ribbon.

I realized while watching “The Argument” that although I had chased this dance from coast to coast when it first came out (it always seemed to be in New York when I was in Berkeley, and vice versa), I had never actually seen it before. So this piece, which had also included Morris and Baryshnikov as two of the original three men, was a complete revelation to me, despite all that I’d heard about it. In its present incarnation, Courtney Lopes and Brandon Randolph were particularly compelling as one of the three argumentative-and-then-making-up couples, but everyone in the dance—including Sarah Hillmon with Dallas McMurray and Billy Smith with Joslin Vezeau—did a fine job executing the exacting, complex, yet seemingly natural roles. The music is by Robert Schumann, who always seems to bring out the best in Mark Morris (I am thinking now of Morris’s 2001 V, set to Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a dance which roused me from my post 9-11 stupor and made me feel alive again). And in this case Morris brought out the best in Schumann as well, assigning beautifully sharp and evocative dance gestures to each phrase of the cello-and-piano Fünf Stücke im Volkston.

The new piece, “Northwest,” arrived in a strange location on the program, just after the opening work and before the intermission, as if shyly hiding itself among the others. But that turned out to be a canny choice, because it showed us—coming immediately after the spectacularly airy leaps and lifts of “The Argument”—that the earthbound, monochromally clad dancers, each armed with multiple yellow paper fans, were purposefully toning down their sparkling technique in the service of something else. Clearly modeled on indigenous dance modes (which, at least in the North American continent, tend to involve relatively simple footwork that can be executed by participants of any age), the moves in “Northwest” relied heavily on the upper bodies, arms, and hands of the dancers. And unlike “The Argument” (or for that matter the final piece on the program, “Going Away Party”), this new work made no attempt to differentiate between male and female dancers: the three men and seven women were all dressed in the same loose shirts and shorts, and their movement styles were uniformly ungendered. Normally Mark Morris focuses closely on numbers in his work, and this piece was no exception, except that the numbers proved extremely hard to count: what began as a dance for nine people intermittently lost or gained one or more dancers onstage, until eventually we saw all ten cast members at once—and even then they were divided into a group of six and a group of four, as if to thwart any wish for symmetry. When we finally got two circles of five, I thought, “Aha, now I know where I am!” But that was a temporary feeling. Like Adam’s spare harp-and-percussion music, to which it remained wholly true, “Northwest” consistently refused to let us settle in place.

I had misremembered “Going Away Party,” the last piece on the program, as Mark Morris’s “goodbye and fuck you” to Brussels, where he had a highly productive three years in the late 1980s and early 1990s—years that were marked by occasional audience incomprehension and critical abuse in response to some of his most stunning works. But I was wrong, it turns out: Morris just made this good-ol’-boys dance (performed to a recording of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys) because he wanted to, midway through his Brussels stay. I saw it long ago, and though I loved it then, I would not have guessed it would age well. But all the humor and pathos, now detached from any particular historical moment or location, are left to stand on their own, and the piece remains a total delight. The semi-square-dance arrangements are performed by three couples, as in “The Argument,” but here a seventh figure has been added to the mix—originally performed by Morris himself, now delicately rendered by Billy Smith. And the occasional presence of that extra figure—the one we seem to be saying goodbye to, especially in the titular “Going Away Party” and the final “When You Leave Amarillo, Turn Out the Lights”—lends a huge depth of feeling to what might otherwise seem a lighthearted send-up of Texas country music. It is not Brussels we seem to be bidding adieu to here, not a temporary foreign posting or even an important career era, but life itself.

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This Past Month or So

Posted on June 17, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

It’s a truism, I suppose, that there is no such thing as listening objectively to music. But criticism is somehow built on the idea that the critic is doing exactly that—bringing her expertise to bear on the sounds emerging from the musicians and then conveying her non-subjective, analytic assessment to her readers. I’ve never pretended to any major level of expertise (my sole qualifications for this role being some years spent as a violin student in my youth, plus decades of assiduous concert-going since then), and I confess that most of my previous blog posts have revealed a significant degree of subjectivity. Still, the events of the past five weeks have forced me to reconceive the relationship between what I am taking in when I go to a concert and what is there inside me to begin with.

It began with my return from Berlin in the second week of May, when I had to accustom myself again to being back under our current authoritarian regime. Somehow it’s very different reading the New York Times online from across the Atlantic and actually waking up to it each morning in situ. But I got over that shock rather quickly and resumed my usual habit of New York concert-going. Top on my schedule were two Evgeny Kissin concerts at Carnegie Hall, one featuring him as a soloist and the other billed as “Evgeny Kissin and Friends.”

I had never actually heard Kissin live before, so I was amazed to discover what a phenomenon he is. I don’t just mean his playing, though he is certainly at the level of my other favorite pianists: Mitsuko Uchida, Igor Levit, Kirill Gerstein, Jan Lisiecki, and so on. But I don’t think he is noticeably above their level, and yet the audience response to him makes him seem like some kind of rock star. For the May 17 solo concert, which featured pieces by Bach, Chopin, and Shostakovich, the house was packed, with some audience members even crowded onto the stage behind Kissin. The conclusion of each segment of the show was greeted by wild roars and avid clapping, and the final set of standing ovations went on so long that Kissin was forced, or at least encouraged, to give three separate encores. I enjoyed the Shostakovich pieces and loved the Bach; my companion at that concert loved the Chopin works, which she knew well. But I never got the sense of lift-off that a great concert always leaves me with. I’m thinking, for instance, of the mammoth performance of all 24 Shostakovich preludes and fugues that Igor Levit treated us to at Carnegie not so long ago—a knockout that was greeted by the normal level of intensely admiring applause rather than Kissin’s nearly insane level.

