Five Nights in Berlin

Posted on December 31, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

For various reasons, Berlin is my favorite city in the world, and one of the reasons is certainly the quality and variety of music it always makes available to me. I spotted a window of opportunity to get there for a week in December and, as it happened, my week included five performances in a row—three of them spectacular, one strange but good, and one astonishingly bad. Since even the bad one provided food for thought, I will recount them here, in order.

I had arrived on a Monday, in time to have dinner with Martin and Barbara, my dearest friends in Berlin (they are also one of the reasons it is my favorite city), but since it turned out they were both occupied on that Tuesday, I bought myself a single ticket, at pretty much the last minute, to the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performance at the grand old Konzerthaus in Gendarmenmarkt. The initial draw for this concert, as I had vaguely noticed from afar, was the inclusion of Murray Perahia as piano soloist, but by the time the date arrived he had been replaced by a young, unknown (to me) performer named Jan Lisiecki.  Boy, did I luck out!  As all the surprised reviews in the Berlin newspapers noted in the subsequent days, this twenty-something Polish-Canadian pianist was a phenomenon of the first order: not show-offy in any way, neither extreme nor insipid in his interpretations, just very, very good. Lisiecki was playing two Beethoven piano concertos that night—both the Second and the Fourth—and since the latter is my favorite of the five, I was thrilled to get to hear it in these circumstances. I had a great seat, hanging over the stage on the left-hand side, so I could watch not only the pianist’s hands, but also his sweetly attentive facial expressions as he turned to watch the conductorless orchestra in between his own passages. Meanwhile, the audience had begun to realize what it was being treated to: about 10 bars into Lisiecki’s first entrance, I turned to my nearest neighbor (a middle-aged German stranger) and discovered that we both had the same raised-eyebrows expression on our faces; by the first intermission, my neighbor was pounding the railing in enthusiasm, while I and the rest of the gallery clapped our hardest; and by the end of the concert, the whole auditorium was roaring its approval in a very un-German, unrestrained way.  They were right, too. It was the kind of evening I remember from my first days in Berlin, back in 2003, when hearing great music played this well made me feel…not exactly that everything was going to be all right (because no art can assert that without lying), but that I could somehow bear whatever was going to happen, as long as music like this existed to keep me company.

Wednesday night was the closest thing to a sure thing in my schedule: an intimate performance by the amazing baritone Christian Gerhaher and his longtime pianist friend, Gerold Huber, in the small hall, the Kammermusiksaal, of the Berlin Philharmonic. I had originally planned to take along both Martin and Barbara, but she wasn’t well enough to come out that night; she urged us both to go, however, and said she would happily stay home watching crap Regency romances on TV, something she can’t get away with when Martin is present. Martin himself is not usually a lieder fan (neither is my husband—I often have to attend such things alone), but in this case the performance was so pure, so beautiful, and so instinctively collaborative that he was won over completely. The program alternated between the relatively old (Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Alban Berg) and the absolutely contemporary (two works by a living composer named Wolfgang Rihm, both written precisely for this duo), and though I didn’t love all the pieces equally, I loved the simple, straightforward presentation and the depth of feeling that was conveyed. Gerhaher was the antithesis of histrionic—he simply stood by the piano, occasionally lifting a finger or two from the hand that rested on it—and Huber matched him perfectly at every turn; the newspaper critics called their relationship “osmotic.” (The German reviews also focused—a bit too heavily, I thought—on the fact that two other major figures in Berlin music, Thomas Quasthoff and Max Raabe, were there in the small audience for this performance.) The Kammermusiksaal is small enough and cunningly designed enough so that you actually feel as if you are at a house concert, even though hundreds of people are in the room, and that too was a great part of the pleasure—as if these two old friends, wonderful musicians both, had simply invited us along to hear what they were working on these days.

