Berlin Music Diary

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

All told, I attended eleven musical events over the course of three weeks. As is usual in my Berlin stays, none was a waste of time. Another way of putting it is that all were at least worth the 35 to 50 euros (about 38 to 54 dollars, at current exchange rates) I spent to go to them. At prices like these, one can afford to experiment. But here I am only going to focus on the six best evenings of my stay.

April 27: This was the first of my two Tetzlaff concerts, and it was held in the larger hall of the Konzerthaus Berlin, the venerable and beautiful Schinkel auditorium located in the Gendarmenmarkt plaza. It featured the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, conducted by someone I had never seen before named Marc Albrecht, with Christian Tetzlaff performing as a soloist in the first of the two major pieces on the program. That was the German premiere of a new piece by a living composer named Christian Jost, his second violin concerto, subtitled “Concerto noir.” I don’t know if the color referred to his mood in composing it or the difficulty of the piece, but as Jost said in his personal introduction to the premiere, it was written for Tetzlaff, who can do anything. (Jost also mentioned modestly—or faux modestly, it is always hard to tell in German—that the evening’s program featured two composers: Richard Strauss, whose name would be familiar to all present, and himself, who would be less so.) It is lucky that Tetzlaff can do anything, because this concerto struck me as almost impossible to play, it was so thorny and harsh and arhythmical and fast. I imagine I have never heard as many separate notes played by a violinist in such a short period of time. And yet the rewards, in Tetzlaffian terms, were relatively skimpy, because although one could see that he was doing everything right—superlatively right—there were no supremely melodic moments in which one could savor his golden tone, and practically no variations in the dynamics, so that the soloist had to perform at an intense volume throughout. I was glad to have been present—I am always glad to be present at a Tetzlaff concert—but let’s just say that the Strauss Sinfonia domestica, agitated though it sometimes was, came as a bit of a relief after the Jost.

Much more rewarding, I would say, was my second Tetzlaff concert, which took place on April 30 in the smaller hall of the Konzerthaus. I bought the ticket because Tetzlaff was on the program, and he was indeed marvelous in the Kodaly Duo Opus 7 for violin and cello that was the penultimate event on the three-hour program. But the whole event was even better than its many parts. A memorial concert for a dead cellist and cello teacher named Boris Pergameschikow, who had taught several generations of major cello players at Berlin’s prime music academy, the event featured about ten different accomplished cellists (plus a pianist, a clarinettist, and Tetzlaff the violinist) in pieces ranging from venerable composers like Beethoven, Saint-Saens, and Debussy to modernists like Ernest Bloch, Samuel Barber, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Held as a benefit concert for the academy at which Pergamenschikow had taught—the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik—it felt like something of a family affair, with people greeting each other as they took their seats. I was in the second row, surrounded by all these devoted music fans and musicians, and practically onstage (the Kleiner Saal is very intimate) with Tetzlaff and the others. Perhaps the most moving moment came right after Tetzlaff’s terrific performance, when a whole wave of new cellists—students of two of the major ones, Nicolas Altstaedt and Claudio Bohórquez, joined their teachers and five others for a final Hymnus by Julius Klengel. The sound of fifteen or sixteen cellos playing at once, and the sight of the proud teachers winking and nodding encouragingly at their students, was nothing short of divine.

In between these two, I attended something that I normally wouldn’t even have counted as a concert, but it seems to deserve the name in retrospect. On Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse in the middle of Berlin is an old cinema called Babylon—yes, just as in Babylon Berlin—that dates from 1929, though the building that now houses it is no doubt a postwar reconstruction. Frequently they run silent films accompanied by a live band (titled, appropriately enough, the Babylon Berlin Orchestra), and the last time I was in Berlin I saw Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great Metropolis screened there in that way. This time, on April 28, what I saw and heard was Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, The Circus, accompanied live by the score that Chaplin himself had composed for it. What a complete and total delight that was!

There are so many fine conductors in Berlin—Vladimir Jurowski and Simon Rattle, just to name two of my world favorites—that I sometimes forget to trumpet the achievements of Ivan Fischer, who has also worked primarily in that city since fleeing from his native Hungary a number of years ago. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 5, I was back in the large hall of the Konzerthaus to hear a typically great and inventive program put together and conducted by Fischer. Once again it featured the Konzerthausorchester, but this time they seemed to me to come to vibrant life in a way that had not been true under Albrecht. Or perhaps it was the program itself that brought them to life: a short and typical orchestral piece by Philip Glass called Facades, following by a Bach choral piece (the Cantata for Soloists, Chorus, and Orchestra, BWV 105), which was in turn followed by a major choral work by Philip Glass, the Passion of Ramakrishna. The soloists were outstanding, the chorus even more so, and I had a terrific seat up in the first-ring Loge, right over the conductor’s podium, which allowed me to watch Fischer’s kindly face and eloquent hands as he gestured toward the players and the singers. You might think that a Bach sandwich with Philip Glass as the bread wouldn’t work, but it succeeded beautifully, and the different kinds of spirituality in the vocal pieces, expressed in different languages (German and English), made the whole thing feel universally inviting, even to a confirmed atheist like myself.

