Two Surprises

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

Though I’ve had some surprises from Music@Menlo in the past (most notably when they introduced the Danish String Quartet on these shores), I find myself attending their concerts mainly to have my high expectations fulfilled. Predictably excellent performances of good chamber music programs are not something to be sniffed at, and these summer festivals—run every year in Menlo Park by the folks who also run CMS in New York—almost always fit that bill.

So I had no ambitions beyond the usual pleasure-seeking ones when I traveled down the Peninsula last Sunday to hear Concert Program III, entitled “From the Heart.” Though it was part of a summer season devoted to Beethoven, there was no Beethoven on this program: just Schubert, Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and a name I had never heard before, Louise Farrenc. The composers sounded fine, but the draw for me lay in the roster of performing musicians—especially Nicholas Canellakis, a terrific cellist whose career I’ve followed since its very beginnings, a couple of decades ago.

In the event, Canellakis was as entrancing as always, and so were his fellow players in the Farrenc piano quintet: Orli Shaham on piano, Arnaud Sussmann on violin, Matthew Lipman on viola, and Anthony Manzo on bass. They played as if they had been playing together forever, not as if they had simply gathered for this one piece; and they played the music itself as if they had known it all their lives, which they couldn’t have done, because Farrenc is not a composer any of them would have heard of in their conservatory days. This nineteenth-century Frenchwoman had no doubt been dug up from the archives as part of the current desperate search for female composers, and this time someone managed to strike gold.

That was the first surprise: how absolutely wonderful Farrenc’s 1839 Quintet in A minor was. I won’t say it rivaled Shostakovich’s or Brahms’s or Schubert’s piano quintets, but it came pretty damn close. Every movement of the half-hour piece brought something exciting and new, especially in the interplay among the musicians. It was never merely pretty (the way, I’m afraid, the Schubert string trio that opened the program was); there was something somber even behind the liveliest passages, and something witty behind the pensive bits. Because I’d never heard it before in my life, I had trouble grasping it fully, but I was gripped by it and thrilled to be hearing it.

The Farrenc was played right before the intermission, and during the pause I wondered why it hadn’t been placed last, since it was such an obvious hit. But then I got my answer. Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1, the final piece on the program, was the second surprise of the day.

You wouldn’t think that such an old chestnut could surprise anyone anymore—especially me, who listens to it repeatedly in the marvelous Beaux Arts Trio version. But I hope the beloved ghost of Menahem Pressler will not be rattled if I say that this live rendering was even better than my favorite recording. Part of the credit goes to the sensitive pianist, Juho Pohjonen, and the eloquent cellist, David Requiro, both of whom I’ve heard at CMS or Music@Menlo before. But a great deal of the effect, and the primary source of my surprise, lay in the performance of the violinist, Francisco Fullana. A young Spaniard with degrees from Juilliard and USC and prizes from all over the world, he plays with a fiery intensity that makes itself visible throughout his whole body (including in his hilariously glittery shoes). His large hands—in fact, his whole large person and personality—seemed to dwarf the borrowed 1735 Guarneri instrument he plays, even as they brought forth the most beautiful, tender, ecstatic notes from it. It was almost as exciting to watch him play as it was to hear him. There is a special feeling you get when you first hear a great musician in performance, especially if you are not expecting it, and that is what happened to me on Sunday with Fullana. I can’t wait to see and hear what he does next.

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Igor Levit in San Francisco

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

For those of us in the Bay Area who care about classical music, the last two weeks have mainly been taken up with Igor Levit’s residency at the San Francisco Symphony. I wrote about this marvelous pianist last fall, after hearing him perform all twenty-four of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues in one Carnegie evening, and if you’ve read that wildly enthusiastic post, you’ll be unsurprised to learn how eagerly I attended all four of the concerts he gave at San Francisco’s Davies Hall.

The first, and in some ways the most straightforwardly delightful, was a Friday night concert in which Esa-Pekka Salonen (who is himself a great and ongoing gift to the San Francisco Symphony) conducted two Beethoven pieces: the Piano Concerto No. 5, in which Igor Levit was the soloist, and the much-loved Eroica symphony, No. 3. The piano concerto came first, and Levit’s mastery of the music was a pleasure to behold. Playing without a score, he seemed especially alert to what the other musicians were doing and feeling, so that his interactions with the orchestra were both seamless and communicative. As for his own solo passages, they ranged from the delicately near-silent to the thrillingly emphatic—never in an idiosyncratic or perverse way, but in a manner that seemed utterly suited to Beethoven’s intentions.  Even Levit’s bodily gestures (his turns of the head to look around, his relaxed way of keeping the rhythm with hands, arms, and even legs) suggested that this collaboration was a pleasure to him as well as to his fellow performers. Afterwards, and just before the intermission, he responded to the audience’s repeated ovations by giving us a lovely little encore of uncharacteristically tuneful Shostakovich (the Waltz Scherzo, as it turned out, from the Ballet Suite No. 1). So by the time we got to the program’s second half, even the beautifully played Eroica symphony felt a bit like elegant wallpaper: that is, something you were glad to have surrounding you, but not a revelation in the same way Levit’s Emperor concerto was.