I had been looking forward to the Thursday opera performance for months, and so was the rest of Berlin, apparently—it had been completely sold out for weeks. This was a new production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie at the recently remodeled Staatsoper, with musical direction by Simon Rattle, sets, lighting, and costumes by the renowned Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and choreography and direction by someone called Aletta Collins. In the event, there was no direction, and the choreography was the usual atrocious Berlin garbage (agonistic Wayne-McGregor-like poses and gestures that were utterly unsuited to the lightly tripping Rameau rhythms), but the real villain of this piece was Eliasson. I guess he had never seen an opera before: there’s no other explanation for how his darkened, spotlight-pierced, self-aggrandizing set and utterly inhuman costumes could have struck him as a good idea, given that they literally prevented the characters—including the two lovers—from visibly connecting with each other. The music was predictably lovely (Rattle did a fine job conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester), and some of the voices were excellent, but if you kept your eyes open—as one does at trainwrecks and other similar events—you couldn’t really enjoy the show. Martin alluded to it, accurately, as “Rameau in Las Vegas,” and as we were leaving the Staatsoper building (which is, by the way, even more wonderful than ever in its remodeled state), he taught me a useful term invented by the nineteenth-century Schlegel brothers:  Unkritisierbarkeit des Schlechten, or “Too bad even to be criticized.”

Friday’s performance (which Barbara was finally well enough to attend) again took us back to my beloved Philharmonie, this time to the large hall, where we were hearing Valery Gergiev conducted the always-terrific Berliner Philharmoniker itself. That—the autocrat meeting this notoriously self-assertive orchestra—promised to be interesting enough, but the interest was enhanced, or at any rate complicated, by the strangeness of the program. Gergiev had picked four pieces in a row—Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, large excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel and Prokofiev’s Cinderella, and finally Stravinsky’s Firebird—that were all scores to dances. It made for a fascinating combination, and it also stretched the Philharmoniker players beyond their usual comfort zone, which tends more toward the German classics and the wild post-moderns. Here they were forced to become intensely and enthusiastically Russian at times, and that was quite something to see and hear—as if they were inside and outside at once, going through the proper motions and then being won over, themselves, by the music. It was far from the best performance I’ve ever heard at the Philharmonie (those were all conducted by Rattle, and there were many of them); but it was thrilling in its own way.

On Saturday night I went alone to an opera that Barbara and Martin declined to come to with me, but only on the grounds that they had already seen it twice. They predicted I would love it, and they were right. It was Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges, performed in German at the Komische Oper, which is the old East-Berlin venue that has always translated works into the local tongue. I had actually seen half of this opera performed in its original Russian at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Opera House (and I only left at intermission because I had to interview a Shostakovich source: otherwise I would happily have stayed for the whole thing), but the German version at the Komische was, if anything, even better. From the minute the squabbling chorus members appeared onstage at the beginning—clad entirely in white, with whitened faces and white gloves, like marble statues or solid ghosts—I knew I was in for an intelligent, hilarious treat. It’s a great, self-mocking opera to begin with (the Prologue argues about whether it should be a comedy, a drama, a romance, or a farce; the scariest of the several villains is a cook; and the love-interest actually does emerge from an orange), but in this case the direction had made it into something more: a commentary on how ridiculous opera is, combined with a childlike delight in ridiculousness and make-believe. The singers were all excellent actors who could also move beautifully (there was more choreography in this opera’s little finger than in the whole of Thursday night’s Rameau), and the sets—which were carried on and off by the performers—were, like the costumes, so brightly, beautifully colored that one felt one was looking at a child’s picture-book. It had that quality I have rarely seen outside a Mark Morris opera: a combination of “let’s put on a show” enthusiasm with a totally professional level of skill. My hat comes off to everyone involved, including the director, Andreas Homoki, the conductor, Ainars Rubikis, the fine Komische musicians, and most of all the terrific singer-actors, not one of whom I’ve ever heard of before, and all of whom I hope to see onstage again soon.

 

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A Month of Great Piano

Posted on November 10, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

The piano is not my instrument, normally. I don’t just mean I never learned to play it (though that too is true: my childhood music lessons were on the violin). What I really mean is that I don’t seek out piano concerts the way I do, say, string quartet concerts or other kinds of string-based performances. I am used to thinking of the piano as a relatively impersonal instrument, compared to the human voices of violins, violas, and cellos.

So it was just by luck—the geographical luck of being in New York, and the professional luck involved in getting press seats or cheap tickets—that I managed to hear, over the course of three weeks, a dozen of the most interesting pianists performing today.