The two concerts I had most anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—took place on the last two nights of my stay. First, on May 14, was my second chance in less than a month to hear the Danish String Quartet in a chamber-music venue. They were playing at the Pierre Boulez Saal, where the audience is seated in the round and the players are in the center, and in their comments to the audience (which were in English), they observed that it was a bit difficult to know where to face when talking. When playing, they faced each other, and if anything, this increased the sense of mutual animation and pleasure they clearly derived from each other’s company. The program was quite similar to the one I heard at Princeton last November—the Haydn Opus 20, No. 3, Shostakovich’s brief yet intense No. 7, and a selection of Irish and Scandinavian folk tunes the DSQ had adapted for string quartet—except that instead of the Britten piece they had played at Princeton, there was a very good Thomas Ades string quartet called The Four Quarters. The audience members loved the classical pieces (not to mention the players’ friendly, somewhat humorous commentary), but they went wild over the folk tunes, stamping and whistling and yelling “Woo-hoo!” when that final segment of the concert was over. Their degree of enthusiasm clearly took the DSQ musicians by surprise—not that they had expected anything less than heartfelt applause, which is what they always get, but the intensity of this prolonged response was unusual. I was happy to see them get their due from the normally restrained Germans, and I felt thrilled, as I always am with the Danes, to be part of their warm and appreciative audience.

And then, on May 15, came the concert I had prolonged my stay to hear: Simon Rattle conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the last three Mozart symphonies. Recently the MCO acquired José Maria Blumenschein as its concertmaster, and hearing this fine violinist play again after a gap of nearly fifteen years (I last heard him when he was a member of the youthful Vertigo Quartet, having just graduated from the Curtis Institute) was a pleasure in itself. But the real delight was in listening to—and seeing, because he is a very active conductor—the performance that Rattle drew out of the orchestra as a whole. The 39th and 40th Symphonies were excellent; the 41st was a revelation, and made me feel I had never really heard it done properly before. During the interval, my friend Martin and I had been discussing with each other the fact that Mozart is almost always a youthful passion; one slightly grows out of him with age, and at times perhaps even tires of his repetitions, as one never does with Beethoven. But as we were leaving the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall that night, after that singularly life-enhancing performance of the “Jupiter” symphony, I said to Martin: “Well, even Simon Rattle can’t quite turn Mozart into Beethoven. But he can make us feel nineteen again.”

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A Photography Show in Berlin

Posted on May 19, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

As I hinted I was going to, I spent late April and early May in Berlin. Normally what I would be writing about here are the excellent concerts I attended—and don’t worry, I will get to them in a later post. But for now I want to focus on something much more unexpected: a rather amazing show I happened to find at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.

I actually try to avoid this museum as much as possible, because it is affiliated with the Helmut Newton Foundation, and I really can’t stand his work. But this time there was a special show I wanted to see, so on the last day of April, I wended my way up the first couple of floors, ignoring the blown-up Newton photos of breasty, naked females, and entered the top-floor gallery devoted exclusively to the work of Michael Wesely.

Wesely, who was born in Munich in 1963, has lived in Berlin since 2000. To judge by the photographs on display here—not only the most recent ones in the main exhibit called Doubleday, but the earlier examples of his time-lapse or archival work—he is particularly interested in the effects of time on our perceptions. How can we detect the still-living human element within archaic urban landscapes? How can we mark the passage of a few hours or even longer when people are assembled in public spaces? And how, most importantly, can we see both the past and present at once?

The astonishing photos that compose the project Doubleday: Berlin from 1860 to the Present Day are an attempt to answer that last question through what I hesitate to call technical means. It’s true that a great deal of technique had to go into making these entrancing, large-scale photographs, which combine Berlin as it used to look with the Berlin that surrounds us now. (“Now,” for Michael Wesely, is 2023: that is the second date on every caption in the show.) But to achieve the superimpositions in a way that does full justice to both present and past, he has had to make innumerable aesthetic and psychological decisions. Should the archival photos be left in their old sepia or black-and-white while the modern ones are in color? Yes, was his answer to that, though in some cases he has allowed a wash of color, usually blue, to unite the two eras. Which should dominate, the old or the new? His solution here was counterintuitive, for he has mainly allowed the old photos to come forward strongly, while the new images fade to ghostlike wisps in the background. How far back in time should he go for each location? This must have depended partly on what was available in the archives. But the archives he drew from were huge, so his choice, for instance, to show the Gendarmenmarkt in 1945 and 2023—partly turned to rubble by the war, but even more torn up by the recent renovation of the plaza—was clearly meant to draw a link between the two kinds of ruins. He gives us several samples of Potsdamer Platz, from several different angles and from multiple years, in some cases emphasizing just the current traffic in relation to the postwar desolation, and in other places capturing the ugly too-high buildings that stand like pale sentinels around that once-open war-torn spot.

Many of these scenes portray places I had just passed in the surrounding neighborhood: the Gedächtniskirche in 1946 and now, its “broken” shape and structure still nearly identical; the Kurfürstendamm at present and in 1962, with hordes of pedestrians from both eras milling along the sidewalks; the Budapester Strasse entrance to the Zoo in 1949, dwarfed by the high-rise building that stands behind it today and the modern cars that whizz by on the street. If you have walked around Berlin a lot, you can’t help but recognize many of the locations, and for the ones you don’t, Weseley has provided helpful captions and dates.