That Sunday I went back to hear Levit in a chamber music concert, in which he joined several string players from the San Francisco Symphony in a well-thought-out program. I was shocked by how poorly attended it was, compared to the Beethoven — but then, chamber music almost always draws a smaller crowd than symphonies, and since Davies sadly lacks a chamber-music auditorium, the SFS is forced to hold these more intimate concerts in the large hall. In the event, the concert was just as rewarding as the Friday night had been, with three unusual string pieces (Frank Bridge’s 1912 Lament, and Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz and Emily’s Reel from the 1990s) played by Symphony musicians. This turned out to be the perfect set-up for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, which formed the second half of the concert. I have loved this piece since the very first time I heard it (with Anne-Marie McDermott at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, almost twenty years ago), and it was even better this time, in Levit’s gracefully collaborative, distinctly enunciated performance. In a way that is not at all easy to do, the pianist managed to capture both Shostakovich’s appealing wit and the composer’s dark-tinged anxiety (the concerto dates from 1940, shortly after Stalin’s terrifying critique of Shostakovich, and just at the beginning of the war). Of the four SFS musicians who accompanied Levit in this adventure, Melissa Kleinbart on the first violin and Amos Yang on the cello were particular standouts, though all four were really good.

Then, on the following Saturday. it was time for the big event: Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto in C major, which Igor Levit, with Salonen’s help and support, had dredged up from the archives and brought to life again. Busoni, who lived from 1866 to 1924, was an Italian who settled for much of his life in Berlin. (I have actually seen the plaque on the house where he lived in Viktoria-Luisa-Platz, the same building Billy Wilder was to occupy a few years after Busoni’s death.) It took him three years, from 1901 to 1904, to write his Opus 39: a fiendish piano concerto, seventy-five minutes long, with a piano part so fast and complicated that few people have ever been able to play it.

This concerto, I have to say, is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. Five movements long, it ends with a choral passage in German, sung by a male chorus and apparently representing “mysticism in nature.” But even before then it does not sound anything like your usual piano concerto. The speed at which Levit had to play his assigned notes was so extreme that his page-turner (whom he needed in this case to handle the paper score) often had to get out of his seat every minute or so to turn the page. The music was incredibly loud at times, and with the combination of drums from the orchestra and repeated pounding chords on the piano, it was also incredibly percussive. Which is not to say that it lacked melody: there were sustained harmonious passages that, while not exactly hummable, evoked a sense of something tunefully familiar. These could never be pinned down, though, because as soon as Busoni had accomplished one new thing with the orchestra and the piano, he was on to the next. If I had simply heard it without being prepared in any way, I would not have been able to say whether this concerto was composed in 1812, 2012, or somewhere in between; the musical forms it drew on could have arisen any time in those two centuries, but they were not forms I have heard from anyone else. The whole piece struck me as a genetic “sport”—an evolutionary dead end, a one-of-a-kind development that took things as far as they could go and left nothing for followers to do. Given the difficulty of the piano’s role (and, I imagine, even the orchestra’s), it was no surprise to find that the work has lain fallow for most of the many decades since its composition. Still, in Levit’s hands it was continually exciting—not for a single second was I bored—and we in the audience all felt privileged to witness its revival, even if we did not always know what to make of it.

I thought fondly back to the Busoni evening as I listened to the fourth concert in Levit’s series, a recital that began with Brahms’s Six Choral Preludes and ended with Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, with pieces by jazz pianist Fred Hersch and a piano adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Prelude in between. There was a connection between the two concerts, not just in the fact that Busoni had arranged the Brahms, but also in the semi-Wagnerian adventurousness that I only now realized I had heard in the Busoni. But the Liszt, for me, was a trial: lots of virtuosity, lots of heavy emphasis alternating with hesitant thoughtfulness on the piano keys, but with none of the payback that had been afforded in the case of Beethoven, Shostakovich, and (to a lesser extent) Busoni.

