The Lesser Blog

Esa-Pekka Times Three

Posted on July 10, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

People I know were delighted when they learned, a couple of years ago, that Esa-Pekka Salonen had agreed to take over the leadership of the San Francisco Symphony. I too would have been delighted if I had known then what I know now: that he is one of the finest conductors working in the world today. I discovered this for myself at the first of three recent concerts he gave with the SFS, and that impression was only confirmed and amplified at the subsequent two.

All three concerts—held on June 18, June 25, and July 9—had a similar format. As is common these days, they lasted an hour and a half or less, without intermission. Audience members were required to wear masks, and a number of the orchestra members wore masks too, though in declining numbers as the summer progressed. Each concert consisted of three works: a short opening number employing a small number of musicians; a somewhat lengthier or more difficult second piece; and a substantial final composition that used the full orchestra. But the works selected were different enough that the structure never felt repetitive. And starved as we are for live music these days, each concert was like a generously full meal.

On June 18, Salonen opened with Richard Strauss’s 1881 Serenade in E-flat major, a piece for thirteen wind instruments, and went on to the very recent Be Still by Daniel Kidane, a pandemic-era tone poem involving strings alone. It was a lovely way of pointing out similarities and contrasts—between modes of expression, between historical periods, between kinds of sonority. He followed this up with Brahms’s rousing violin concerto, a piece I never tire of hearing. (Come to think of it, I never tire of hearing Brahms, period, though I always forget to rank him among my favorite composers.) This time the solo part was beautifully played by Augustin Hadelich, a marvelously expressive, slightly odd violinist I’d never heard before. As Esa-Pekka pointed out in a friendly, witty welcome to the audience, just feeling the sound of a live orchestra playing the Brahms was enough to restore our spirits in these difficult times.

The June 25 concert followed the same contrasting pattern in the first two pieces. An all-brass selection from Gabrieli’s late-sixteenth-century Sacrae symphoniae (in which the musicians, gratifying, performed from both sides of the balconies over the stage) was followed by Richard Strauss’s all-strings Metamorphosen from 1944. This late Strauss work was much longer and more challenging than the previous week’s early Strauss had been, as if Salonen were saying to us, Okay, last time we were taking baby steps in our return to musical attentiveness; now I’m going to make you work a little. He ended the evening with a full-length symphony, Schumann’s Symphony No. 3. This is not a piece I ever listen to on my own, but played live by the this orchestra, it was thrilling. As I commented to my companion that night, it’s not just the audience that’s going wild over Esa-Pekka; the musicians of the SFS, in response to his inspiring presence, seem to be playing better than they ever have before.

And last night we got Salonen at his own peak performance level. The program itself had a slightly different shape, with a very short and quiet opener—Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s Bist due bei mir—followed by the very substantial Mozart Clarinet Concerto. That was clearly intended as the crowd-pleaser of the evening, the work that would draw in an audience, and the SFS’s principal clarinetist, Carey Bell, did an unimpeachable job in the solo. If I sound less than fully enthusiastic, it’s because I’ve maybe heard this piece too many times, including from the great Richard Stolzman, and so my standards are ridiculously high—but, as predicted, the rest of the audience went wild over it.

The work that unexpectedly grabbed me, though, was Sibelius’s extraordinary Symphony No. 2. In its four movements, lasting three quarters of an hour, it went through nearly every color and mood available to a symphonic composition, from the near-silent throbbing of pizzicato on the basses alone, at the beginning of the second movement, to the full-force blast of the entire orchestra, underlaid by a brilliant drummer, at the end. It was suspenseful and moving and at times almost terrifying, and Esa-Pekka and the orchestra gave it everything they had. It was as if he had turned them all into proud, culturally attuned Finns, at least for the duration of the performance.

Watching him up there on the podium, and then listening to the outpouring of love that came to him from the nearly full audience, I realized once again how lucky we are to have this conductor in San Francisco. His presence here is a gift to us, and to the musicians, and to music itself.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged augustin hadelich, brahms, daniel kidane, esa-pekka salonen, mozart, richard strauss, san francisco symphony, schumann, sibelius | 1 Comment

Joy, Delight, and Jeremy Denk

Posted on May 17, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

Okay, granted it’s been fifteen months since anyone in San Francisco was able to attend a live concert in Davies Symphony Hall. Granted that we were all starved for a real musical performance—not live-streaming, not carefully curated videos of past pinnacles, but real live musicians and audience members present in the same hall. And granted that we vaccinated recipients of this largesse felt like prisoners set free, returnees to a land we never thought we would see again.