One of my favorite photos in the whole show is an elegant frontal image of the old Lehrter Bahnhof, taken in 1885, with a shadowy ultra-modern building (the Cube, it’s called) looming quietly behind and over it. I get a similar chill from the 1885 view of the simple and dignified old Marienkirche, with horses and carts standing in front of it and a stark white-and-silver TV tower seemingly growing out of its back. The Reichstag, too, is beautiful both as a dome-less ruin in 1945 and with a sliver of the current glass cupola peering over its head. These photos look nothing like the standard notion of a double-exposure, the kind an amateur might produce by mistake. On the contrary, each melded pair forms a single coherent image, an almost painterly view of a particular section of the city at two specific moments in time.

Given my own historical interests (I’ve recently been researching late-Weimar Berlin), I am struck by two images that draw on 1929 and 1931 for their earlier shots. The first is taken on Französische Strasse, where very little—including the Bridge of Sighs extending over the quiet street—has changed since 1929; only a faint background of bluish-tinted modern buildings and an even fainter image of a modern-day white car interrupt the old look. In the 1931 photo, taken from the Rote Rathaus and looking in the direction of Alexanderplatz, most of the blue-and-sepia image looks old; only the white column of the TV tower, dominating the right side of the picture like something that has landed from outer space, assures us that time has indeed marched on. The pedestrians in both of these pictures are all from the original era: the men (they are all men) wear clothes that, while not utterly Victorian, do not quite look like ours, and they stand next to vehicles—an open-topped car, some old-style double-decker buses—that have long since been retired. These people are just going about their normal lives, it seems, and only a few snatches of modern-day color and the faint glimpses of some as-yet-unbuilt buildings suggest that the world as they knew it is about to come to an end.

Wesely clearly knows his city and its history through and through; he can actually visualize its past when he looks at its present. Many of my Berlin friends have reported similar experiences themselves—a kind of palimpsest, in which the city as they used to know it is overlaid by the one before their eyes. But no one else, to my knowledge, has made that sense of doubleness, of constantly teetering on the brink between present and past, as viscerally accessible as Wesely has. Even his remarkable achievement, though, will someday be swallowed up by history itself. That is the thing about “now,” especially in an ever-changing city like Berlin: it is always temporary. Eventually Wesely’s 2023 will become part of the city’s past, just as my or your 2024 or 2025 or 2026 will. All of our visions of this city are always teetering, always momentary, because the only permanent thing about Berlin—as its 1929 inhabitant Joseph Roth was astute enough to observe—is its constant mutability.

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Bonding with the Audience

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

I have loved the Danish String Quartet ever since I first started listening to them, and I’ve already written about them once or twice in The Threepenny Review, as well as many times on this blog. I have no trouble remembering, between one concert and the next, how endearing these four guys are. And I never forget about their great musicianship, because I listen to their albums (particularly the recent Prism series) frequently and happily. But what always surprises me anew, whenever I attend one of their live shows, is how intense the bond is between them and their audience. I am apparently not the only one who loves them, and that becomes patently obvious every time.

Last night’s performance at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was a typically wonderful example. On this occasion, and in fact for this whole tour of their fourth Doppelgänger concert, they were joined by the excellent Finnish cellis Johannes Rostamo, who fit right in, as if he had been playing with them forever. They needed the extra cello because, for this version of the multi-year Doppelgänger project (in which they commission living composers to write responses to a work of Schubert’s), they were playing both Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major and Thomas Adès’s tribute to it, a 2024 work which he titled Wreath for Franz Schubert. Bravely, they played the Schubert first and the Adès after the intermission. (Anyone else would have done it in the other order, so as to end with the crowd-pleaser, but the Danes wanted us to appreciate the explicit connection Adès had forged, which we could only do by hearing the Schubert Adagio first.) And then they concluded with two “songs”—one on the program, one as an encore—that they had adapted for string quintet. The first was another piece by Schubert, “Die Nebensonnen” from Winterreise; the second was by Carl Nielsen, a Danish composer whose work often supplies their encores.

Aside from the programming itself, what was typically DSQ was the friendly, relaxed, companionable way they spoke to the audience at various points during the concert. To begin with, the violist Asbbjørn Nørgaard picked up a microphone that was lying around the stage and welcomed us all to Schubert’s String Quartet. He managed to describe it as a “huge” piece of music in a way that would have appealed to both veteran chamber-music attenders and complete novices, and though I doubt there were any complete novices in this audience, it was definitely a different kind of crowd from the usual Zankel/Carnegie regulars. For one thing, the age level seemed lower; for another, there were a lot of warm, relaxed chuckles in response to Nørgaard’s comments; and at the intermission, conversations among the small groups seemed much livelier than usual. It could be that a lot of these audience members already knew each other (I knew two or three people myself, aside from the one I brought along). But it could also be that this particular performance of the Schubert Quintet was so noteworthy, so stimulating, that people simply couldn’t stop talking about it.