My spring stay in New York had been prolonged until the end of May mainly so that I could hear the second of the two Kissin concerts, which featured Shostakovich’s 1934 Cello Sonata in D Minor, his 1968 Violin Sonata, and his 1975 Viola Sonata, the last piece he ever wrote. I love the viola sonata and had never heard it live, so I knew this would be a treat; and given the other two “friends,” cellist Gautier Capuçon and violinist Gidon Kremer, whose work I already knew and loved, I figured the chosen violist, though unknown to me, would be up to snuff. 

In the event, the Ukrainian-British violist Maxim Rysanov more than exceeded my expectations. His rendering of the viola sonata was out of this world, and since it was the one piece on the program where the piano was absolutely required to fade into the background, we could hear him beautifully over Kissin’s soft chords. It helped, too, that I could remember the circumstances of Shostakovich’s composition of this piece. Dedicated to the young violist Fyodor Druzhinin—who had recently taken his teacher’s place in the Beethoven Quartet, the composer’s lifelong musical mouthpiece—it was finished only a month before Shostakovich died. After playing through the piece for the first time on August 6, 1975, Druzhinin was so thrilled that he sat down that very night to write a long, grateful letter to Shostakovich, who was by then in the hospital. According to Shostakovich’s wife, Irina Antonovna, the letter had its intended cheering effect. “Dmitri Dmitriyevich read your letter and was very pleased,” she told the young violist. “It was the best medicine for him.” But days later, on August 9, he succumbed to the lung cancer that was killing him, so he never got to hear his final work played live.

There is something I haven’t told you yet, which you probably need to know to understand the rest of this blog post. Ever since about 2018, my only and much-loved younger sister had been battling metastasized colon cancer. At first she was told the disease was simply “chronic” and she was able to take chemo pills to control it; later, though, this morphed into painful chemo infusions every two weeks, which gradually destroyed her body without fully getting rid of the disease. In early December of last year she bravely decided to quit chemo and take the consequences. I visited her in San Antonio for Christmas that year—the first time, we realized, that we had spent Christmas together since our childhood—and she was in remarkably good spirits, given the circumstances. But since then things had been getting worse.  I had been back to see her in mid-March, and I was scheduled to go again on June 9. We were speaking regularly on the phone together, at least twice every week, and she promised me she could hold out until then.

First, though, I returned to California for the last three of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final four concerts with the San Francisco Symphony. The circumstances of Esa-Pekka’s hiring and then departure have been enough to break the hearts of all music-loving San Franciscans. When he first arrived, just as the pandemic had started, we saw him as an immense sign of hope, and his concerts after that were indeed so thrilling that we all felt as if we had a marvelous new orchestra in our midst. Then, last year, the short-sighted symphony board decided that they could do without his inventive, expensive programs (not to mention raises for all the symphony players), and they cut back on the budget they had promised Esa-Pekka in order to lure him in. He promptly refused, rightly, to renew his contract. We all wrote letters to the board begging them to reverse their decision, but to no avail: they wanted to save on artistic funds so they could renovate and expand their symphony hall. So now we in San Francisco will have an upgraded building in which nothing of interest will be performed. What this meant, for me, was that in addition to the nationwide disaster of our 2025 government and the huge personal tragedy of my sister’s health, I was suffering from the minor but still significant prospect of this local loss. Hence the importance, and the emotional impact, of Esa-Pekka’s final concerts.

On May 30, my first full day back in the Bay Area, I attend the first of the three remaining concerts, the “Beethoven” one, which featured Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony along with his Violin Concerto. Hilary Hahn was the scheduled soloist, so that was guaranteed to be great, right? And can any Beethoven symphony be a disappointment? Well, maybe. I don’t think it was just jetlag that made me feel the Fourth is not Ludwig’s best work; as I said to a friend at intermission, there’s a reason we don’t hear it very often. And though every note of the Violin Concerto was familiar and precious to me, that too was a problem. I had heard it all before, and I wasn’t hearing anything new, as one must in a live concert if it is to be outstanding. As I say, this could be my problem as much as the program’s, since I was sleepy and anxious and worried about whether I would reach San Antonio in time. And in fact I texted my brother-in-law the very next day, or perhaps the day after, asking him to alert me if there was any sudden change in my sister’s condition.

He wrote to me on Tuesday, June 3, saying there had been a sudden decline that morning—my sister had stopped eating and was sleeping all the time—so I instantly changed my airline ticket to the next day. I was there with her on Wednesday night, Thursday all day long, and Friday morning, by which time she had lapsed into complete unconsciousness. She was still partly awake on the Thursday, though, and I am pretty sure she knew I was there; I knew I was there, anyway. On that Friday morning I kissed her forehead, stroked her hair, told her I would love her always, and left to return home, since the hospice nurse was saying it could take her a week or more to die. 

You will think I am crazy, perhaps, but I did not give up my ticket to Esa-Pekka’s concert that Friday night. On the contrary, I decided that Salonen’s version of Sibelius (whose Seventh Symphony formed the bulk of the program) was exactly what I needed at that moment. I have always loved music with the forward impulse of a narrative and the measurable rhythm of a dance, but it this case I found Sibelius’s characteristic floatiness—his suspension of time, his refusal to come down to rest, his overall vagueness, if you will—to be immensely soothing. And that initial sense of relative peacefulness carried me through the rest of the program as well: a world premiere, Rewilding, by the talented young composer Gabriella Smith (whose work I have been following since she was fifteen years old), and Richard Strauss’s 1895 Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. I cannot tell you whether either of these works was objectively good, or even objectively well-played. All I can say was that, following on the beautifully performed Sibelius, they allowed me to remain passive and unthinking.   