All that is true, but none of it fully accounts for the absolute perfection of the concert that Jeremy Denk and a group of San Francisco Symphony string players gave on May 13th and 14th. I was present at the Friday night performance—which lasted exactly an hour and fifteen minutes without intermission—and I could feel and see my fellow audience members coming back to life in exactly the way I was. It reminded me of the way the flowers in my garden perk up when I give them a much-needed watering during a heat wave. We were all thirsting for something special, and Jeremy Denk quenched our thirst.

He did this by interspersing two brief, relatively modern works—William Grant Still’s 1939 Out of the Silence, and Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue for Piano and Orchestra, which dates vaguely from the second quarter of the twentieth century—with two longer masterpieces, Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major. The Finzi was not really to my taste (too soupy and romantic, I thought), but the eerie, floating piece by Still was a real discovery, and I was grateful to have heard it.

Of course, neither could compete with the main servings of the evening, nor were they meant to. But with Jeremy Denk’s excellent commentary before and between each piece, the smaller segments did their bit in contributing toward the feeling of the whole evening. That feeling involved a sense of discovery and rediscovery—of composers we’d never heard of, of old gems transformed in new hands, and of how even the art of conducting could take on surprising forms. Denk “conducted,” if that’s the right word, from his piano bench, barely moving his arms more than he would have in a normal piano performance, but nonetheless leading the other musicians. Obviously much of the true conducting was invisible to us, in the rehearsals that lay behind the live concert (and what I would have given to attend those rehearsals!). But even so, we had the sense of a strongly cohesive group—all on the same page, as it were—despite the extended distance between their seats and the face-masks that they were still obliged to wear.

We in the audience were also masked, and before entering we had been asked to show our vaccination certificates along with our I.D.s and digital tickets. But none of this interfered with our pleasure; if anything, it made us appreciate it more, because it reminded us of the hard times from which we are only starting to emerge. Denk’s conversation, too, alluded to these hard times, and to the privilege of being able to play for us live. I have heard him play many times before, and I have heard him speak before (most notably at a wonderful White Light concert he gave in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, when music seemed the only thing that lay between us and total darkness). So I knew that going to this San Francisco Symphony concert would be restorative. What I couldn’t have guessed in advance was how long the healing power of it, and my visceral gratitude for it, would stay with me. I can feel it still.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged bach, Gerald Finzi, jeremy denk, mozart, san francisco symphony, William Grant Still | Leave a comment

Back in Berlin!

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve been here a little over a week now, and for the first time in seven or eight months, I am getting to hear live music again. It is so thrilling that I can barely analyze or even fully take in my responses, so it will probably be another week before I can begin to talk coherently about what I’ve heard. In the meantime, let me just say something about the process of attending a concert in Covid times.

The first thing to be noticed is that every concert hall does it differently. I had thought, somehow, that there would be a standard procedure (as there is, say, on public transportation, where all buses, trains, and stations require a mask and warn of a fifty-euro fine if you are caught without one). But no: each music venue has its own way of abiding by the rules and regulations.

My first experience was at the Konzerthaus Berlin, a beautiful old building with a huge concert auditorium whose ceiling reaches up 90 or 100 feet above the seating area. With that amount of open space above my head—and given that no one was seated within three seats of me on either side, nor in the row in front of me or behind—I felt quite protected, despite the fact that we were all allowed to remove our masks after sitting down. (Most people did.) My only worry was that Jorg Widmann, who was vigorously playing the clarinet in Carl Maria von Weber’s marvelous clarinet concerto, might well be blasting his germs out to the orchestra and the closer members of the audience. But as I was seated safely toward the back of the auditorium, I wasn’t worried about my own health.