The series started on October 19 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, where I heard Igor Levit for the first time. Friends had recommended his playing highly, and I had even met him at a dinner party once (he is, among other things, a masterful raconteur of Jewish jokes), but I was still not prepared for how irresistibly moving his performance would be. The program—a Brahms transcription of a Bach partita, a Bach-inspired piece by Busoni, plus one work by Schumann and two by Liszt—all derived from his recent album, Life, and it all felt immensely personal in his hands. (This was even more true of the thrilling encore, Frederic Rzewski’s “A Mensch,” which I had never heard before and will now permanently associate with Levit’s inspired performance.) Without any distracting mannerisms or excessive emphasis, and with great thoughtfulness throughout, Levit managed to make the piano into a deeply expressive and delicately tender instrument.

A mere six days later, on October 25, I was present in the same hall when Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich (who are partners onstage as well as off) gave their remarkable performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’amen. The first half of the two-piano program (Bartok, Ravel, Birtwhistle) was fine—probably better than fine—but it was the half after the intermission which galvanized the audience, including me. I have heard this great Messiaen work played before, and I knew it was probably going to be good, but I have never before felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck during certain passages. I am not kidding: that eerie sensation, which I always considered a metaphor, in this case became so literal that I briefly glanced around the hall to see if someone had opened a door and let in a draft. In animals, I know, this physiological reaction signals alertness to danger, a sense of guardedness and fear. What is it about a piece of music that can reach to those depths? Whatever it is, the Messiaen as played by Aimard and Stefanovich had it—not to mention a hundred other shades of emotion as well. You could be a staunch atheist, as I am, and still feel that the music gave you a brief glimpse of the world to come.

A more earthly but still delightful event took place two days later at Merkin Hall. On the afternoon of Sunday, October 28, about thirty musicians gathered together to give a 70th birthday concert for the cellist Fred Sherry, who is a much-loved figure in the New York chamber music world. Tickets were available to the public for a mere $20 and were free to students (that was very Fred, too), so naturally the hall was filled, but so many people seemed to know each other that it felt more like an intimate house concert than a public event. Among the noted pianists who took the stage, both solo and in concert with others, were Peter Serkin, Ursula Oppens, Alan Feinberg, Jeremy Denk, and Anne-Marie McDermott. (Among the non-pianists were the cellist Leila Josefowicz, the clarinetist Richard Stolzman, the JACK Quartet, and other musicians of that calibre.) The whole event was so thrilling, so touching, and so only-in-New-York that my main emotion was gratitude at being present for this terrific gift (a gift that Fred Sherry, who sat right across the aisle from me, was clearly thrilled at receiving). But I also had time to take note of the fact that my monthly great-pianist count had suddenly jumped through the roof.

And I still had four concerts to go!  On November 1, I was lucky enough to hear the Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire perform Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. I had gone for the Mariinsky, but I came away feeling that Freire—a pianist’s pianist, one whose self-effacing manner and phenomenal skill have endeared him to generations of musicians and audience members—was the real discovery. I love the Brahms anyway, but this pianist brought things out that I had never heard before, and he did so by collaborating beautifully with the orchestra, not by strutting his own stuff.

The very next night, I heard a resolutely modern piece that was entirely new to me—Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories for piano solo”—performed by New York’s own Pedja Muzijevic as part of the annual White Light Festival. Held at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, which co-sponsored the event, the November 2 concert also included a simultaneous dance performance by the Catalan dancer Cesc Gelabert. Gelabert is an interesting dancer and choreographer, but in this case it seemed to me that the star of the show was Muzijevic, who gave extra meaning to the word “piano” by rendering Feldman’s one-hour work in a phenomenally soft, quiet way. Partly because of the dramatic setting, it felt as the pianist was pulling each single note out of the silence and showing it to us before letting it lapse back into its native inaudible state.

This was immediately followed by a Paul Lewis concert—always likely to be a high point of any piano month. On November 3 he was appearing courtesy of the People’s Symphony Concerts series at Washington Irving High School: an excellent series in that the tickets all cost $15, though the environment can be somewhat less-than-excellent in terms of acoustics. Still, no one was complaining about the sound quality in this case. Lewis’s solo concert, which ranged from Brahms to Haydn to Beethoven and back to Haydn (with an extra fillip of Beethoven Bagatelle as the encore), was satisfyingly terrific from start to finish.  He has a way of engaging with the audience through subtle glances and occasional smiles that welcome you into his view of the music: you can tell when he thinks a passage is witty or tender by the expression on his face, and you can hear the same emotion coming through in his sensitive playing. Once again I was forced to acknowledge that the piano, in the right hands, can be as moving as my beloved strings.