It was a rather odd way for Levit to choose to end what had been an eye-opening, utterly thrilling residency. But I was clearly in the minority in my reaction, because the crowd that attended Tuesday’s recital once again roared to its feet at the concert’s end, just as it had for the Beethoven and the Busoni.  That avidly applauding, bravo-screaming San Francisco audience seemed, in a way, like a slavering beast—as if Igor Levit were a delicious morsel meant to feed his fans’ all-consuming hunger, if only they could get close enough to swallow him. I found it almost frightening, how much they adored him…even if, throughout most of his residency, I also felt that way myself.

 

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Glorious Shostakovich

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

I think the Fourth Symphony—which Shostakovich wrote after being castigated by Stalin for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and which as a result was pulled from its 1936 premiere and not performed until after Stalin’s death—might be my favorite of his symphonies. Certainly it is the first one I ever heard live, at a Russian performance in 2003, and I’ve loved it since then. But not until this April, when Vladimir Jurowski and his Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin played the Fourth on their program at the Philharmonie, did it move me so deeply that it left me trembling.

This had something to do (as usual) with the way the brilliant Jurowski had designed the evening’s program. He started with Beethoven’s Coriolan overture, a rousing piece of music that got us all in the mood, and followed that immediately with a Berlin premiere: a piano concerto, Opus 175, by the exiled Russian composer Elena Firsova, who wrote it in 2020 and saw it performed only once before, at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In Amsterdam as in Berlin, the piano soloist was the marvelous Yefim Bronfman, and I only wish I could have been able to hear him do it twice (as Schönberg recommended we do with all new pieces of music). I felt I was barely taking in the multiple strengths and delicacies of Firsova’s concerto, as it flew off Bronfman’s fingers into the auditorium; all I could gather, that first time, was that she was indeed working in Shostakovich’s tradition of rhythmic complexity and melodic inventiveness. The whole experience was enhanced by the fact that Firsova herself was in the audience: she happened to be seated in the row just behind mine, so that after she had taken her bows, and after the intervening intermission, I got to see her being greeted and saluted by tearful young Russian girls who captured her signature on their programs and her photo in their iPhones. (It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it, when a seventy-something composer can be a culture idol for teenagers.)

Firsova politely, or perhaps eagerly, stayed for the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Shostakovich’s Fourth. What can I say, other than that it was truly astonishing? The musicians responded to Jurowski’s dancing gestures as if they were a single large instrument emanating from his hands; their moments of speeding up and slowing down, of alternating loud blasts with mild, contemplative passages, were perfectly attuned to the demands of the piece. As the final quiet notes dwindled into the nothingness that comes at the end of this great symphony, the audience responded as it generally does if the playing is up to par: with what always seems a very long silence, and then with thunderous applause.

 

If the Fourth is the symphony I love best, the Twelfth may well be my favorite of his string quartets. This is a harder choice, though, because I also love the Second Quartet and the Eighth, the Third and the Fifteenth—and let’s not forget the charming Tenth and the terrific Thirteenth… But enough. The Twelfth is the one where I think he most fully demonstrates his range, going from a difficult, fraught beginning (where the second violin just sits it out for a number of measures) to a full panoply of plaintive melody, agitated rhythm, wise sadness, and dour triumph, all in the course of a half hour.

I was lucky enough to hear the Emerson Quartet play this piece last Sunday in Alice Tully Hall, during one of the final New York performances of their last season as a quartet group. Again, the program was beautifully structured and satisfyingly complete, with Ravel’s lovely quartet to start with, Webern’s Bagatelles as a palate cleanser, Bartok’s No. 2 to end the first act, and a New York premiere by Sarah Kirkland Snider just before the performance of Shostakovich’s Twelfth. Like Firsova, Snider is a worthy inheritor of the Shostakovich tradition, and like Firsova, she took her delighted bows and then stayed to hear the Master’s piece that followed hers.

I am used to the recorded Emerson version of the Twelfth (it is probably the one I played most often, when I was writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets), but even so this performance surprised me. It had something new about it: a kind of passion mixed with longing, a sense of human limits and of the power of music to transcend them. I can’t explain how that works, the way Shostakovich’s music always translates itself directly into emotion, but I know it happens every time the quartets are beautifully played, and this was one of those times.

The Emersons closed their CMS program on Sunday with an encore by George Walker, an eminent Black composer who died in 2018, just as they opened by dedicating the evening to Menachem Pressler, who had died only the day before. Having the Shostakovich bracketed by these two deaths helped bring out his affinity for what is mortal in us—his ever-present habit, at least in the quartets, of addressing our limited time on earth. I am always aware of this when I listen to him, but this time I felt it even more so, and for that I was immensely grateful.

