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 On this latest tour, he has been replaced by his student, Kiveli Dörken.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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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.

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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.

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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.

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