I was able to get both piano and strings in the final concert of my three-week series, the November 8 encounter at Zankel Hall between the St. Lawrence String Quartet and the pianist Inon Barnatan. I’ve become a great fan of the California-based St. Lawrences ever since first hearing them at an intimate Baryshnikov Arts Center event some years ago, and I try to attend their concerts whenever I can; Barnatan, too, always struck me as incredibly talented when I heard him play with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. So I was looking forward to their collaboration on Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, a piece I hold very dear. What I couldn’t have predicted was how skillfully the first half of the program—Haydn’s strangely modern String Quartet in G Minor, Beethoven’s darkly antic Opus 135—would lead up to the Shostakovich. The whole performance, with and without Barnatan, felt of a piece, as if all five performers and all three composers (plus Schumann, whose great piano quintet supplied the encore) had banded together to offer us a single jolt of powerful emotion. That emotion partook of joy and pessimism, wit and sadness, wild adventurousness and deep respect for tradition, individuality and communion—everything, in short, that makes music such a central and important part of life.

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Fall for Dance

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

Every fall, over the course of two or three weeks, New Yorkers get treated to a generous helping of dance at the hallowed City Center. This Moorish extravaganza on West 55th Street was the original home of the New York City Ballet, and it is still a great place to see dance. What is particularly appealing about the “Fall for Dance” programs is not just their range—which could include ballet, modern, hip-hop, and flamenco in a single evening—but also their price: for $15 (plus some rather hefty fees), you can get a ticket anywhere in the house. The result is an audience that is young, ethnically varied, and wildly enthusiastic about everything it sees. Because it’s such a good deal, though, you have to buy tickets the first day they are offered if you want to be sure of getting your first choices. This year I managed to snag tickets to Program 2 and Program 4, and I was more than satisfied with the results.

Program 2 gave me a chance to see a good portion of Pam Tanowitz’s New Work for Goldberg Variations, which I had missed when it premiered last year, and I was grateful not only for the dance, but also for the performance by Simone Dinnerstein which the dance was designed to surround and accompany. I was also thrilled to see a new piece by Justin Peck, Sleep Well Beast, that he choreographed for himself and the remarkable dancer Patricia Delgado (who also happens to be Peck’s fiancée). The duet was so perfectly suited to the two performers that it felt as if they were making it up spontaneously, yet so difficult to execute correctly that they must have spent weeks rehearsing it. Delgado is the best kind of ballerina—delicate yet strong, flexible yet precise—and I sincerely hope we get to see more of her in New York. The two pieces that came after the intermission were less noteworthy (Paul Taylor’s Promethean Fire was a particular disappointment, largely because of its bombastic Stokowski orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, a score which sadly matched the bombastic choreography). But by then I had more than had my money’s worth, so I didn’t mind.

Program 4 was, if anything, even more satisfying. It began with a Frederick Ashton duet (excerpts from Rhapsody) performed by Alina Cojocaru and Herman Cornejo. For me, any chance to see Cornejo perform these days is not to be missed, and from my excellent first-row mezzanine seat I could actually see his warm facial expressions as well as his precise gestures. Then came a Lucinda Childs work called Canto Ostinato, subtly and skillfully performed by a Dutch group called Introdans. This modernist work for four dancers was so minimalist as to verge on tedium, if you were looking only for excitement; but I found it incredibly soothing to watch the minor changes executed over time in such a bracingly intelligent manner. Neither of these pleasant experiences, however, prepared me for the wonder that was to follow: Jennifer Weber’s reimagining of Petrushka, with Lil Buck (the great inventor and purveyor of Memphis jookin’) in the title role. I expected to love Lil Buck on his own, but I was not prepared for how beautifully the full trio worked together: the liquid-boned Buck bringing new pathos to the puppet role; the wonderful Tiler Peck exhibiting a hard, sharp grace as the ballerina he loves; and, in the villainous role of the strongman who steals her, an amazing ballet dancer (new to me) named Brooklyn Mack. This was the kind of dance that leaves you breathless—it left me breathless, anyway, as each new episode unfolded, with every performer embodying his or her role to its fullest extent, and all three dancing (sometimes in unison) in a style that managed to combine ballet, jookin’, modern, and god knows what else. I can’t say anything better than to say that the performance gave new life and meaning to the Stravinsky score, and I only wish it had gone on longer.