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More Than One Tetzlaff

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

Since Christian Tetzlaff is‚ and has been for decades, my favorite violinist in the whole world, I take every available opportunity to hear him. And this has meant that two or three times I’ve been privileged to hear the Tetzlaff Trio—most recently at the 92nd Street Y, where they played last night.

There are actually only two Tetzlaffs in the trio: Christian on the violin and his sister Tanja on the cello. For many years their excellent third member was the pianist Lars Vogt, with whom they had worked so closely and so long that he almost seemed like a third sibling. But last September Vogt died of cancer, tragically young. On this latest tour, he has been replaced by his student, Kiveli Dörken.

She may not be a full Tetzlaff yet, but Dörken more than held up her end in this concert. Her sound was perhaps a bit too emphatic in the Beethoven that opened the program (Op. 1, No. 3), but even there her skills were obvious and her playing suitably delicate in the quiet parts. By the Dvorak (No. 2, Op. 26), which came second, she had calmed down considerably, and when the trio reached the end of its program—the enchanting Schubert Piano Trio No. 1—her performance could not have been bettered by anyone.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that Schubert piece played more beautifully than I did last night. The accord among the three players was perfect; the way they picked up each other’s themes, alternated their trills and pizzicatos, occasionally joined together in unison, and even left a few momentary silences was a pleasure to behold. Watching the cellist as she intermittently glanced aside at the violinist, I felt that the word “automatic” did not do just to the sibling connection: their shared sense of the music lies deeper than practice or technicality, extending down to some place that’s bred in the bone. What is magical is that the trio allows this close tie to become manifest, and yet still makes room for a third person in its embrace.

As a soloist, Christian Tetzlaff is known for his lightness of touch—he can sometimes play so softly that you feel yourself leaning in to hear the notes—and also for his intense musicality, whereby he seems to be channeling the composer’s own character in every dynamic or rhythmic shift. I have heard him do this with Bach’s challenging partitas and sonatas (twice, in fact, both times at the 92nd Street Y); most recently, I heard him do it in Kurt Weill’s judderingly twentieth-century Concerto for Violin and Wind Instruments, played under the masterful baton of Vladimir Jurowski at Berlin’s Konzerthaus. In other words, he is superb at the full range of the violin’s repertoire. But in the Tetzlaff Trio he has mostly chosen to perform works of the Beethoven-Schubert-Brahms-Dvorak period, an amazing era of just over a century that produced a plethora of great piano trio music.

On Tuesday night we were treated to that period in full, because the encore—a Brahms slow movement—was drawn from a piano trio that had Vogt recorded with the Tetzlaffs back in 2014. This achingly emotional Brahms encore was their explicit tribute to their lost comrade, but the evening’s program as a whole was dedicated to him. Perhaps as a result, the entire concert felt moving and triumphant, joyful and sad all at once, just as the best music should be.

 

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The Look of Love

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

Like Pepperland, the evening-length work set to Beatles songs that Mark Morris created a few years ago, Morris’s new Burt Bacharach production, The Look of Love, is pure pleasure. I went twice when it appeared at Berkeley’s Cal Performances this past weekend, and I admired it even more the second time. In many cases, what had seemed casually fun at first glance turned out to have complexities buried within it.

You don’t have to know Bacharach’s work well to enjoy this piece, though if you are a sentient human living in America in 2023, you no doubt do know some of Bacharach’s songs, even if you don’t know you know them. I myself, a non-listener to radio and an ignoramus about pop music, recognized five of the fourteen songs used in this hour-plus work, and those were the ones I could set a name to; many of the others had a familiar feel, probably because I had been obliviously surrounded by them at some point.

The pleasure starts with that key word “look.” Everything about this production is visually delicious. The colors in Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes—tangerine orange, guava pink, grape purple, cherry red, lime green, lemon yellow—suggest ice cream, tropical fruit, or some other good thing to eat. The simple set consists of five folding chairs and five round cushions, all in the same range of candy colors. The background screens against which these sets and costumes are displayed, in Nicole Pearce’s brilliant lighting design, move from a pale sunrise yellow to a deep, rich purple that makes you want to gobble up the whole stage. The dancers, too, are great to look at, not just because they display excellent rhythm, balance, speed, and other technical skills, but because they look like individual people, as Morris’s dancers always do.