Next I went to the Berlin Philharmonic, for a sold-out concert of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Simon Rattle. “Sold-out” in this case meant, again, leaving alternate rows unoccupied and placing audience members at least three seats apart from each other. I have been to the Philharmonie many times, but I had never before had such a comfortable experience, with terrific sight-lines (no tall people in front of me!) and plenty of space to spread out. It felt almost sinfully privileged to be at this concert. Getting in and out, too, was a highly monitored affair, with individual masked ushers guiding you through the entrance procedures (socially distanced outdoor lines, mobile tickets on phones), requiring you to fill out a paper form that gave your contact information and seat number, and then leading you to your isolated seat. In addition to providing the best music in town, I felt that the Philharmonie offered the safest environment. (“If we have even one infection, we will have to close down,” confided the young man who first escorted me in, explaining why they were being so careful.) Here, too, as at the Konzerthaus, we were allowed to remove our masks during the music, and again, most people did this, as did I. The musicians themselves arrived and departed wearing masks, though they took them off to play—and part of the security arrangements involved seating them spaced out on the wide stage of the Grosser Saal, though I had previously heard this chamber orchestra only in the more cramped circumstances of the Kleiner Saal. Altogether, it was a reassuring as well as delightful experience.

The Pierre Boulez Saal is a more recently opened venue, designed precisely for chamber concerts, so they had less room to play with. During the quartet concert I attended there, we were not seated in alternate rows (every row of the in-the-round terraced seating was filled), and there was only one or at most two empty seats left between patrons. On the other hand, we were required to wear masks the whole time, and in fact we were given very high-quality masks at the front door and told to put them on before entering. (A German friend, when I showed him my new thick, white mask afterward, told me they are quite expensive and beyond the reach of normal consumers.) I found the process of listening to music under one of these masks a bit stifling, but that may have been partly because that particular quartet group was less than inspiring. The tickets were issued on paper at a box office, and we didn’t have to fill out any contact forms; on the other hand, the Pierre Boulez Saal (like the Konzerthaus) had taken full details at the time of ordering, so I suppose they will be able to reach me in the event of an outbreak. Like the other two concert venues, the Boulez Saal ran the whole program without an intermission, so as to further reduce the dangers of a crowd in motion.

My scariest experience, thus far, was at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where I had been lucky enough to obtain one of the rare tickets to the new production of Die Walküre. I don’t know why I thought they would run a Wagner opera straight through for four hours, but since the others were giving up on intermissions, I thought they would too. No such luck. This production had two 45-minute intermissions, at both of which food and drink were sold and consumed without masks. Terrified, I hid in a high-ceiling stairwell during these free-for-all periods. I felt barely more secure during the performance itself, because alternate rows had not been left free, and only a single empty seat lay between me and the people on either side of me. So I was within three feet of at least four to six people, if you counted those in front and behind; and when the man in back of me fell asleep and woke up with a snort, I almost died of fright. Perhaps some of this was brought on by the scary plot and music (Wagner is made for Covid times, in terms of dread), but I couldn’t help feeling that I was under threat the whole time I was sitting there, despite the fact that masks were required throughout the performance. (This procedure was not only understandable but essential for an opera, I would say, since all those powerful singers were emitting aerosols from deep inside their lungs.) We were allowed to wear our own comfortable masks rather than the super-medical ones provided by the Pierre Boulez Saal, and that was a blessing, in a way, but it was also part of the increased danger. I guess the Germans feel that it’s worth taking a mortal risk to hear good music. And I have to say, judging by my own hectic attendance schedule during the past week, that I appear to agree with them.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged berlin, berlin philharmonic, deutsche oper, konzerthaus, pierre boulez saal, simon rattle | Leave a comment

The Mirror and the Light

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

If you have not yet read Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, now is the time to start. And time is what you have now, right?

Wolf Hall, the first book in the series, features the profound effects of the plague in sixteenth-century London, along with a lot of other great stuff having to do with Cromwell’s deprived childhood, ambitious youth, and surprising coming-to-power. Plus the writing is amazing, as you will soon discover—fully up to the standard Mantel set in earlier books like A Place of Greater Safety and Beyond Black. She is surely one of the great stylists as well as being one of the greatest of historical novelists, and if you do not yet know her work at all, you are in for a treat.

Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume, is slightly less affecting. The Cromwell we loved has become more of a plain old fixer for Henry VIII and less of a character in his own right, while Anne Boleyn dominates the plot. But it is still well worth reading, and you will not be able to forego the next step in the plot, once you put down Wolf Hall.

And that leads us to this final volume, The Mirror and the Light, which is a masterpiece. Having finished it last night, I now feel a bit bereft; all I could do after closing the book was to sit there, stunned and moved. I am not giving away the plot if I tell you that it takes us up to Cromwell’s death—we all know Henry VIII executed him in the end. But for those of you who lack the detailed history, as I did, it’s best to let the plot unfold on its own rather than running to Wikipedia first: there’s a great deal of suspense in guessing which of those around him betrayed him and intrigued to bring about his fall. (If you must resort to Google, try getting the images Hans Holbein painted of Cromwell, Henry, Anne of Cleves, and others who feature in this plot—they will add to your pleasure in reading the novel, in which Holbein himself appears as a character.)

And, as always, there are intense satisfactions to be had in being inside Cromwell’s clever, supple mind throughout 750 pages of beautifully written prose. The writing here is so good that it may even transcend that of Wolf Hall, which is an impossibly high standard to beat. We are somehow suspended for the duration: between Cromwell’s interior life and the historical events taking place around him; between his time and ours; between humane sympathy and savage competitiveness (or perhaps competitive savagery). Thomas Cromwell cannot have been an altogether nice guy—he was probably a monster, of sorts—but Mantel makes us love him.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged hans holbein, hilary mantel, the mirror and the light, thomas cromwell | 1 Comment

The last time I was at the Met…

Posted on March 14, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

Since the Metropolitan Opera—not to mention the Metropolitan Museum and anything else with Metropolitan or New York or City in its title—is on indeterminate hiatus during the current crisis, I thought I would reflect on the last opera I saw there: Handel’s Agrippina.

By great good luck, I happened to catch this stellar production during my February trip to New York (which now seems much longer than a month ago, given everything that has happened since). I had already seen at least one unsuccessful production of this semi-comic, semi-historical, semi-ridiculous opera, so I knew in advance how hard it would be to get the tone right. To my surprise and delight, the Met performance succeeded on every level. I found it laugh-out-loud funny in places and oddly moving in others, and the rest of the audience seemed to agree with me. (You could tell by the laughter, and also by the fact that they uncharacteristically stayed in their seats until the end, which in this case was more than four hours after the beginning.)

When faced with Handel’s historical operas, one can either decide to update to a more recent moment or capitulate to a false sense of history. There are risks either way, but in this case the decision to modernize was the right one. Giving a twentieth-century look and feel to this Roman tale—which involves Empress Agrippina’s effort to get her son, Nero, installed as the heir to his stepfather, Emperor Claudio—never felt gratuitous or off, and even the obvious anachronisms (like Agrippina’s 1950s hairdo and little black dress) only served to enhance the humor.

As a whole, the production was greatly aided by the calibre of its stars. Joyce DiDonato as Agrippina, Iestyn Davies as Ottone (the loyal but betrayed commander of the emperor’s army), and a brilliant newcomer, Kate Lindsay, in the pants role of Nero all did their utmost to make the lengthy evening an intense pleasure. The rest of the cast was vocally excellent as well, but these three could act as well as sing, and that was essential. DiDonato, in particular, invented a hilarious strut—part Marilyn Monroe, part cartoonish battle-axe Mom, and part Maggie Thatcher in high heels—that utterly defined her character. Even the way she held her hands, like little paws dangling from her wrists, expressed this woman’s character in a way that was both funny and frightening.

Harry Bicket, whose annual Handel concerts at Carnegie Hall I always religiously attend, did beautifully with the orchestra, as I expected him to. And when I looked to see who had directed this brilliant confection, lo and behold!—it was David McVicar, whose marvelous Death in Venice (starring the incomparable Mark Padmore as Aschenbach) I had just witnessed at Covent Garden last December. For a director to get one difficult opera right is unusual enough. For him to do two in a row is nothing short of miraculous.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged agrippina, carnegie hall, david mcvicar, death in venice, Handel, harry bicket, iestyn davies, joyce didonato, kate lindsey, mark padmore, metropolitan opera | 5 Comments

Beethoven and the Danes

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

All concert attendance is a betting game, but some bets are riskier than others. Earlier this month, I bet on something I thought would surely pay off: I traveled to New York from California just to hear the Danish String Quartet play all sixteen Beethoven quartets in an eleven-day cycle presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Yet even I, who am already on record praising these musicians to the skies, could not have predicted how marvelous the experience would be.