It’s hard to pinpoint what the DSQ did to make that piece their own, but it was audible to everyone who had ever heard it played before. They slowed it down a bit, taking nearly a full hour rather than the usual 48 minutes, and they created a number of dramatic pauses, sometimes within short passages. Their dynamic range, from near-silent pianissimo to full-hearted fortissimo, was notable, and sometimes practically instantaneous. (It was also totally suited to the musical work, as their little discernments and reinventions always are.) Their delight in the danceable rhythms, especially in the final Allegretto movement, was palpable. And they were so united in their playing that at times the five of them felt like a single organism designed for the production of music. I especially loved the way the two violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Øland, turned their heads toward each other when playing certain repeated chords, as if to say: “Everyone else tries to jazz these bars up rhythmically and make them seem syncopated, but we know they are supposed to be Amishly plain in their repetition, and that’s how we’re going to do it.”

I’m still not sure what I thought of the Thomas Adès piece, but I loved Frederik Øland’s introduction to it. Like Nørgaard, he spoke to the expert and the newcomer alike, commenting that we maybe already knew how difficult Adès’s work could be, and that they themselves, waiting for the commission to arrive in the mail, were “excited but also a bit scared.” He charmingly took us through the things Adès had told them about how the piece was constructed, and he named each player in the group (by first name, as if we were all good friends, which is how we felt by now) when he described how their seemingly simple parts were interrelated. He described the piece as “meditative,” and that’s exactly what it was: a series of similar though never identical measures that had a subtle start and an even more subtle, though definite, finish.

The encore was introduced by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, and like the other two, he thanked us for welcoming the DSQ to Carnegie Hall—as if it were our doing, somehow, that they had been invited back. He promised they would return with the Doppelgänger I concert next year: “We owe you a concert,” he explained, describing how the pandemic had canceled their first try. He also said what a gift it had been playing with Johannes, and we all gave the blushing cellist an extra round of applause. And then he led into the Nielsen encore by noting that although “Schubert was the king of song, we have a Danish composer who was not too shabby.” The familiar tone, the idiomatic yet slightly accent-tinged English, the whole lovely way in which these guys sought to bring us into their circle, was a joy to behold—not because they needed such speech to enhance their already great performances, but because it was an especially generous, pleasure-giving thing to do.

I have seen them communicate with the audience like this in every concert of theirs I’ve ever attended, but I’ve only been to their American shows. Next month I’ll get to hear them at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, and I’m wondering what that will be like. Will they speak in German, or will they assume that Berlin’s classical music audience understands English? And will they be able to create the same sense of warm envelopment that their fans in America so clearly feel? I am very curious to find out.

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Watching Christian Tetzlaff Dance

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

Of course, I am listening to him play as well. What would be the point, otherwise, in attending live concerts by my favorite violinist, which I do every time he and I end up in the same place? This April, luckily for me, that will happen three times in all: once last Saturday, at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, and twice toward the end of the month, when I will hear him at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, currently Tetzlaff’s hometown.

The April 6 concert at Zankel paired him with the excellent (and also Berlin-based) pianist Kirill Gerstein, in an evening of pieces by Thomas Ades, Bela Bartok, Johannes Brahms, Leos Janacek, and Gyorgy Kurtag. All except the Bartok and Brahms were short—the Kurtag, which consisted of three pieces, was only seven minutes in total—and all except the Brahms probably counted as some kind of strenuous modernism, though the Ades was sufficiently tuneful (as he often is) to seem to evade this category. About two-thirds of the audience, I would guess, were completely delighted with the program; another quarter or more accepted it with intermittent grumbles, coughs, or bored page-turnings; two or three people actually left during the performance. As I watched them disappear, I thought of Shostakovich’s instructions to the musicians who performed his final, difficult, incredibly beautiful string quartet: “Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” In other words, I took the occasional manifestations of audience resentment as a compliment to Tetzlaff’s and Gerstein’s unerring commitment to the composers’ own rigor.

For me, even the most hard-to-penetrate pieces become comprehensible in Tetzlaff’s hands, because his hands are not the only thing moving in his performances. This is a violinist who unaffectedly adopts the swaying body, bending knees, nodding head, and lifted eyebrows of a small-town klezmer musician. Even as his right arm draws the bow across the strings—sometimes in surprising, near-silent delicacy, at other times with powerful, percussive emphasis—while his left travels up and down the violin’s neck with precision and speed, the rest of him is in almost constant motion. This is not the nervousness of a tapped foot or a juddering knee; it is a constant, probably unconscious, but extremely useful guide to what is taking place, moment by moment, in the music. Rising on his toes as the musical line goes up in tone or in volume, bending at the waist as he plays a particularly harsh chord, dancing from side to side when the rhythm becomes especially lively, Tetzlaff defines for us in a measure-by-measure way what is happening in the composition he is playing. The fact that he is not doing this on purpose, as some kind of pedagogical effort, makes it all the more effective, for the motions clearly come from inside him, just as the music seems to be doing. Whether he is playing melodious Brahms or cacophonous Bartok, the composer’s spirit appears to infuse Tetzlaff’s every move, manifesting itself physically before our eyes even as he enables it to reach our ears.