My sister died the next morning, on June 7, and nothing will ever be the same again. But like a good little critic who knows that life (and music) must go on, I took myself off to the final Esa-Pekka concert the following Friday.  The featured piece—in fact, the only piece—was Mahler’s Second, and though I am not a huge Mahler fan, I thought that his Resurrection Symphony might somehow be consoling. But it was not. Death in music, I learned, is not at all the same as death in life. The former is willful, changeable, melodramatic, and a tad self-glorifying; the latter is just pure pain.

It didn’t hurt me to be at the concert, but it didn’t help. And in reporting on it, I can therefore be of no help to you, because my internal state so overwhelmed the external circumstances as to make me useless as a critic. I am not blaming myself for this; it is the natural reaction, and I would be ashamed not to have it. Whether it is of any interest to you, I cannot say. I do not, in general, talk about my personal life in these blog posts, because they are supposed to be about the external world: our shared external world, in which I include music and the other arts. But in this case I thought you ought to know the whole story.

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Four More Concerts

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

My average attendance at Berlin musical events usually hovers between two and three per week; this time it was at the lower end, but that still meant I attended four additional concerts since my last posting. They were so varied that I think just describing them will give a sense of why I love this town, musically and otherwise.

First, on Saturday April 26, I had a rematch with Barrie Kosky and the Komische Oper. If the previous opera, Echnaton, was an example of Kosky at his serious, intellectual, somewhat terrifying best, this one showed his opposite but equally entrancing side to great effect. The Pearls of Cleopatra is a 1923 operetta by the Viennese-Jewish composer Oscar Straus —someone I had never heard of before, but it seems he was in the Franz Lehar league, in his own day. I chose this production not only because it sounded fun, but because the choreography was by Kosky’s frequent collaborator, Otto Pichler—my favorite Berlin choreographer, which means one of the few I like. On both counts, I chose well, and in fact the production was huge fun in large part because of Pichler, who transcended himself with a series of near-constant dances that both drew from 1920s style and reflected the knowing sensibility of this semi-ironic performance.

We began each act with dancer-singers flooding the balconies and the aisles around us, as if to say: Join us! You too are part of this show!  And that inviting sensibility pervaded the whole silly-on-purpose production, even for a foreigner who could not understand the Berlin-dialect asides that the main character kept making, to the rest of the audience’s complete delight. That main character, Cleopatra, was played by a well-known former-East-Berlin actress named Dagmar Manzel, born in 1958, who originated this role in Kosky’s production in 2016 and has been playing it ever since. Armed with a kitten-faced sock-puppet named Ingeborg who talked back to her in funny voices (a gimmick that the actress herself apparently originated), she was the wildest, craziest, most effective version of Cleopatra imaginable. This was a woman who clearly always got her way, and those around her had adapted to that fact in strange and ludicrous ways. The whole supporting cast, from her maid-servant Charmian (Julia Demke) to her righthand advisor Pampylos (Theo Rüster), turned out to be equally charming and endearing and funny, and the whole evening—musically, choreographically, and as a communal theatrical experience—couldn’t have been improved upon in any way.

Next up, on Sunday the 27th, was a concert on the other extreme of the Berlin spectrum, in every way except its quality. A one-hour performance of two Pierre Boulez pieces, held in the Werner-Otto-Saal, the tiniest space at the Konzerthaus, it was conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, my favorite Berlin conductor, and featured the eleven performers of the UnitedBerlin chamber group. The two pieces, “Dérive I” from 1984 and “Dérive II” from 1988–2009 (Boulez apparently couldn’t stop tinkering with it), were both extremely difficult to perform; the man sitting next to me said he could hear Jurowski heave a small sigh of relief when the concert ended. And the seriousness on all the players’ faces reflected the degree of concentration required of them. We in the audience took our parts seriously, too, and were quiet as mice throughout. Boulez is a difficult composer for me to take in—his rhythms (unlike Shostakovich’s, say) are always hard for me to follow, and I find it challenging to grasp what he is doing—but Jurowski’s expressive explanation, offered to us between the two pieces, gave me clues about what to watch for. It is these direct addresses to the audience, as much as the other factors one encounters at the Konzerthaus, that cause me to love this former-East music venue.  The prices are great there, too: I believe I paid only 15 euros for this intense Boulez experience. 

Pierre Boulez turned out to be the flavor of the week, because the following Sunday I attended a student performance at the Saal named after him. I have been to many fine concerts at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin’s latest and perhaps most congenial chamber-music space, but they have all been inside the concert hall itself. This one, titled Personal Note: Heartbeat, was in the lobby/bar area of the hall. As the students and one of their teachers explained to us in the course of the program, the nine pieces had been selected in large part because of their rhythmic qualities. Ranging from Bach, Vivaldi, and Schubert to relative youngsters like Marc Migó (born in 1993) and Matias Azpurua (born in 1983), the pieces were all short and lively, and they were played with vigor by the members of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, which was originally founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in order to bring together Israeli and Palestinian music students. The need for such unity is all too evident at this moment, and the diversity of the players’ backgrounds (I detected Hispanic, Armenian, and Turkish names in the mix, along with the Palestinians and Israelis) gave an added emotional punch to the sight of the valiant student performers. Among the standouts, I thought, were Andrés Gómez for his amazing percussion work, Ali Emir Bostanci for his delicious performance on the cello, and Eda Sevinis for both her piano-playing and her lovely speech about the meaning and function of music.