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The Good Teslas

Posted on September 20, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

Forget Elon Musk and his super-fancy cars. He may be making an embarrassing hash of his company at the moment, but he is not the only claimant to the name.  There is quite a wonderful group of string players operating under the name of the Tesla Quartet, and I was lucky enough to hear them last night at a BAC Salon.

The Salons (as their progenitor and programmer, Pedja Muzijevic, announced before the concert last night) have been going for thirteen years now, and I have been attending them since practically the beginning. On each occasion, a small number of audience members paying nominally for their tickets arrive at the fourth-floor Howard Gilman Performance Space of the Baryshnikov Arts Center and are treated to something special. It is almost always chamber music, and the performers can vary from the famous to the relatively unknown, but the playing is always at a very high level. In this case, the programming as well was superb, with a strange and fascinating vocal piece by Berio sandwiched between two string quartets: Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 1 from 1917, and Debussy’s sole String Quartet from 1893. What could be nicer than hearing an hour of complicatedly entrancing, beautifully performed music in an intimate setting? Nothing, if you ask me.

The 1966 Berio piece, Sequenza III for solo voice, is exactly the kind of thing that Muzijevic excels at digging up. I would be surprised if any of us in the audience had heard it before—especially since it requires an extraordinarily adept soprano, one who can shriek, gurgle, cackle, mutter, gesture, and declaim as well as sing beautifully.  Fortunately Alexandra Smither, the young singer who took on the startlingly dramatic piece, was more than up to the job. I hope someday to see her onstage with Simon Rattle, who loves to employ singers with her diverse talents.

The heart of the evening for me, though, lay in the two performances by the Teslas. I had not heard the Szymanowski live before, and I found it interesting and appealing, if a bit self-consciously odd in places. But since self-consciously odd was, in a way, the theme of the Berio, the first quartet set up the Smither performance perfectly. Still, it was only when we got to the Debussy, which I know much better, that I could appreciate how truly terrific the Teslas were. They were, for one thing, absolutely in sync with each other, able to pause heartstoppingly in unison and then begin the next phrase as if they were a single consciousness rather than four. The four players—Ross Snyder and Michelle Lie on violin, Edwin Kaplan on viola, and Serafim Smigelskiy on cello—were also masters of their respective instruments, something that truly came out in the notoriously difficult pizzicato passages, which in their hands were complex and rapid but also entirely, distinctly audible. It was a huge pleasure to submit myself to this glorious, unnerving piece of music once again, knowing this time that we were bound to arrive safely on the far shore. Only a quartet group as skilled and adventurous as the Teslas is capable of giving you this feeling—that you in the audience are sharing the risks and enchantments of the whole voyage with them, and not simply listening from afar.

 

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Serendipity

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

Part One: This part of the story begins in 2007, when I first heard a very young quartet group, the Vertigo Quartet, play Shostakovich’s Twelfth. I had heard all fifteen Shostakovich quartets in a cycle played the year before, during his centennial, and had loved them, but it was not until I heard the Vertigos’ rendering of the Twelfth that I decided to write a book about the composer and his quartets. I got in touch with the four young members of the Vertigo Quartet—all recent Curtis Institute graduates—and asked if I could talk with them about their attitudes toward that composer, and they kindly agreed. As a result, they appeared in my book, Music for Silenced Voices, even though the quartet group they played in had dissolved by the time the book came out.

The other three players dispersed all over the world, but the cellist, Nicholas Canellakis, became part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and also appeared frequently at Music@Menlo—two places where I could follow his career, which I proceeded to do. Whenever he saw me at one of his concerts, he would greet me as “the Shostakovich lady,” and I soon began attending concerts purely to hear him play, for he had become a very fine cellist indeed. Earlier this month, on August 2, I went down to Menlo Park to hear him play in two great pieces, the Brahms Piano Quintet and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, in the last Music@Menlo program of the season. In both cases, Nick (as I have come to think of him) was superb.