In its original order, the program would have started with the more accessible works (the brief, lovely, at times pained or mournful Janacek Violin Sonata, and then the dramatically enveloping Brahms Sonata No. 3 in D Minor), and then been followed after the intermission by the more challenging ones: the Ades (a relatively new suite based on his opera The Tempest), the Kurtag Tre Pezzi, and the Bartok Violin Sonata No. 2. It’s true that the twenty-minute Bartok piece, with its frequently jarring antagonisms leading into its extraordinarily moving, blending-into-silence ending, would have made a lovely close to the program. But the masterful Brahms work, one of the towering accomplishments of the violin-and-piano repertoire, made an even better one. So the musicians rearranged things at the last minute to give us the Janacek first—just to dip our toes in the water—and then the chillier Kurtag and Bartok. That left only Ades to accompany Brahms in the second half, which worked well, because it helped emphasize the Englishman’s tuneful side. In fact, I thought this spinoff suite gave us more emotional access to Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda than the whole opera had when I heard it a number of years ago; and Gerstein and Tetzlaff, both previous Ades collaborators, did full justice to it.

The very first time I heard Christian Tetzlaff, he was playing Brahms: the Violin Concerto, which he performed nearly twenty years ago with a visiting orchestra, also in Carnegie Hall. I remember being completely blown away by the power of this young, Pierrot-looking violinist, who even then used his swaying body and his lifting eyebrows to communicate the music. Since then I have heard him doing Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, Kurt Weill, you name it, in a variety of venues across Europe and America, and he is always great. As a live concert experience, nothing can beat hearing him perform all the Bach partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied violin in a single afternoon and evening; I have heard it twice, and if you ever have the chance, you should grab it. But for pure listening pleasure, I often find myself returning to his recording of the Brahms and Joachim violin concertos. This latest performance at Zankel seemed to summon up both of those pieces (the Brahms Sonata No. 3 was actually written for Joseph Joachim, who was better known as a violinist than as a composer); and as I listened to it, I found myself relaxing into its rhythms, sinking into the pleasure that music at its most welcoming can bring. Gerstein and Tetzlaff continued the mood in their encore, a delightful snippet of Beethoven, and as I sat back happily in my seat after the requisite (but in this case heartily meant) standing ovation, I thought: “I wish these two could just keep playing for me all evening.”

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Looking at Love Again

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to get another glimpse of Mark Morris’s delightful tribute to Burt Bacharach songs, The Look of Love, which was playing for four days at BAM. This was actually my third encounter with the piece, since I managed to see it twice last February when it appeared at Cal Performances in Berkeley. I wrote about this hour-long dance in some detail then, so this time I am going to focus on what struck me belatedly—always a useful exercise with Morris’s work, which, as I have learned, stands up to numerous revisits over the years.

When I rewatch something as lengthy and complicated as, say, The Hard Nut—Morris’s brilliant and beautiful take on The Nutcracker—I am not surprised to notice new things, because one’s focus cannot be everywhere onstage at once, and something unusual is often going on in the corners. Still, I always find myself asking the choreographer afterward, “Didn’t you change bits of that? For instance, was there always a woman bursting into tears at the party scene?” And he always says to me (and I do mean always), “I haven’t changed a thing.” So I have learned to take him at his word.

With a shorter, simpler piece like The Look of Love, you would think it would be easier to notice everything the first time. But no: there are still odd corners where someone is doing something different from everyone else, small and nearly hidden gestures that can have large effects. And there are complexities even within the seeming simplicity. The dance to “Walk On By,” for instance, struck me now as one of Morris’s best. Last time, by comparing it in my mind to his truly masterful walking dance in L’Allegro, I failed to give it the full credit it deserved on its own. This time I saw that the subtle numerical deployment of the ten dancers—the way the successive waves of walkers met in fives and then fours and finally threes—gave the work a deeper, more subconsciously satisfying layer; and the interruption of the walking patterns with occasional flights of leaping dance (how had I failed to notice that?) was also an intense pleasure. I still love the segment set to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” the best, I think—nothing can match those syncopated rhythms and semi-comical, semi-earnest gestures—but “Walk On By” has now risen to near the top of my favorites list.

I noticed the music more this time—Ethan Iverson’s elegant piano, Marcy Harriell’s terrific voice—but perhaps that is to be expected, since I was relatively ignorant about Bacharach’s oeuvre before Morris decided to focus on it. And I noticed how beautifully the dancers all performed this time. Some of them are new to the company since I last saw it, and yet they all had the Mark Morris style down, to the point where they actually seemed to be dancing with enjoyment (something you never see in ballet, and rarely enough in modern dance). But maybe what I noticed most is that, very much like the songs it is based on, this is a successful work of art built around the idea of love. That is a harder thing to do than you might think. Every day during submissions season at The Threepenny Review, I go through dozens and dozens of horrible poems and stories about love; it has gotten to the point where, if I see the word love in the title or the first line, I cringe. Very few people can make anything new and surprising out of this hackneyed, repetitive, universal experience. But Mark Morris and Burt Bacharach, especially when combined, can.

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Youth and Age

Posted on March 18, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

It’s always great to return to Carnegie Hall with a bang, and I certainly got that thrill last week. I was able to attend two amazing concerts with two days of each other, each exemplifying something completely different about the virtues of musical performance.

First up, on Wednesday, was the young Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki, whom I had discovered for myself in Berlin about five years ago. That was a purely chance encounter—he was substituting for some ailing eminence in a piano concerto at the Konzerthaus, and I bought the ticket at the last minute—and I was blown away, as was the rest of the discerning, normally reticent Berlin audience. When Lisiecki (who must have been all of 23 at the time) finished his undemonstrative but wonderful performance, we all howled and stamped our approval. So when I heard he would be holding the stage of Stern Hall all by himself on March 13, I hastened to get a ticket.