My fourth musical event was again at the Konzerthaus, but this one was a far more normal chamber concert, held in the Kleiner Saal. The performers were a Czech quartet group called the Bennewitz Quartett, joined after the intermission by the excellent German violist Veronika Hagen. I had never heard of the quartet before, but the program (Brahms followed by Dvorak) seemed attractive. As it turned out, the Brahms was perfectly fine; the Dvorak—the String Quintet in E-flat Major, opus 97—was out of this world. You could see from the expressions on the players’ faces that whereas Brahms’s String Quartet in B-flat Major struck them as a kind of entertainment, something to play for mere enjoyment, the Dvorak was serious business: so intense as to require their full-bodied involvement and concentration, and so passion-filled as to evoke an almost human singing quality from their strings. I was so inspired by their rendering of it that the minute I got home to my borrowed Berlin flat, I streamed the piece again on my little Micro Bose—and lo and behold, that recording too featured Veronika Hagen.  Perhaps no one is allowed to play the piece without her.

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Easter Weekend in Berlin

Posted on April 24, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

Yes, I have escaped from America, if only temporarily. It’s amazing how just being out of the country seems to remove that tightening iron vise from around one’s head. I can still read about all the presidential crimes and depredations in the daily newspaper online, but it’s as if it’s all happening at a distance, diminished in its power over me. Which is of course a fiction, but one that allows me to relax a bit.

And the music here! That is one of the things that brings me back to Berlin again and again, and this past week it was outstanding. First there was a Good Friday concert at the lovely old Konzerthaus Berlin; then a Saturday night encounter with the Babylon Berlin Live Orchestra at the venerable cinema of that name; and finally, on Easter itself, Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten (or Echnaton, as they spell it here) at the Komische Oper.  But I will take them in the order they came to me.

The Konzert zum Karfreitag (which is their name for Good Friday: my local interpreters define the Kar syllable as variously “flesh,” “sorrow,” and “precious”) featured the excellent RIAS Chamber Chorus, the regular Konzerthaus Orchestra itself, four fine soloists, and the English conductor Justin Doyle performing Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ. Due to Mark Morris’s strong advocacy of this piece, I even own a recording of it, but I have never heard it live, and the effect was profound. Like Brahms’s German Requiem (a work on which the Haydn clearly had an influence), it strengthens the emotionally persuasive effect of the human voice by intertwining it with instrumental music—in both cases powerfully reinforced by quantity and volume. Seven Last Words, though it follows a tight and somewhat repetitive structure, noticeably builds towards its end, so that you can really feel that end coming, even the first time you hear it. Because I was seated in one of my favorite Loge Right seats, suspended directly over the stage, I could even spot the three extra players —two brass and a percussionist—who sneaked into the orchestra during one of the final pauses between movements so that their resounding music could amplify the conclusion of the piece.

Lest we non-Christians in the audience feel left out, the designers of this program preceded the main event with a reading by the Persian-German scholar Navid Kermani, widely known in this country for his critical writings about Christianity. In this case he was reading a series of close analyses of Mary-and-Jesus artworks that were projected on the large screen behind him, interspersed with Gregorian songs broadcast from the first-ring level by two alternating soloists. I was not terribly attracted to Kermani’s readings, which emphasized his subjective take over anything that was actually happening in the paintings or sculptures, but I appreciated the inclusive gesture—anti-Christianity combined with Christianity—that made it a part of this concert. Only in Berlin, I thought.

And thought again the next night, when I attended a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times at the Babylon Berlin cinema, accompanied by the charmingly adept in-house musicians. Over the years I have heard them play along to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and Chaplin’s own first feature, The Circus, always to sold-out crowds at this wonderful Mitte-district film theater, which has been located on that spot since 1929.

I have always loved Modern Times (I must have seen it nearly a dozen times by now), but it took me until last Saturday’s viewing to realize that Chaplin himself had composed the music, along with doing the writing, directing, and of course acting (in which category I include his genius-level movement, of everything from his body to his face). As with my other musical experiences at the Babylon Berlin, I almost forgot about the orchestra, their performance was so in synch with what was taking place onscreen—until the very end, when the lights went up and we all applauded the musicians like mad. The orchestra in fact came in for even more applause than the film, to such an extent that they felt obliged to give us an encore. I emerged from the theater on Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse feeling that this vibrant, delighted audience consisted entirely of my kind of people: an illusion, no doubt, but one that I am happy to preserve.

And then, on Sunday, I attended the Easter Day performance of Echnaton, directed by Barrie Kosky (he of recent Threepenny Opera fame in Brooklyn, and of much else I have admired). Despite my affection for Kosky’s work—and for Glass’s, of which I am a strong though not die-hard fan—I had very low expectations for this event. For one thing, I was prepared to resent the architecturally cold Schiller Theater, the former-West-Berlin location to which the Komische has fled while its own former-East premises are being renovated. For another, I did not see how three hours of repetitive Glass music was going to hold my interest in a nearly plotless opera about monotheism. (The story in a nutshell: the old Egyptian pharaoh dies, the new one take over and makes his father into a singular all-powerful god, and then the establishment forces bring him down and return religious matters to the status quo.) But I did not count on the inventiveness, the sheer brilliance of Kosky’s staging, aided and abetted not only by his seven collaborators in “movement sequencing” (there was no choreographer listed), but also by the soloists he cast in the crucial parts. A particular standout was the countertenor John Holiday, who played Echnaton, and whom I’d unaccountably never seen before. But had I stayed in America, I would have seen him soon enough, for he will be performing during the next few weeks in the English Concert’s version of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, first at Zellerbach Hall (April 27) and then at Carnegie (May 4). If you live near Berkeley or New York, do not let this opportunity pass: he will astonish you, as he astonished me and everyone else at the Easter performance.