Mark Morris’s key trait as a choreographer is always to match his dances to the music he has chosen—not just in terms of putting steps to notes, but also in terms of the whole mood he creates. His Handel feels like Handel; his Dvorak feels like Dvorak; and here he has produced something that feels, at least to me, like Burt Bacharach. There is an easy looseness to the dance style, a reliance on social-dance and free-form improv moves, that almost manages to suggest the ten people assembled onstage, inspired by the music they are listening to, have made up some of the steps and gestures themselves. But there is also far more synchronization than is usual in Morris’s work—a style one would normally associate with the more commercialized dance companies of the Bacharach era, like the Peter Gennaro dancers or the chorus in a twentieth-century musical.

The tunes were written by Bacharach (with lyrics, for the most part, by Hal David), but the arrangement here is by the wonderful jazz musician Ethan Iverson, who also worked with Morris on Pepperland. Iverson starts off the evening with a solo piano version of the Alfie theme song, played in a slow, quiet, quasi-noodling fashion while the curtain is still down. As the curtain rises, this morphs into “What the World Needs Now,” and Iverson’s little Big Band—Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Simón Willson on bass, Vinnie Sperrazza on drums, Marcy Harriell as the lead vocalist, and Clinton Curtis and Blaire Reinhard singing backup—launches into its full-strength sound, which on this occasion filled UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall and made every word of the songs audible.

We needed to hear the words, because Morris uses them in his dance pieces: a bit of mimed coughing on the word “pneumonia” in “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” some car-driving in “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” a triple-threat pointing gesture to go with “Are You There (With Another Girl).” These are jokes, but they are also pleasures, coming around more than once and reminding us that a key element in song is repetition. Morris does not shy away from literalism; his dance for “Walk on By” is a walking dance, and if it is not quite as great as the walking dance in L’Allegro (but then, very little else in the world is), it is still satisfyingly complex as it reaches toward its conclusion.

In his youth Morris was always billed as a dance rebel, but he can be a traditionalist too, especially when the music calls for it. Elsewhere in his work he has played with gender roles, but here he maintains a strict separation between male dancers and female dancers—again, a nod to the kind of love Bacharach was always going on about. Partnering is always heterosexual here (though it is frequently promiscuous: Morris is fond of the American-square-dance move that brings a succession of different female partners to a circle of males), and when the dancers perform in smaller groups, they are often divided by gender. Still, they are divided in many other ways as well, and the five women perform as fiercely and as acrobatically as the five men. The costumes, too, work to break down the traditional division: Billy Smith and Nicole Sabella, for instance, wear similar big shirts over knee-length tights, and the always-marvelous Dallas McMurray manfully performs the entire program in a pink dress.

There were no boring moments in the short evening, but for me certain segments were standouts. One was “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” where the dancers’ sharp, renunciatory gestures emphasized the futile excess of the title, the fruitlessness of departing only to return. In one particularly beautiful sequence, a single couple danced forward on Marcy Harriell’s statement of the theme, followed several beats later by a second couple doing the same steps as the backup singers repeated the theme in a lower register. Morris is known to adore the musical structure called canon, and this was a classic use of it.

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was also terrific, not least because Ethan Iverson’s added plinks and rumbles in the opening section truly suggested rain. His musical evocation was perfectly matched by Pearce’s brief flashes of “lightning,” as well as by the dancers’ delightful imitation of children leaping over or into puddles. My favorite sequence in the dance was Domingo Estrada’s lovely soft-shoe-style solo, modeled (though I only got this the second time through) on Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”

If I had to single out one segment for highest praise, it would be the piece Morris composed to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” It’s hard to say why this was so great, except that there was an inherent match between Bacharach’s oddball beat here and the asymmetrical rhythmic structures Morris generally favors. Superficially, it didn’t look that much different from the other dances, with its ten figures variously darting around the stage and trading positions on the five seats. But it felt different in the way it surprised you. That shifting rhythm, the way the regular up-down two beats gave way to a faster three on “San-Jo-se,” allowed Morris to introduce a complex choreography of variously paced grapevine steps and unexpected skips. And since this is where his work excels—in the subtle details that are so stirring they make you feel like getting up and dancing yourself—I was glad when I saw it happening in The Look of Love.

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Three in a Row

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Wendy Lesser

New York is viewing itself as pretty much post-pandemic these days, and the result is that the full array of concert offerings is once more in place. Last week I benefited from this at an extraordinary level.