Part Two: This part of the story begins even farther back—possibly as early as 2000 or 2001—when I first became aware of a quartet group called the Pacifica Quartet. The first thing I heard them play was Beethoven—at a Columbia noon concert series, I believe—and then, in 2010, I also began listening to their Shostakovich. At that point I reached out to them behind the scenes, and when they played the full Shostakovich cycle at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, during the 2010-11 season, I was invited to appear with them at each concert, talking with one or more of the players about the quartets they were about to perform. Later we met up at Shostakovich concerts in Illinois and California, and ultimately I even joined them for a five-day appearance in Montreal, where we again did our joint Shostakovich routine. I became very attached to all four members of that quartet, and especially to the violist, Masumi Per Rostad, so I was a little disheartened to learn last year that he had left the Pacificas to take up an excellent post at the Eastman School of Music.

But recently, at that same concert where I heard Nick Canellakis play in the Brahms and the Schoenberg, I got news of Masumi Per Rostad. I learned from Milina Barry (whom I’d met because she was the PR person for both the Pacificas and Music@Menlo) that Masumi had gone freelance as a performer and was playing all over the country in various summer festivals. I was able to locate him, then, at a forthcoming concert in my general neighborhood (if you count the Napa Valley as part of Berkeley’s neighborhood), and so I instantly acquired a ticket to his end-of-August performance at Music in the Vineyards — a venue where I’d heard him many times when he was still with the Pacificas.

Part Three: Okay, here is where the serendipity comes in.  I noticed that Nick Canellakis was also scheduled to play that weekend at Music in the Vineyards. Great, I thought, two for the price of one! Since I was going to be away for the rest of the weekend, I could only go to the last performance of the season, on Sunday, August 26, which happened to feature Schumann’s Piano Quintet, one of my favorite pieces. The program didn’t say which works Masumi and Nick were scheduled to participate in (there were other cellists and violists involved in the concert), but I knew I’d get a chance to hear each of them play at least once.

The August 26 concert was held in the elegant upstairs cask room of the gorgeous Inglenook Winery, a vineyard that is now owned and run by Coppola family—perhaps the most comfortable and acoustically intimate of the spaces I’ve been to at Music in the Vineyards. As I came up the stairs to check in, I heard a group rehearsing in the performance space—and when I peeked behind the curtain, I saw that it included both Nick and Masumi.  But what they were playing was not the Schumann, but Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, which had been on the agenda for the Saturday night but had been relocated to Sunday for personnel reasons. As it turned out, my two favorites had not been scheduled to play together in the Schumann (which had been done the night before, with neither Masumi nor Nick), but they were both scheduled for the Brahms, along with the fine violinist Axel Strauss and the incredibly talented pianist Michael Brown. So if things had gone the way they should have gone, I wouldn’t have heard them play together.  “What luck!” I said to the man arranging the seats onstage when I learned about the switch. “Or fate,” he said. Indeed.

The Brahms Op. 60 that emerged that evening was truly one of the most wonderful chamber performances I have ever heard. The four musicians managed to merge their rhythms and styles in ways that are rare for festival groupings: it felt more as if they had been playing together for a long time, though with the kind of added excitement that can come from a sudden encounter with a thrilling new partner. The quartet seemed designed, in particular, to showcase Nick’s and Masumi’s talents, with the extraordinarily moving cello solo in the Andante movement and the heart-stopping passages on the viola in the Finale—not to mention the sudden shifts between pizzicato and bowing, between slowness and speed, between louder and softer passages, and between the instruments themselves as they carried various motifs, all of which allowed Canellakis and Per Rostad to strut their stuff. But “strut” conveys exactly the wrong feeling, because even as they shone brightly as momentary soloists, these two players stood out even more as modest, hardworking collaborators, joining together on just this one occasion to render the Brahms piece in all its overwhelming power.

I, of course, had nothing to do with their coming together in this way; and yet, because I had been following each of them for so long and was now getting to see them for the first time together, I felt somewhat like a proud dinner-party host who has finally managed to introduce two of her good friends to each other. It was as if the deeply personal and the transcendently impersonal had melded together to shape the perfect concert experience—so much so that even a warmly appreciative Brahms, smiling in his characteristically melancholy way, seemed to be sitting there at the dinner table with us.