But even a great singer could not have supported this three-hour show on his own. That was accomplished by the abstract yet viscerally compelling staging: abstract in that it often consisted simply of repetitive yet slightly varying motions performed in front of non-representational sets; compelling because the quality of those motions was so very, very good. Berlin dance, as I’ve complained before, is often terrible because it either overdoes or underdoes the capacities of the human body to exhibit strain. But in this case Kosky and his collaborators got it just right.

The seven collaborating “movement sequencers” were the seven highly skilled dancers—four men and three women—who appeared in just about every scene of the opera, and whose gestures were often echoed by the members of the chorus and even the soloists. Perhaps because of this link to normal bodily abilities, the gestures were never stupidly exaggerated or annoyingly grotesque, as they so often are in this country. When not all the chorus members could perform the motions, Kosky wisely left it to just those who could—as in the wonderful scene where the dancers and about two-thirds of the chorus criss-crossed the stage carrying lit globes, while the non-dancing singers remained holding their globes on the sidelines. This approach matched what other choreographers have done with Glass’s music (I am thinking in particular of Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces, to which some of Kosky’s sequences seemed to allude) while at the same time making the performances seem even more natural, less artificially constructed, less “stagy” than in professionally choreographed dances. Yet there were scenes—as when the seven dancers lowered themselves slowly to the ground, backs perfectly straight as their knees bent more and more—that could not have been accomplished by any but the best-trained physical performers.

Despite the long musical passages that took place between sung interludes, there was never a moment when my attention drifted from what was happening onstage. And despite its obvious and indeed vaunted repetitiveness, there was never a note of Glass’s music that seemed unnecessary. I roared with delight when the final curtain came down, and so did the rest of the wildly appreciative Berlin audience. It had been the best three hours of opera one could imagine—a fitting conclusion to my multi-religious, musically enhanced Easter weekend.

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A Welcome Visit from the Danes

Posted on April 7, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

Sometimes I think I organize my geographical existence around the concert schedule of the Danish String Quartet. This is not actually true. What is true is that I once flew from California to New York to catch their Beethoven cycle at Alice Tully Hall—and boy, was that worth it. But for the most part I allow our overlaps to occur naturally. I have yet to cross the Atlantic just to hear them play, though I am always happy when my semi-annual Berlin trips coincide with their appearances at the Pierre Boulez Saal, as happened last spring. And similarly, I am glad when I get to hear them during twice in a single season, in both Berkeley and Manhattan—these being the two places I inhabit for part of each year, both of which the Danes seem to visit with some regularity.

This year I caught them at Cal Performances on February 2 and then, about two months later, at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, so I suppose I have had my fair share. But I am already fretting about the fact that I will miss their summer concerts in Denmark, including the premiere of their new Shostakovich piece, I press your hand warmly, which is based partly on Shostakovich’s letters and partly on his string quartets. Since I have yet to attend any of their Danish concerts, this should not really bother me. But it does, perhaps because I feel so personally (if unreasonably) possessive about Shostakovich.

To date, I have managed to hear them play two of Shostakovich’s fifteen quartets—the Seventh, which is his shortest, and the Fifteenth, which may be his most difficult to pull off—and each performance persuaded me of their deep affinity for this composer’s work. That is somewhat surprising, because the DSQ are in general a sunny, friendly, companionable group, interested in the various kinds of pleasure offered by music, whereas DSCH can often be quite moody and forbidding. But that difference in temperament does not prevent these musicians from getting to the heart of Shostakovich’s work. When they played the somber, relentlessly slow Fifteenth Quartet at Cal Performances in February, they introduced it by pointing out that the composer was very ill when he wrote it, and warning us that “not all music is meant to be enjoyed.” If I did, perversely, enjoy it, it was partly by remembering Shostakovich’s own instructions to his favorite players about how they should perform the first movement: “Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” None of us in Hertz Hall were even faintly tempted to leave—I could sense that all my fellow audience members were as gripped and entranced as I was—but we nonetheless appreciated the brief respite that followed. That final bit of the program, three Irish folk melodies drawn from the DSQ’s terrific Keel Road album, got introduced with the phrase, “Now you can enjoy the music again.”

Last Friday’s performance at Zankel Hall was also a mixture of sorts, though for different reasons. A payback for a missed concert during the pandemic, it was actually the first of the Danish String Quartet’s “Doppelgänger” series, the second, third, and fourth of which had already been performed at Carnegie. For each of these concerts, they commissioned a modern composer to write a new piece that responded in some way to one of Schubert’s late works for strings. I had heard and appreciated the Thomas Adès response, paired with Schubert’s String Quintet, during their last Zankel appearance; this time I heard and appreciated Bent Sørensen’s composition, inspired by the last of Schubert’s string quartets. Appreciation is not the same as enjoyment, however, and I wondered, frankly, if it could ever be a fair contest between Schubert and someone else. Certainly I felt we had all earned our money’s worth by the time of the intermission, with the String Quartet in G Major played as perfectly as it could ever be played. So the agitated, thrumming Sørensen piece—along with the program’s final flourish, an adaptation of Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” song for string quartet—felt like gravy, or icing, or whatever you get when you don’t actually need anything more. But like gravy or icing, it was a plus, because it is always a plus to hear the Danes play.

They are not entirely Danish, by the way—the cellist is a Norwegian—and this time the they were even more internationally varied than usual. One of the two violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (no relation, as far as I know, to Bent), was back home on parental leave and had been temporarily replaced by the Los Angeles–based violinist Yura Lee. Introducing us to Rune’s “doppelgänger” in his brief, graceful talk before the performance, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard took a moment to point out that Yura was from Korea and California, the cellist was from Norway, the rest of them were from Denmark, and “it is always good when people from different countries can join together to make something.” Coming on the heels of the horrific tariff announcements and all the other hateful, isolating decisions of the past seventy days, this quiet statement seemed to open the floodgates, causing the pent-up Zankel audience to burst into loud, prolonged applause. I applauded myself, and as I clapped, I felt tears starting to my eyes—a sign not only of how sad I am about what is happening to America, but also of how grateful I am to the Danes for coming to our intermittent rescue.