It was the kind of program only a young man would put together. The first half consisted of fifteen preludes by various different hands, some as short as sixty seconds and none lasting longer than eleven minutes. In quick succession, without pausing to allow for any applause, he gave us pieces by Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Szymanowski, Messiaen, and Gorecki—all without any musical score in front of him, and all rendered beautifully. He hadn’t said anything about his attacca approach beforehand, but he didn’t need to, because his body language was enough to keep us quiet and attentive throughout. Not a whisper or a page-flutter could be heard in the packed hall; as far as I could see, not a head moved from its focus on the lone figure on the stage. I felt as if we were all hiding in a forest, watching and listening to some gorgeous rare bird that might fly away if we moved a muscle. The audience members were so stunned by Lisiecki’s performance that they forgot to give a standing ovation at the end of the first half, something they normally do just to get out of their seats. But the applause, when it finally came, was thunderous.

The second half was equally thrilling in a different way: it consisted entirely of Chopin’s Twenty-Four Preludes (Opus 28), where the composer pays a brief and enchanting visit to every major and minor key. This gave Lisiecki a chance to show his range within a single composer’s work, and I have to say, he managed to enlarge my feeling for Chopin to an extent I would not have thought possible. Every available emotion seem to be covered in these twenty-four little pieces, and the way they differed, rhythmically and dynamically, showcased Lisiecki’s skill without ever making it seem like mere virtuosity. Throughout, his manner was entirely unmannered; his huge talent was gracefully and modestly worn, so much so that it was a pleasure to watch him as well as hear him. This time the audience was prepared, and this time we did stand (and howl, and applaud until our hands hurt). And Jan Lisiecki responded in just the way a young man should, with an encore that was at once witty and touching: a Romance, because, as he said, “what should follow all these preludes but Love?”

Neither Mitsuko Uchida nor Mark Padmore is what I would call old. As performers they are still in their prime, and their evident vigor and grace as human beings makes them seem ageless. But they bring to Schubert’s Winterreise, which they performed together last Friday night in Zankel Hall, the kind of experience and knowledge that can only be acquired through years of living. Poor Schubert, who died at the age of 31, never got to have a “late style” in the sense that, say, Beethoven or Shostakovich did. But Uchida and Padmore kindly gave him one in their March 15 concert, and I was grateful to witness it.   

Partly, it was a matter of pacing. Like Glenn Gould in his final recording of the Goldberg Variations, the pair slowed things down, even giving us pauses—not just between the songs, but also within them. To me, this was particularly apparent in Uchida’s piano-playing, as if it were she, and not the tenor, who had willfully decided to make each note linger in our minds as long as possible. Yet Padmore matched her in gravity and honesty, managing to bring a new interpretation to this piece he has done so many times before. The songs were less fluid and more wrenching; one could sense a certain harshness behind them, as if they had been pulled up with great effort from terrifying abysses of feeling. In this sense, the journey was even more wintry than usual: the narrator’s character had deepened and darkened, to the point where he was reflecting at a distance on his own illusions and disillusions. I found the whole seventy-five-minute performance extraordinarily moving, and I think everyone around me did too.

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The Italians and Schubert

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

About fifteen years ago, when I was engaged in writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets, I interviewed one of the Emerson Quartet violinists, Eugene Drucker, about the intense impact those works had on the audience. “When we put a Shostakovich quartet on a mixed program,” he told me, “no matter whether we put it before the intermission or at the end, when people come backstage, what they want to talk about is the Shostakovich. This happens even if we’re also playing something equally great, like Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden.’” What struck me at the time, and what I emphasized in my book, was how emotionally powerful the Shostakovich quartets evidently were. Still, over the years I found myself imagining the thrill of listening to two such amazing pieces—the Schubert and, say, Shostakovich’s Eighth—in a single concert. How great would that be?

So my Pavlovian response, when these very pieces appeared on a CMS program last Friday, was instantly to grab tickets. I had no prior acquaintance with the Quartetto di Cremona, the featured group, but their reputation was good, so I figured it wasn’t much of a risk. And the addition of a single brief contemporary work to the program—Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae for String Quartet—also suited me, since I figured that the congenially harmonic Golijov would offer a nice appetizer to the two meatier works. I do not mean to demean Golijov by saying this: his 2002 piece, though offering its own distinct pleasures, could never have aspired to reach the depths of the other two. But then, practically nothing written for string quartet, whether in this century or in Shostakovich’s or Schubert’s, would have stood up to that competition.

The Quartetto di Cremona’s ordering of the program—first the twenty-minute Shostakovich, next the twelve-minute Golijov, and then, after the intermission, the forty-minute Schubert—made sense in terms of timing, but it struck me as slightly perverse. With my innate bias toward Shostakovich, I expected to like the Eighth Quartet the best and to feel that everything went downhill after that. Talking to my friends at the intermission, I was still vociferously defending my Russian favorite and wondering why he couldn’t have appeared last. His emphatic, severely anxious, but also consciously self-dramatizing despair (embodied in both the strong three-beat “knocks” and his relentless repetition of the D-S-C-H theme) combined with shreds of his innate wit (those dance-of-death triplets in the middle section, for instance) to make his 1960 quartet a searing experience that was bound to burn up everything else in its vicinity. I also commented that the Italians seemed a somber group. Their playing, I agreed, was terrific, but their faces never cracked the slightest glimmer of smile, even during the uproarious applause.