First up, on Sunday afternoon, was a production I knew would be good because I’d seen it before. John Boyle’s staging of Peter Grimes at the Met is one of the great operas put on in the last decade by that august house, and I was thrilled to get the chance to experience it again. Everything from the music (eloquently performed this time under the baton of Nicholas Carter), to the set (a clever house-front-like facade with windows that open at various levels like those of an Advent calendar), to the projections that appeared during the orchestral interludes (storm-tossed waves, for the most part), made this a delight to the eye and particularly the ear. The opera itself is brilliantly ambivalent about its main character, who is both a harsh, cruel man and an unfairly persecuted figure in a stuffy, self-righteous village. And this time we benefited from a magnetic singer in the title role: Allan Clayton, who had recently come off his Met debut as Hamlet (another notoriously ambivalent figure, though in quite a different way). Clayton is a tenor worth following, not only for the purity of his beautiful voice, but also for the clarity of his diction, which made it unnecessary to read the English supertitles when he was singing his lines. His acting, too, was somehow vehement as well as restrained—a difficult trip tock pull off in a huge space that seats thousands, but he managed it. Counting the two intermissions, the opera was well over three hours long, but no one in my vicinity left: we were all gripped from beginning to end.

The very next night, I was lucky enough to attend a much smaller and more intimate concert at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Organized, as usual, by the intrepid and inventive Pedja Muzijevic, this part of the BAC’s chamber series featured Owls (they abjure the article), a four-person string quartet. Unlike most quartets, however, they have two cellos instead of two violins, and this means that the range of music they play is not the standard one for a string quartet. On Monday, their hour-long show included two pieces by their resident composer (Paul Wiancko, one of the cellists), a jazz adaptation from Chick Corea, a pop-folk adaptation from a Norwegian group called Trollstilt, Terry Riley’s “Good Medicine” (with the other cellist, Gabriel Cabezas, playing the second violin part on his cello), a new and rather lovely piece by an Azerbaijani composer named Franghis Ali-Zadeh, and a very old piece by François Couperin. The Couperin, though brief, thrilled me to the core, and I very much enjoyed the rest of the program too, but what I liked best was the camaraderie and friendly musicianship of the four players. It felt as if they were performing for friends in their own living room—as indeed, it often feels in the BAC Howard Gilman Studio, which is why I keep returning there again and again.

And then, in this week of miracles, came the most miraculous performance of all: Tuesday night’s Carnegie Hall program of all 24 of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, performed by the pianist Igor Levit. I have heard and admired Levit before—he is really an excellent player—but this concert went beyond even my expectations. Though I’ve written about Shostakovich’s string quartets, I knew almost nothing about these piano pieces, which he wrote as homage to (and in partial imitation of) Bach; I’d heard at most four or five of them played in a mixed concert years ago. Now I was introduced to all 24 of them at once, in a mammoth undertaking that would have tried the skills and the endurance of any pianist on earth.

The two-and-a-half-hour program (a rarity at Carnegie, where the doors tend to shut tight at ten) was neatly divided into a first half and a second half, each containing twelve of the pieces. The first half seemed to waver amusingly back and forth between Bach and Shostakovich—that is, sometimes I was highly aware of the homage being paid to the rigorously precise German source, and sometimes I was more aware of the wild humor and deep-seated anxiety that pervaded the work of his Russian inheritor. That was fascinating in itself; but in the second half, this separation of powers began to disappear, as Bach seeped more fully into Shostakovich and vice versa. One reached the end of the program with the sense of having gotten somewhere—of having traveled on a journey accompanied not just by the vibrantly alive man up on the stage in front of us (and his calm, helpful page-turner), but also by the two ghostly figures who infused the music, one by way of the other.

I would say, without a doubt, that it was one of the best Carnegie concerts I ever attended. And this was not just because the playing itself was so good (though it was), nor that the physical achievement itself was so astonishing (though it was). It had to do with the felt rapport between the performer and his audience. Never have I been to Carnegie with such a quiet, attentive audience—the usual coughs and page-turnings and shiftings in the creaky seats had all been banished, as the whole crowd silently and almost religiously attended to the notes emanating from the stage. At one point in the second half, after a particularly difficult, fast, and emphatic fugue, an overwhelmed audience member let out a subdued, inadvertant “Woo-hoo!” Rather than allowing the interruption to ruin the atmosphere, though, Levit turned toward the audience, smiled his thanks, and gestured at the score, as if to say, “It’s his achievement, not mine.” At this the whole audience burst at once into spontaneous applause, and again Levit responded—nodding his thanks, but also demonstratively grasping the unplayed pages of music, reminding us there was still a lot left to do. So, after that brief moment of total communion between the pianist and his thousands of fans, we all quieted down and allowed him to finish. It was live music at its very best, and we all knew it.