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The Boycott

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

When I heard last month that the marvelous German violinist Christian Tetzlaff was canceling all his forthcoming U.S. concerts, my first reaction was “Good for him!” I am a big fan of everything he does—musically, socially, and politically—and I was glad he was taking a vocal stand when so many of us in America are just silently deploring. It was only secondarily that I felt sorry for myself, since it meant I would not get to hear him at Carnegie this spring.

Now the esteemed pianist Andras Schiff has joined the boycott. I am quite sure there will be many others to follow, and they are all right to take this position. We have become an authoritarian country, approaching the condition of Hungary, Russia, or even Hitler’s Germany, and we fully deserve to be abandoned by the Europeans, the Canadians, and everyone else who will soon come to hate us. The fact that nearly half of us voted against the monster in power—and that no one at all voted for his fellow presiding monster—does not absolve us. We classical music fans are probably mainly anti-Trump, if I had to take a guess, but that does not mean that we as Americans should get to avoid punishment for our nation’s bad deeds. Contemplating the silence of the “good” Germans in 1933–45, my postwar generation always wondered, “Why didn’t they speak up? Why didn’t they do anything?” Now we are in their position, and for the most part we—including the elected Democratic members of the House and the Senate—are remaining equally silent. So we share in the guilt, and we deserve whatever comes to us.

There is some debate about whether such cultural boycotts are justified. From the point of view of the individual musician, this seems to me undebatable, in that, as Tetzlaff pointed out, 32% of his earnings in America would go to support a government he violently objects to. It is his right and perhaps even his obligation not to submit to that tax. When he announced his decision, he said that other musicians had tried to talk him out of it—their argument being that “music crosses borders” and is therefore especially valuable as a form of exchange in these circumstances. When I repeated this line to a European friend of mine, he scoffed, “Infantry crosses borders too.” Agreed.

In the course of the next couple of months, I am scheduled to hear a range of musicians who come from elsewhere: Mitsuko Uchida, the Danish String Quartet, Evgeny Kissin, Gidon Kremer…  It will be very sad for me if they all cancel this year or next, and and continue to abandon us for the entire time that this regime remains in place. But the much sadder thing is what we, as a country, are now doing to the rest of the world—and to ourselves.

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Chamber Music at Herbst and Hertz

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

Symphonic music may be about to take a nose-dive in San Francisco, due to the imminent departure of conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, shamefully let go by the short-sighted administration of the S.F. Symphony. Chamber music, on the other hand, is still alive and well all over the Bay Area. From Music@Menlo, south of the City, to festivals like Valley of the Moon and Music in the Vineyards up north, from tiny venues in churches and storefronts to more official auditoriums in Berkeley and San Francisco, smaller-scale concerts of classical music are at a peak.

Two of the best places to hear chamber music these days are the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, where San Francisco Performances presents most of its concerts, and Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley, where Cal Performances holds sway. Last weekend, I had a chance to sample the offerings at both, one after the other, and the result was more than satisfactory. If similar concerts were offered every weekend of the year, I probably wouldn’t have a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon available for anything else.

The Saturday night concert at Herbst featured a classical guitarist whose single-name appellation, Milos, was completely unknown to me. (But then, so is just about the name of every other classical guitarist except Andres Segovia.) The house was not packed, but it held a good-sized audience, many of whom had what I imagine to be the vaguely nerdy look of fanatical guitarists.

As we sat waiting for the concert to start, the curtainless stage was empty save for a single chair and a backdrop that pressed close behind it. When Milos came out, carrying his guitar, he turned out to be a slender, handsome young man dressed in casual black and sporting a slight but discernible accent. As the program booklet stated, and as he later mentioned during one of his interludes of talk, he was born and grew up in Montenegro: hence the accent. But at the age of seventeen he went to London to study classical guitar, and he has pretty much lived there ever since.

Because of the intimate way he dealt with us, along with the quiet nature of his performance itself, the concert hall felt much smaller than it was. His music was entirely unamplified, and between each piece he spoke to us (without a microphone) about what he had just played or was about to play. Clearly he had something very specific in mind when he designed his program—that is, the Baroque as reflected and portrayed on the guitar—so he began with two pieces by Silvius Leopold Weiss, one of the earliest composers for the lute. That sounded just right on the guitar, but the two subsequent pieces—an excerpt from a Rameau opera, and a Handel menuet—sounded like the transcriptions they were: something designed for another instrument and then wilfully relocated onto the guitar. Only when he got to the close of the first half and played Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor did the transition from violin to guitar make complete sense: not only because the Bach piece is so beautiful that it would probably sound okay played on a kazoo, but also because the variety of simultaneous notes the composer demanded from his violinist were well suited to the chords of a guitar. Only a master guitarist could have pulled it off, though, and it was in this particular work that Milos most thoroughly demonstrated his mastery.

The second half started with a bang—the Asturias by Albeniz, which really was designed for guitar, and which knocks me out every time I hear it—and then wandered, by way of Scarlatti and Barrios, up to the present, which included a slightly trashy rendering of “Over the Rainbow” and then a complicated modern piece by Mathias Duplessy, written explicitly for Milos. None of this could compete with the Bach, really, but Milos’s generally charming manner, his modest way of receiving our enthusiastic applause, and his confiding manner of speaking with us all made the evening a quiet if consistent pleasure.