As it turned out, I had to eat all those words in the second half. Never have I heard Schubert’s Fourteenth Quartet played better. In fact, never have I heard any Schubert quartet played better than this one was done by the Quartetto di Cremona on Friday, March 8, at Alice Tully Hall. It was not that the Shostakovich faded away; I was glad to have heard it live, as I am always glad whenever it appears in my life. But the Quartetto’s rendering of the Schubert was so intense, so varied, so vigorous and yet so attentive to nuance, as to leave me stunned.

My first glimmerings of how great it would be appeared as early as the opening Allegro, when I watched the face of the first violinist, Cristiano Gualco, and saw the edges of his mouth tugging upward in an involuntary smile. Gualco was facing my direction, so I couldn’t see the other countenances as clearly, but it was obvious from their playing that Paolo Andreaoli, Simone Gramaglia, and Giovanni Scaglione had also reached the moment they were waiting for. They loved this quartet. They treasured its every move from speed to slowness, loud voices to soft ones; they savored every repetition with a difference. In the course of their emphatic bowings, they lost horsehairs all over the stage, but nothing could stop the onward flow. It was as if they had been born to play this music. It spoke to them, and through it they spoke to us.

At the quiet, solemn end of the Shostakovich, the four players had held their final position, still and silent, for a noticeably lengthy time before they lowered their arms and allowed us to applaud; this is what the Eighth Quartet demands, and they were listening to it. But when they reached the close of the Schubert’s final Presto segment, they threw up their arms in joy, and we responded accordingly. If I had been invited backstage afterward (and Gramaglia’s charming introduction to the Puccini encore made me wish I had been), it was the Schubert I would have wanted to talk about.

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Rainy Days and Live Music

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

January was a dry spell—not so much in terms of the California winter rains (we had the normal level) but in terms of live concerts I could attend. I wasted away at home, watching endless Netflix serials, some of which were worth recommending (for instance, The Golden Hour, a Dutch police procedural) but most of which were not.

Then, this past weekend, I was treated to two excellent concerts in a row. Unfortunately, it was also a weekend of heavy, threatening rain and wind, so to the usual “It’s great to get out of the house” was added an unusual “But will I make it home again?” In both cases—to the San Francisco Symphony concert in Davies Hall, and to the much closer Cal Performances concert in Berkeley—I had to drive rather than walk or take public transportation. Surprisingly, I was able to park close enough both times to avoid getting drenched. Unsurprisingly, the best thing on each program was a Beethoven piece.

I went to Saturday night’s San Francisco Symphony concert in part for the attractive program (Schubert’s Sixth combined with Beethoven’s Seventh), but also because it featured a conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who was new to me. He turns out to be far from new to conducting: an eminent, grey-haired Finn, Saraste, who now heads up the Helsinki Philharmonic, is a veteran of guest-conducting and regular-conducting positions worldwide. His manner was brisk and effective, with clear distinctions between the parts of the music that were supposed to be sharp and angular (jagged, cutting hand gestures) and the parts that were more flowing and smooth (sweeping, curling hand gestures); he rarely ascended, or descended, to a full-body sway, but he did bend his knees a few times when he was really swept away by the music. His Schubert, I would say, was fine but no more. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was thrilling. Admittedly, the Seventh Symphony is one of the great musical works of all time, but even it can be ruined. (I saw Loren Maazel ruin it once.) In this instance, Sarastre drew the absolute best out of the San Francisco players, and it was a complete delight to hear them perform.

Sunday afternoon’s concert was something else entirely. Held in Hertz Hall, the chamber-music venue on the UC Berkeley campus, it featured a string quartet, the Attacca Quartet, that I’d heard of but never seen live. The first half of the program was a smorgasbord of pieces that bore a family resemblance to each other (tuneful modernism, I guess you’d call it) and that were mostly snippets from longer works, strung together and performed “attacca”—that is, without breaks in between. So we got excerpts from Caroline Shaw’s Three Essays and The Evergreen (both 2022 compositions), a segment from Paul Wiancko’s 2020 Benkei’s Standing Death, a Radiohead song adapted for string quartet by Attacca’s violist, and one movement of Ravel’s marvelous string quartet from 1903. I was relieved when I heard the Ravel—not only because it was the only thing I recognized on the program, but also because the Attacca players performed it so gorgeously. This, I thought, was a good sign. It signaled that the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Beethoven’s Opus 131, would be worth hearing.

That, it turned out, was an understatement. With their ear for the unexpected and the revelatory, the Attacca Quartet made something new of this great Beethoven work, even as they also played it exactly as written. I listen to various recordings of it all the time, and none of what they did jarred my ear; they did not depart noticeably from the tradition. Yet in tiny ways (varying the volume on repeats, for instance, or emphasizing the rhythmic shifts) they managed to imprint their own technical expertise on the venerable quartet. They showed us—as if anyone still needs showing—exactly how much of a “modern” composer Beethoven was in those late, great quartets, and at the same time they remained completely true to his unsurpassable ear for melody. The performance was moving and thrilling, and it earned its uproarious standing ovation—followed by a brief and delightful encore of a John Adams snippet: a tip of the hat, perhaps, to our local musical hero. All in all, it was a concert well worth braving the storm for.