 

 

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Russian Music

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

It’s not often you get to go to a chamber music concert of entirely unfamiliar pieces and have them all turn out to be good. But I had that experience last Saturday night at Music@Menlo’s “St. Petersburg” concert. The program even included two Shostakovich pieces I had never heard before—and that’s after writing a book about Shostakovich! One of them, granted, was the 1931 Impromptu for Viola and Piano, a two-minute piece that has been lost practically since its first appearance; but the other was the powerful “From Jewish Folk Poetry,” a 1948 composition which I had read about and never heard.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. The program started with a trio by Glinka written in 1832 and composed for piano, clarinet, and bassoon. It was lively and fun, but the most striking thing was how it foreshadowed in odd ways the jazz trios of the twentieth century. Next up came what I think might have been my favorite work of the evening: Anton Arensky’s Quartet No. 2 for violin, viola, and two cellos, written in 1894. Again, the instrumentation was slightly unusual (I’d never heard a two-cello quartet before), and this—with the marvelous cellist David Finckel’s help—lent a profound sonority to the already somber opening theme. There were moments of agile, festive rapidity in this twenty-five minute piece, which contained a number of alluring tunes, but it was that opening theme and its deep note of feeling that kept coming back. I thought it seemed slightly familiar—though I was sure I’d never heard anything by Arensky before—and at the intermission a more knowledgeable listener informed me that the same theme, derived from a Russian Orthodox chant, appears in both Mussorgsky’s Boris Gudonov and one of Beethoven’s Razumovsky quartets. So as it turned out, I had heard those familiar notes before.

After the intermission we had Mily Balakirev’s Octet for Wind, Strings, and Piano, which again was hugely pleasurable.  This time I had never even heard of the composer, much less the piece, but this spirited work from 1855 certainly established him in my mind. And then came the two Shostakovich works: the 1931 novelty, which is what had brought me to the concert in the first place, and the 1948 piece, written at a moment of maximum crisis in Shostakovich’s life. (His music had just been banned for being too abstract, and he had been told by Soviet officialdom that he needed to incorporate more folk music in his work. But Shostakovich, in his typically sardonic way, responded by borrowing his folk elements from the despised Jewish subculture—hardly the way to win back the apparatchiks’ hearts.)

The debut of the impromptu was less exciting than I expected, but that is my fault entirely. Since one of my favorite Shostakovich works—the Viola Sonata of 1975, probably the last thing he ever completed—has exactly the same instrumentation, I was expecting more than a bit of pleasant fluff.  Paul Neubauer was excellent on the viola and Wu Han performed the piano part admirably, but nothing was ever going to make this work more than it seemed on the surface: that is, an occasional piece designed for a theatrical interlude or an informal get-together by a hardworking twenty-five-year old composer.

The good thing, though, is that my mild disappointment set me up to receive “From Jewish Folk Poetry” with even more gratitude than I might normally have felt. Even if you can’t understand the words, the musical exchanges among the soprano, alto, baritone, and pianist are wrenching and terrifying; and when you learn that the lyrics are all about sick or dead children, hateful rebellious daughters, deserted fathers, old age, rural poverty, occasional sharp moments of joy, and other aspects of Russian-Jewish life, the poignance becomes even more intense. I was particularly struck by Gilbert Kalish’s understated but intense piano-playing and Sara Couden’s wonderful contralto voice, but the whole thing was terrific and indeed hair-raising in the way that only the best Shostakovich can be. It made a fitting end to a glorious concert.

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Summer Surprise

Posted on July 4, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

First of all, I apologize for the length of time between my last post and this one.  I’ve been in Scandinavia, a most delightful and enlightening place, which I previously knew only from decades of Nordic noir reading and television-watching. A full report will emerge eventually in book form; for the moment I just want to thank the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, the Swedish Embassy in Washington, and the Swedish Academy in Stockholm for the generous travel grants that made my trip possible.

It was with predictable culture shock that I returned to the hot, dirty streets of New York in the midst of our current administration’s worst depredations. Everything in this country is, of course, a mess at this point, and 98-degree days and bad subway service only exacerbate the general feeling of despair. I knew I would be escaping on July 4 to California (which, although it is not another country, often feels like it), so I decided to celebrate my last summer night in New York by going to Le Poisson Rouge on July 3.

The program consisted of Michael Riesman playing live piano to Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula. But this was not just any old film improvisation: it was a score by Philip Glass, first released in a version by the Kronos Quartet in 1999 and now reconfigured for solo keyboard.  After hearing it performed live by this stalwart and professional pianist, I can’t now imagine it done any other way.