For one thing, they decided to play the quartets in essentially chronological order, which is not how the Beethoven cycle is usually played. Normally in such concerts (and in my favorite recordings as well) we get a mixture of early, middle, and late in each two-hour chunk. But the four members of the Danish String Quartet—Fredrick Øland and Rune Tongsgaard Sørensen on violin, Asbjorn Norgaard on viola, and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (the sole Norwegian) on cello—decided instead to display Beethoven’s development over time. So we got two initial concerts featuring the six lively quartets of Opus 18, which you might characterize as Beethoven’s Haydn period, though even at this early stage he was increasingly exhibiting moments of weirdness and idiosyncratic inventiveness. The third concert presented the three terrific Razumovsky quartets, which deserved a whole evening to themselves (especially given the Danes’ affinity for folk-derived classical music). The fourth bridged middle and late by covering Op. 74 (“Harp”), the rarely heard and rather grim Op. 95 (“Serioso”), and then my person favorite in the whole batch, Op. 127, which marks the start of Beethoven’s final, mature sensibility. And then there were two unbelievably great concerts that each treated just two of the late quartets: one combining Op. 132 and Op. 130 (the latter with the Grosse Fugue occupying its original position as the final movement), and the other starting with the deeply moving Op. 131 and ending with the oddly chipper Op. 135.

I have listened to all of these quartets many times in the privacy of my own house, and I have also heard them played live many times, including in a full cycle. But I have never before felt I was mainlining the music, getting it infused directly into me by performers who had fully thought about it, taken in its possibilities, and mastered it together. The variations from what I was familiar with were not extreme—a bit more dynamic range, perhaps; a few more sharply dramatic pauses; a greater sense both of group coherence and of soloist skill—but the overall effect was noticeably more thrilling than what I was used to.

And at each concert, the intensity grew and grew: not just in the music itself (though one could really feel the progression in this arrangement), but also in the audience’s reaction. I have been watching and listening to the Danish String Quartet for years, so I knew, in a way, what to expect. But for many of the audience members who were packing Alice Tully Hall on these occasions, the youthful, informally dressed, utterly fresh and musically intelligent Scandinavians came as a delightful surprise. Because one or the other of the musicians spoke from the stage before each of their encores (as they have a habit of doing in all of their concerts, sometimes even addressing us earlier on), we had the sense we were getting to know them personally—that is the atmosphere they always manage to create, on every stage, large and small, where I have ever seen them. The Alice Tully audience responded by becoming very quiet and very loud: very quiet during and before each piece of music, and raucous to the point of rock-band cheering when each quartet had finished. By the final two concerts, you could hear whoops of approval and witness massive standing ovations even at the intermissions. The audience, many of whom attended all six concerts, absolutely loved these guys, and the players responded in kind. At the end of the final concert—when, having wisely decided to forgo an encore and give the last word to Beethoven, they stood on the stage with their arms around each other’s shoulders and smiled back at us—the applause was so resounding, and so downright affectionate, that I wondered if the New Yorkers would ever allow the Danes to go home. Of course, we had to let them go in the end (one always does, alas, in live concerts), but the feeling of what they gave us will, I imagine, stick with us all forever.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged alice tully hall, beethoven cycle, chamber music society of lincoln center, danish string quartet | 3 Comments

Photography Heaven

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

It seems unbelievable that ten years have already passed since Pier 24 opened its doors in San Francisco. Perhaps that’s because this great venue for looking at photography remains so exciting, and so welcome, that it still feels like a recent addition to the local gallery scene.

Everything about the place is perfect. It’s free, but you have to reserve your visit in advance, so you are never looking at pictures among crowds. The rooms are purpose-built for photography—perfectly sized, perfectly lit—and the building itself is located on one of the old Embarcadero piers, a piece of San Francisco history converted to delightful modern use. There are no wall captions, so you are practically forced to have a direct encounter with the images themselves. (If you are curious, you can refer to a hand-out that gives the photographer name, title, and date for each piece.) And the annual shows last long enough so you can send all your friends to them, even friends visiting from out of town, before they have time to close.