I had almost the opposite feeling—of being lifted out of my seat with the intensity of the experience—when Jeremy Denk played Brahms’s Piano Quintet with the Takacs Quartet at Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon.  The concert had been sold out for weeks if not months, and this was the curtain closer; it had been preceded, before the intermission, by Beethoven’s Opus 18, No. 1 and Janacek’s Kreutzer Sonata string quartet. I have heard the Takacs do both of these before, and there were no surprises: though they do them well, their performance left me relatively unmoved this time.

But Denk! He was something else again. I realized, hearing him in this piece, that I had only heard him play solo piano over the course of the past few decades, and while he is a marvelous pianist (and speaker) on his own, the possibility of collaboration brought out a new side to him. Located behind the string players but nonetheless leading them at every moment, he raised the Takacs musicians themselves to a new level of explosive, emotional strength. I love Brahms anyway, but his music can be done well or badly; this was Brahms at his best, and Denk at his best, and the Takacs at their best as well. “Worth going out of the house for,” I murmured to my husband, as we heartily joined in the standing ovation at the end.

And then we walked home in the late afternoon twilight, because Hertz Hall is only about a twenty-minute walk from our house. That too is an incomparable luxury—to have music of this caliber brought to one’s doorstep, courtesy of the irreplaceable Cal Performances. I shudder to think what our life in Berkeley would be like without them.

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Again with The Hard Nut

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

I have to say, I never tire of it. I must have seen this Mark Morris production at least a dozen times over the course of the past three decades, and each time I see something new in it. I was about three or four seasons in, for instance, when I first noticed the crying woman during the carol-singing session at the Christmas party. A decade or two later, I wondered for the first time about Drosselmeier’s vigorous bouncing of Marie on his lap: were we meant to sense an element of child sexual abuse? These elements were both there from the beginning, but because the party scene in which they occur is so complicated and various—and because, in addition, we see what our current news makes us more likely to see—my take on them varied over time.

This time, at the BAM performance on December 14, I was struck in particular by how closely Morris’s staging followed E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original storyline. Having just finished reading Hoffmann’s “Nutcracker and Mouse King” tale (and also his “Sandman,” the inspiration for both Tales of Hoffmann and Coppelia), I was able to pick out the specific details that Mark Morris had preserved: not only the name Marie for the little heroine of the story (rather than the more common Clara), but also the connection between Drosselmeier and the Nutcracker (they are uncle and nephew), the performance of mechanical dolls at the Christmas party (though they are miniatures, not life-sized, in the Hoffmann story), the night-nursery battle between mice and soldiers, the whole tale of Princess Pirlipat and the Hard Nut, and even the inclusion of the dentist who takes care of the failed suitors. All of this was there on Hoffmann’s page, and all had been faithfully incorporated into Morris’s Hard Nut. Only the pointe-shoe-clad maid—a brilliant invention, originated by Kraig Patterson and now danced to perfection by Brandon Randolph—is entirely new to the plot.

If you have watched a particularly vivid dance piece over the course of thirty years, one of the things that happens is a kind of superimposition of roles. Behind Elisa Clark’s graceful rendering of Mrs. Stahlbaum, I saw not only the initial outrageous travesty by Peter Wing Healy, but also the subtle, womanly performance by John Heginbotham—all three excellent in their own ways, but with an added Shakespearean twist lent by putting a female dancer in the role designed as a man performing a woman.  I miss Morris’s own presence in The Hard Nut (first as a drunken party guest and the lead Arabian, later as Dr. Stahlbaum), but was thrilled to see his Stahlbaum role taken now by Joe Bowie, an old and much-missed member of the dance group. Rob Besserer, the original Drosselmeier, still inhabits my memory, but Billy Smith has done a wonderful job in recent years of masterfully taking over the role. And his touching duet with his Nutcracker nephew (formerly David Leventhal, then Aaron Loux, now Domingo Estrada) remains one of the most moving and thrilling and echt-Morris parts of the dance for me.

On my visit to BAM last week—my first time seeing The Hard Nut again since before the pandemic—I brought along a friend who had never seen the dance before. She was in ecstasies, like a small child. Another astute enthusiast, as I soon discovered, was the stranger sitting next to me. Just before the piece commenced, he politely informed me that he had a very small bladder and might have to dash out to the bathroom during the performance. “But I promise not to come back in again until the end of the act, so I won’t mess up your view twice.”

“Okay,” I said, “as long as you don’t leave during the Snowflake Dance.” 

“The Snowflake Dance!” he exclaimed. “How amazing that you should say that. That’s why I’m here for a second time, to see the Snowflake Dance.”

And a very good reason it is, for I too always await, at the end of the first act, this marvelous, inventive, funny, sad, thrilling ensemble performance, which concludes with the lovely image of Drosselmeier making his solitary way upstage through the snow, as the spinning snowflakes mark his progress by slowing to a gradual halt around him.

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A German Requiem

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

The first time I was ever in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, back in the fall of 2003, I heard Brahms’s German Requiem. It was the first time I’d ever heard the piece performed live, and it was not a work I knew well, so what I mainly took away with me was the tremendous sense of the waves of sound penetrating my body. This was attributable, of course, to the felicitous acoustics of the concert hall (my favorite in the world, I often think, though the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall in New York give it a run for its money), but it was also due, I now realize, to the music itself. The choral singing, in particular, moves its listeners by overwhelming them, whatever their knowledge or lack of knowledge about the German words being sung.

On my most recent visit to the Philharmonie, twenty-one years later, I was lucky enough to hear Ein deutsches Requiem again, this time conducted by the incomparable Vladimir Jurowski and played by his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. The RSB has taken the place of the fabled Berlin Philharmonic orchestra in my heart, now that Simon Rattle has stepped down from the latter in favor of Kirill Petrenko, and if Jurowski is conducting anywhere in Berlin during my stays, I always make an effort to hear him.