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A Thrilling Wozzeck

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve attended at least four other productions of Alban Berg’s marvelous opera, and all but one have been excellent. It’s almost a sure thing, if you have good enough singers, competent musicians, and a simple enough staging. That’s the only risk—that the power of the music and the plot can be overwhelmed by too much additional stuff going on onstage (especially since there are so many short scenes). It’s always best if Wozzeck’s sad fate has a chance to come through directly, and that’s why concert performances of this opera are often the best.

Still, though I expected it to be good, I was blown away by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tuesday night performance of Wozzeck at Carnegie Hall. Part of the power lay simply in the strength of the orchestra—not only the individual abilities of its players, and not only the fine conducting by Andris Nelsons, but the sheer number of people onstage. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the music come through so well. And though these blasting chords threatened on occasion to drown out the individual human voices, that too is consistent with the nature of this strange opera, where the music seems to be an objective correlative of Wozzeck’s inner state—to emanate, as it were, from his increasingly besieged and confused mind. I didn’t mind not being able to hear every spoken or sung word (they were rendered for us in English, in any case, in the highly visible supertitles) when the whole musical experience was so fittingly overwhelming.

As for those individual voices: well, they too were terrific. Christine Goerke was predictably wonderful as Marie (and her incredibly strong voice never got drowned out, however loud the music was). But the big surprise of the evening was a Dane named Bo Skovhus in the role of Wozzeck. His voice, his diction, his facial expressions, even his bodily stance (and this in a concert version, mind you!) were all absolutely true to the character: he was Wozzeck, in all his pathos and frenzy and distress. I also loved Toby Spence as the Captain (he played the role more comically than I’ve seen it done before, and it worked), Franz Hawlata as the Doctor, and Mauro Peter as Wozzeck’s only friend, Andres. But in fact the whole cast was more than up to par—as good as they needed to be to render this masterpiece in all its remarkable complexity, and to keep faith with the BSO’s remarkable performance.

 

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Chamber Music

Posted on November 20, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

It is foolish to wade into the mild controversy currently surrounding the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, but I have never been afraid of appearing foolish. It kind of goes with the territory.

The controversy, typical of our day and age, surrounds how much new music, as well as music by under-represented groups, is played at a given concert. CMS has chosen to stick with its tried-and-true formula of introducing great and sometimes obscure pieces from the past four or five hundred years, without paying much attention to who wrote them. For this they have been chastised by the New York Times and others.

The part of their attitude I want to defend wholeheartedly—and it lies at the center of their defense—is that great music is for everyone, no matter who wrote it. They illustrate it by having a range of performers, old and young, black and white, Asian and non-Asian, famous and unknown, present the pieces on their programs.

Which are, granted, mainly by dead white men. I do not have a problem with this, because if I want another kind of music, there are plenty of venues where I can seek it out. Not everybody has to do everything; not everybody has to adhere to the latest preferred strictures at once. There is still room in our world, I hope, for the wayward and the exceptional, and CMS has long been good at introducing me to composers I know nothing or little about. The virtue of this is that I never actually know what I am going to like until I encounter it live, and they have repeatedly given me this opportunity.

A case in point is the CMS concert I attended last Sunday—my first return to Alice Tully Hall in twenty months. The program was called “Spanish Inspirations,” and I was drawn to it by three things: the inclusion of a Shostakovich work I had never heard, and the presence of two musicians (Nicholas Canellakis on cello, Anne-Marie McDermott on piano) whose performances I have always loved.

Canellakis and McDermott were terrific, as usual. But the Shostakovich was surprisingly disappointing. His amalgam of “Spanish Songs for Voice and Piano,” first performed in 1956, must have been the kind of sappy melodic stuff he occasionally produced to get himself back into favor, because there was nothing Shostakovich-like about it. If you had played the piece to me without attribution, I would have thought it was movie music by some unknown composer; I would never in a million years have guessed it was by the same man who composed my favorite modern string quartets.

In contrast, the rewarding parts of the concert lay in the things I didn’t know anything about and therefore hadn’t necessarily planned on enjoying. Chief among these was the performance by the young baritone, Will Liverman, who sang in both the Shostakovich songs and a work by Ravel called “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.” Those who are more in the know than I am may recognize his name from the cast of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, in which he recently starred at the Met; but he was certainly a revelation to me. The voice is beautiful, the delivery intense and well-acted. But even beyond that, this wonderful African-American singer has something much rarer: the kind of charismatic quality that can take over a whole performance space and command your undying allegiance. Needless to say, I am now a fan.

The other unexpected benefits were the pieces by Spanish composers I had never even heard of, much less heard. Joaquín Turina (1882–1949) was represented by a delightful quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello. Gaspar Cassadó (1897–1966) gave us a masterful, original trio for piano, violin, and cello that ranged through a variety of eccentric modes, borrowing on the way from both modernism and folk.

And Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908) was responsible for the intense, at times hilarious Navarra for Two Violins and Piano. De Sarasate must have been someone in his day, because there is a Whistler portrait of him (“Arrangement in Black”) that was painted in 1884, when he was forty; but it seems he is rarely played now, at least in this country. McDermott excelled herself in this piano performance, and the two violinists who played with her—Paul Huang and Danbi Um—kept up a remarkable interaction that contained (among other things) light playfulness, speedy virtuosity, seductive flirtation, and shy charm.

All three of these composers were discoveries for me, and their pieces vastly outweighed the Boccherini, Ravel, and Shostakovich that I had come to Alice Tully to hear. So isn’t that an accomplishment worth celebrating? And aren’t we glad CMS is brave and generous enough to persist in this kind of range?

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A Reopened Carnegie Hall

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

On Thursday night I took a friend to Carnegie Hall to hear Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang play a concert of Bach, Busoni, and Shostakovich. My friend hadn’t heard live music in nearly two years, and she was utterly thrilled to be back in that beautiful space—never mind the program.

Luckily, the music was terrific, too.

I say this having already been to two prior Carnegie concerts this fall. On October 14 I heard the Orchestra of St. Luke’s playing Handel’s Water Music and other baroque gems in the big auditorium; and then on October 19, a skillful new cello/piano pair named Zlatimir Fung and Mishka Rushdie Momen performed a number of Romantic pieces in Weill Hall. Those concerts were fine but not, to my ear, especially stirring. My main complaint about both was the attempt to create new pieces—a Bach meld of disparate symphonic pieces in the former case, a cello version of Franck’s eloquent violin sonata in the latter—which I found less than satisfying.

Possibly the fact that I was coming off some amazing September concerts in Europe (Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes in Berlin, Simon Rattle and the London Symphony in Amsterdam) also dampened my appreciation. I, for one, have not been starved of good live music during this pandemic period, and I am therefore able to be extremely picky. But I was a rarity in those October Carnegie audiences, which went wild in each case. People are so glad to be hearing live music again that they leap to their feet in a standing ovation at the first opportunity—as if Carnegie Hall had somehow turned into Broadway.

When Kavakos and Wang performed, though, I thought the standing ovation was warranted. Yuja Wang stayed demurely in the background throughout (though with her trademark eye-catching gown, you couldn’t stop looking at her) and did a marvelous job of suiting the piano’s dynamics to the inherently quieter violin. Leonidas Kavakos, whom I’d never heard in person before, was a wonder, especially in the Busoni and the Shostakovich. (To my surprise, the Bach Violin Sonata No. 3 was the least thrilling of the pieces played; maybe it was just too short to sink in.) I’ve never heard pizzicato done as audibly and as well as Kavakos did it in these two works, so that it actually seemed musical rather than merely rhythmic.

I haven’t listened to much Busoni, but this performance of the masterful Violin Sonata No. 2 in E Minor made me think I should seek out more of him. The duo’s account of the thrilling Presto movement was so overwhelming that the audience burst into spontaneous applause at its close; Kavakos had to wave his bow at us to indicate that there was still one movement to come. In that long final movement, and indeed throughout the whole piece, the delicate transitions from loud to soft and virtuosic to melancholy were a delight to witness.

Shostakovich’s chamber music is of course dear to my heart, and this 1968 Violin Sonata, which was composed for his friend David Oistrakh toward the end of the composer’s life, was a joy to hear live. Coming straight after the Busoni, it exemplified the strange contradictoriness of Shostakovich’s approach: a seeming simplicity (single notes hanging in space, single instruments playing off against each other one at a time), combined with a complexity of feeling and a constantly shifting rhythm and key. Both Wang and Kavakos got to show off their virtuosic skills at times, but my favorite parts were the more tender moments when they melded together. It was a brilliant way to end the program, and it made the whole experience of being back at Carnegie as exciting for me as it evidently was for the rest of the audience.

(By the way, for those of you still hesitant about being in an enclosed room: Stern Auditorium is so vast that you might as well be outdoors, and the precautions—everyone double-vaccinated, everyone masked throughout—are enough to allow you to relax into the performance. Or so I think.)

 

 

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A Random Opera Thought

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

I’m listening to the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf recording of Così fan tutte and am struck by the  same thought I always have when hearing or seeing this opera: How is it that Mozart’s greatest music belongs to his most hateful plot? An interesting conundrum.

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