I have liked some of the shows better than others, but every one of them had things worth looking at. And now the best-of-the-best from those ten years have been pulled together for this stellar anniversary show, Looking Back. Curated with great subtlety and intelligence by Allie Hauesslein, Pier 24’s associate director, it might just be the most exciting collection of photographs I have ever seen gathered in one place.

There are, of course, the classics: Paul Strand’s blind woman, Lewis Hine’s workers on the Empire State Building, Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother (in several different poses). And there are roomsful of Diane Arbus, including not just her best-known photos (like the boy with the toy hand grenade, or the bowed-down mentally disabled woman from the Untitled series) but also a huge range of her other work, including unexpected things such as an overhead view of Times Square. The additional Dorothea Langes, too, are worth attending the show for—not just the deservedly famous images like White Angel Breadline and the other Depression-era photos, but rarer ones like the 1952 Consumer Relationships, which shows a wide urban sidewalk with a haughty-looking mother trailed by a tiny and rather despondent-looking child. My favorite Hiroshi Sugimoto of all time—his wax-work Last Supper, movingly damaged by rain—has a room practically to itself. The Lee Friedlander that graces the catalogue cover, of a woman in profile walking through a revolving door, is certainly one of his very best, too.

The colorful hotel rooms and apartment interiors by Alec Soth, the street scenes by Henry Wessel and Fred Herzog, the Mahdan Mahatta and Edward Burtynsky factory images are all amazing. But I think photographs I like best are the portraits. These range across the board, from the posed close-up to the distant capture, from the purposely strange to the excessively familiar. Weirdly, there are actually two different photos of Truman Capote in the show—one by Irving Penn, the other by Richard Avedon—but there are also much less typical Avedons, portraying the creased faces of working men. Lewis Hine’s touching group portraits of coal-workers convey one kind of intense emotion; a different kind of intensity is rendered in Dorothea Lange’s Funeral Cortege, which shows a woman looking out at us through her black car’s oval window. Famous photographers (Arbus, Friedlander) have been captured on film by other famous photographers (Winogrand, Avedon). And then there are the anonymous portraits, like those in the series of mug shots that fill one whole wall of a large room. Unknown people and unknown photographers are also important, this Pier 24 exhibit insists, and that is part of what makes it a great and true-to-photography show.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged alec soth, allie haeusslein, diane arbus, dorothea lange, garry winogrand, hiroshi sugimoto, lee friedlander, pier 24, richard avedon | Leave a comment

The Dolphin Letters

Posted on January 14, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

Most people who were interested in poetry in the late twentieth century know at least the vague outlines of this story. In 1974, Robert Lowell published a book of poems called The Dolphin, a series which cannibalized the letters he had received from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, as he was leaving her in the early 1970s for his third wife, Caroline Blackwood (a Guinness heiress who was herself the ex-wife of the artist Lucian Freud and the composer Israel Citkowitz). The controversy that swirled around the book hinged on the moral violation of using Hardwick’s private letters—and, still worse, rewriting them—in a collection that was essentially a love letter to another woman. Years later, when the marriage to Caroline was breaking up, Lowell returned to Hardwick, and they spent the summer of 1977 together in Maine; in September, though, he died of a heart attack in the taxi that was bringing him home to her New York apartment.

Now Saskia Hamilton has performed the miraculous editorial task of putting together all of the actual letters: Elizabeth’s to Robert (whom she and others called “Cal”), his to her, plus assorted missives to and from other members of their circle during this fraught time, which dated from mid-1970 to Robert’s death and beyond. In The Dolphin Letters, Hamilton has scrupulously arranged and annotated this correspondence in a way that makes us feel immersed in the situation ourselves—if not as participants, then as close bystanders. Robert Lowell comes across as brilliant, erratic, and morally obtuse; both he and Caroline seem incompetent in the handling of daily life to an almost criminal degree (considering that they were in charge of four children); and meanwhile Elizabeth Hardwick appears as — I was going to say “a saint,” but she was too appealingly human for that; and then I was going to say “a tower of strength,” but was prevented by the memory of her own joke (repeated in one of the letters) about a fellow New Yorker who was “a tower of weakness.”