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Delirious Pleasure

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

In most years—and this one was no exception—my favorite concert of the year is the appearance at Carnegie Hall of Harry Bicket and his English Concert, performing yet another Handel opera or oratorio. Last Sunday it was Rodelinda, which happens to be one of the operas I play on my devices all the time. And it turns out that I can even stream a 2021 English Concert version these days, featuring at least two of the stars, Lucy Crowe and Iestyn Davies, who appeared in this December’s Carnegie concert.

But there is absolutely no comparison between listening to this reduced version at home and hearing the real thing, live, at Carnegie Hall. Part of the enhancement is visual: although these are concert versions rather than fully staged operas, the singers (under Harry Bicket’s direction, I presume) do their best to take on the characters and gestures of their parts. A touch on the arm here, an embrace there, an angry or wistful or regretful expression—these are enough to give life to the figures of Rodelinda and her husband Bertarido, the usurping king Grimoaldo and his evil advisor Garibaldo, the loyal servant Unulfo and the strangely mixed figure of Eduige. It’s also fun to watch the musicians themselves: the two harpsichords facing each other (one manned by Harry Bicket himself), the four terrific wind-instrument players in the back row, the huge theorbo up front, and all the other talented and essential strings. For an opera company, it is a relatively small group of instrumentalists and singers, but they pack a wallop far beyond their size.

Of course, the main benefit of hearing it live is auditory, and Carnegie Hall is the perfect setting for that. This was clear to all of us the minute the overture was over. To hear Lucy Crowe’s pearly soprano beam out across the seats and upward through the successive balconies—a gem of a voice, with perfect diction and occasional moments of wild expressiveness, never pushed too hard, never unmusical—was a delight of the first order. And to hear it in combination with Iestyn Davies’ golden countertenor (which we finally got to do at the end of the second act: Handel always makes us wait for a combination of voices) was to hear both singers at their very best. Bicket always gets good people for the solo parts, but in this instance he exceeded even his usual brief, for there was not a singer onstage who was less than stellar. The other countertenor, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, was tender and delicately rich. The bass-baritone, Brandon Cedel, had that rare deep voice that could hit all the notes perfectly and boom out loudly (and he had a lovely semi-comic manner as well, which suited his role as the truth-telling bad guy in the plot). Eric Ferring carried his heavy tenor role with dignity and grace. And Christine Rice was a wonderful Eduige, her mellow mezzo-soprano placing her midway between the high-voiced heroic characters and the lower-voiced villains.

But just as you can’t get a true sense of any opera from a mere recording, my mere assertion of how great this performance was cannot begin to duplicate for you the actual experience of being there. So I have just one piece of advice. If you are anywhere near Carnegie Hall next time the English Concert and Co. come around with one of their Handel operas, do yourself a favor and buy a ticket. You will thank me, and more to the point, you will thank them for the deep, irreplaceable, long-lasting pleasure.

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Some Notes for Peace

Posted on November 18, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

Like everybody else, New Yorkers are feeling pretty terrible these days. It was with the hope of forgetting about the world’s problems, at least for a couple of hours, that I attended last week’s performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at Geffen Hall. I mean, what could be more soothing and familiar and at the same time stirring and rewarding, if it is done right?  And what were the chances that the New York Philharmonic would do it wrong?

As it turned out, zero. Under the baton of the lively and charmingly fuzzy-looking guest conductor, Stéphane Denève, the orchestra’s players were excellent, allowing the dynamics of the piece to range, as they must, from the forceful to the subdued. But the real hero of the evening was a soloist I’d never heard if before, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. He wielded his 1741 Guarneri “del Gesu”—on longterm loan to him from the Royal Danish Theatre—as if he’d been born with it in his hands, and though his stance was a bit more stolid than I am used to in my favorite violinists, his playing was a fluid as one could wish. It was a delight to hear him, and to hear the orchestra backing him up so well; he and they appeared to get along like a house on fire.

When he came out after the fourth round of applause to play an encore, he spoke to us first, thanking us for our enthusiasm and announcing he would now play a short Bach partita. I cannot reproduce his words exactly, but I know they contained the words “reflection” and “dialogue,” and somehow managed to allude to the disaster in the Middle East without overtly saying so. We all got the point, and a large portion of the audience applauded his words as well as the beautiful piece that followed them.

Later, on the subway home, I read the program note about Szeps-Znaider and also Googled him on my phone. It turns out he was born in 1975, in Copenhagen, to a Polish-Israeli father and a Danish Jewish mother. The timing suggests to me that his father was one of those Polish Jews (I knew several in my youth) who fled from Poland’s wave of anti-semitism in the late 1960s. In any case, Nikolaj was brought up in Denmark but now plays all over the world, including as a violinist and conductor with orchestras in Singapore and France. One of his numerous concerts this season will be an appearance at Wigmore Hall with someone he describes as his “longtime collaborator,” the pianist Saleem Ashkar. So clearly this is a guy who is used to reaching across the aisle.

Sitting in my seat at Geffen Hall, and thinking back on those moments in the week since then, I felt extremely grateful to Szeps-Znaider for sharing his cosmopolitan, humane vision with the rest of us. As much as the gorgeous music, it was what I desperately needed.

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