The effort, this time, was repaid beyond measure when I was treated on November 24 to a concert that began with Haydn’s sprightly Symphony No. 44—new to me, but then, since he wrote over a hundred of them, that is not surprising. So far, so good, I thought at the intermission. But then, as if in recapitulation of my first experience, I was transported beyond pleasure to something resembling awe at the RSB’s performance of the German Requiem. Jurowski was terrific, and the orchestra no less so, but pride of place went, as it should, to the Rundfunk Chor, which brought forth Brahms’s sonorous admonitions and praises and contemplations of death (and life) in a way that profoundly stirred me. The two soloists, soprano Elsa Benoit and baritone Gerald Finley, were fine, but as usual the performance left me feeling that the very existence of soloists, in such a piece, was rather beside the point. It was the cohesion of the choral voices—their harmony, their counterpoint, their unified strength—that gave Brahms’s work its terrifying, remarkable, infinitely moving power. I left Berlin the next day with the sense that the city had rewarded me, as it always does, with the best musical experiences the world has to offer. And to me, in the present state of the world, that means a lot.

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Czechs, Etc.

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

This week the Czech Philharmonic came to Carnegie Hall for three concerts in a row, and so did a huge number of Czechs. You could distinguish them from the normal Carnegie denizens because a) they were all dressed up—the men in suits or even black-tie, the women in glittery dresses—whereas we locals have taken to attending Carnegie concerts in jeans and sweaters; b) they were incredibly silent at the breaks between music, and incredibly vocal in their applause at the end; and c) they were all speaking Czech with each other. Just being in their midst was kind of like visiting a foreign country, without even having to go to an airport. The friendly and extremely knowledgeable man I sat next to on Wednesday night had come all the way from Prague for these three concerts, and I gather much of the rest of the crowd had done the same. On Thursday night they were even joined by the Czech president, who sat in one of the first-tier boxes and benevolently bowed to the crowd when he was introduced from the stage.

But how, you may well ask, was the music? Well, pretty stupendous, on the whole. I missed Tuesday night’s concert (for reasons that will be explained at the end of this post), but on Wednesday we were treated to Dvorak’s Violin Concerto featuring Gil Shaham, followed by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and on Thursday we had Daniil Trifonov in Dvorak’s Piano Concerto, with Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass to conclude the program. Both soloists were outstanding in completely different ways: Shaham looked like he was having a great time amid his fellow players, nodding and smiling at them in the moments when he wasn’t playing, and moving around freely, as a violinist can, whereas Trifonov remained hunched over the piano keys, communing with the instrument as if it and he belonged to their own superhuman species. What the two performances shared was their remarkable virtuosity, even beyond what was demanded by the complicated scores. If I had to judge by the audience response alone, I would say that the enthusiasm expressed for these two soloists was even greater than that accorded to the absent Mahler and Janacek—and that is saying a lot, because those huge symphonic pieces were performed beautifully, and the audience knew it.

Both evenings, plus the one I missed, were led by the terrific conductor Semyon Bychkov. I have only heard him once before, in a guest appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic, but I remembered his name because he was so good—and now, at the helm of his own orchestra, he was even better. In the time this Russian-born, American-trained, European-domiciled conductor has been leading the Czech Philharmonic, he has been able to infuse them with something of his own personality and at the same time bring out their own. In fact, I would say that “personality” is one of the triumphant attributes of this excellent orchestra, especially in the way they performed the huge symphonic pieces (or symphonic and choral, in the case of the Glagolitic Mass). Other fine orchestras feature amazingly exact precision, or subtlety of dynamic range, or some other technical skill; the Czechs are notable for their intensity, which manifests itself in the emotion-infused music they produce. Somehow, they and Bychkov together managed to create the sense that the whole gigantic room was feeling the same thing at once—a feeling that was reinforced when the Czech-led audience began to clap loudly and yell “Bravo” repeatedly at the end.

And where was I on Tuesday night? In the underground chamber space at Carnegie, Zankel Hall, listening to the countertenor Iestyn Davies sing mainly seventeenth-century German songs by the likes of Buxtehude, Geist, and Johann Christoph Bach, all the while accompanied by an English group called Fretwork.  I wouldn’t have missed it for the world—not only because the music itself was lovely and soothing, if often melancholy, but because the sight of five people all playing various-sized viols (with one more player in the background on organ and virginal) was itself intriguing and unusual. Have you ever seen a viol, that ancestor of the violin, the viola, and the cello?  It’s played like a viola de gamba—that is, gripped between the knees of the musician—and the bow is held from the inside rather than the outside, if you see what I mean, so that the whole experience of watching such a concert takes one back to a different period entirely. This was a kind of travel that no airport could have accomplished, and I was exceedingly grateful for it. Even more, though, I was grateful to be present in the same room with Iestyn Davies’ voice, an unearthly sound that can fill the whole of Carnegie’s large hall if it needs to (I have heard him do it, with the English Concert’s Rodelinda last spring), but that comes across as even more remarkable at close range. Neither male nor female, neither childish nor fully adult, the vocal music emitted by a great countertenor—and Davies is one of the greatest—sounds like nothing so much as the heartfelt expression of a ghost or spirit. It can truly make the hairs rise on the back of your neck. In contrast to Wednesday’s and Thursday’s delightfully human and overwhelmingly present experience, Tuesday’s concert seemed to offer a muted, lowkey, but nonetheless tangible access to a magical, hidden, ancestrally known world—one I generally don’t believe in, except when such music has its way with me.

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