Hardwick’s letters are distinguished throughout by their honesty, their expressiveness, and their flashes of great wit. (Commenting on a positive review about Stanley Kunitz, whose poetry she finds “thin and disappointing,” she says to Lowell, the review’s author: “I will say as someone said about Christianity: ‘Important, if true.'”) It is during these years, too, that she really comes into her own as a writer, forced by finances as well as emotional stress to produce some of her best work; crucially, the divorce frees her from treating Lowell’s career as more important than her own. Throughout, she never ceases to sign her letters to Cal “with love” — and he in turn continues to address her as “Dearest Lizzie” and sign off “with all my love” even after he has married Caroline and had a son with her. But we also get moments of intense anguish, mainly on Elizabeth’s part but sometimes (when he is going into or emerging from one of his periods of madness) on his. It is a gripping story, and though I knew the outcome in advance, I was on the edge of my seat for the entire time I was reading it. The letters between the two of them of course form the core of the narrative, but there are equally important messages from those around them—in particular Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s best friend, who warned him in advance, in one of the most intelligent, loving, and powerful letters I’ve ever read, that he would be committing a moral atrocity if he used Lizzie’s correspondence in this way.

Perhaps I was more gripped than most would be because I knew or knew of the principals. I was friends with Elizabeth Hardwick during the 1980s and the 1990s, when I visited New York as a young person getting my toes wet in the New York literary world and stayed at her apartment. I had met Robert Lowell once in 1970, on the day I—an overly ambitious freshman—attended the first meeting of his poetry seminar at Harvard and then fled, suitably intimidated; and eight or nine years later I reviewed his last and posthumously published collection, Day by Day, for the Berkeley Poetry Review. But I think even if you had never read a word by either of these people, you would find this book of letters compelling. It is as intense and as beautifully composed as a well-constructed epistolary novel, but with the added force of being all quite real.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged elizabeth bishop, elizabeth hardwick, farrar straus and giroux, robert lowell, saskia hamilton, the dolphin letters | Leave a comment

A Bright White Light

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

Just about any concert performance of Pergolesi’s amazing Stabat Mater, I have learned, is worth going to. When you combine that with Vivaldi’s movingly lovely Gloria—and when you further add in the stellar skills of the Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment, led by harpsichordist Jonathan Cohen—you are bound to have pretty much of a sure-fire evening of good music.

But what made Thursday night’s White Light program super-special, above and beyond the predictable pleasures, was the inclusion of countertenor Iestyn Davies. I have heard Davies in everything from modern music like Thomas Ades’s Tempest to an evening of John Dowland songs. I have seen him on stages as small as Poisson Rouge and as large as the Met. And I know that in addition to being a renowned singer, he is also a well-regarded stage actor. (His co-star from Farinelli, Mark Rylance, who was seated directly behind me during last night’s performance, shouted out an enthusiastic “Ies-tyn!” during the wild applause.) But I have never before heard Davies sing in pieces I love as much and know as well as the Stabat Mater and Gloria.

So it was a revelation to hear what his rich, mellow, expressive voice could bring to their live performance. He is one of those rare countertenors who never seems to have to push his voice or distort the melodic line; his diction is perfect, always audible but never intrusive; and he has a way of delaying the conclusion of a note to the last possible millisecond, without being a moment late, which adds to the thrill of his delivery. He also has a wonderful stage presence—as, for example, in the way he stood and watched the solo cellist who accompanied him in his Gloria part, as if he were receiving the instrumental music personally. For this and other reasons, I found it hard to take my eyes off him, even when he was not actually singing.

Every time I’ve heard Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater before, it featured two women, a soprano and a contralto. Having the contralto part sung by a countertenor, and in particular this countertenor, made something beautifully new of this beloved old work. As we sat in the subway on the way home, my companion commented, “If a countertenor is that good, you almost feel as if the voice is going directly up to God.” And when he (an agnostic) said this to me (an atheist), I knew exactly what he meant.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged gloria, iestyn davies, orchestra of the age of enlightenment, pergolesi, stabat mater, vivaldi, white light | 2 Comments