The music managed to augment the film without in any way overpowering it. Browning’s stylishly designed black-and-white movie came into being shortly after talkies emerged, and it includes its own (rather primitive) spoken dialogue. Those speeches and other sound effects were for the most part still audible through the music, but they had been supplemented with subtitles, which meant that we could enjoy the music even when it was at risk of drowning out the talk. Glass has always been good at soundtracks (his Thin Blue Line music is, to my mind, essential to the creepy feel of Errol Morris’s great movie), and in this case his trademark frenzies of repeated, cascading notes went perfectly with the supernatural plot and the highly mannered performances. Bela Lugosi was quite perfect as the augustly threatening, piercing-eyed Count, but for me the plum role turned out to be Renfield, a part that allowed Dwight Frye first to appear as a proper English gentleman and then as a raving lunatic serving his vampiric “Master.” I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, musically and cinematically—it was both a hoot and a serious wonder—and I would have been satisfied if the evening had ended with our avid applause for the performer.

But then, on top of that, we got a special treat. For as Reisman gestured gratefully toward the audience, who should appear up on stage with him but Philip Glass himself, beaming and embracing the performer?  Only in New York, I thought, would one of the major American composers of the past eighty years show up at a little club with fewer than a hundred audience members to watch and hear his movie score being played once again. Now that’s what I call a good kind of culture shock.

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Gerhaher

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

It never ceases to amaze me that critics can respond to a specific performance with such different takes. Sometimes I have trouble believing I was at the same concert as these other guys.

This morning’s Times review of the recent appearances in New York by Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra is a case in point. Nobody is a bigger fan of Rattle than I am, and I agree that his version of Mahler’s Tenth with the LSO (I missed, alas, their Ninth) was indeed splendid—as splendid as I expected it to be, having heard him do the same piece with the Berlin Philharmonic a few years ago. But to say, as James Oestreich did this morning, that their performance of Das Lied von der Erde was a low point in the three-concert series, a veritable “disappointment,” beggars the imagination. What could Oestreich possibly have wanted if Christian Gerhaher’s deeply moving singing did not send him into chills of quiet ecstasy?

What Gerhaher did, and what Rattle—by toning down the orchestra to a mere whisper at times—allowed him to do, was to return the song to its essential meaning, as both a celebration of life on earth and a poignant farewell to it. The tenor, Stuart Skelton, handled most of the celebratory part, as he was meant to do; but it was in Gerhaher’s delicate, uncanny, piercingly beautiful rendering of the song’s darker and more melancholy aspects that Mahler’s genius emerged most strongly. Particularly in the final section, “Der Abschied” (literally, “Farewell”), this marvelous baritone’s precise diction and riveting control of his breath and voice made the account of this parting—of friend from friend, of man from world—much more heartbreaking than it normally is. Assisted by the supertitles, and craning our ears to hear Gerhaher’s every word, we in the audience were able to glean an unusually full sense of how much the earth’s glories can mean to those who sense their own mortality. Can this possibly be the same Mahler piece that Oestreich labeled “a work that little rewards understatement or great subtlety”?

Gerhaher did not sing softly because he has a weak voice suited only to intimate lieder, as Oestreich implied. I have heard him fully take over the stage in the Berlin Staatsoper’s Tannhäuser, so I know what he can do when he wants to sing at full strength. But here he was doing something that, in its own way, was even more dramatic. He was inhabiting the role of the-man-saying-farewell as if he were not only an acclaimed singer but also a skilled actor—an actor with the ability to put across every meaningful word even as he mused quietly to himself. We who sat in Geffen Hall on that Sunday afternoon, the privileged bystanders to this contemplation, knew full well that we were hearing something we would likely never hear again: a singer voicing these words as if he were in the process of inventing them, and the music to go with them, at that very moment. This illusion, if that’s the right word, was supported in full by the orchestra and the conductor, who collaborated in suggesting that the whole overwhelming performance was coming out of that one slight body. No wonder we all sat silent after it was over, as Gerhaher’s final “ewig…ewig…” faded into the air—his sung phrase explicitly evoking eternity even as it demonstrated its own evanescence.

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Great Performers

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

In this wintry New York spring, I have thus far managed to attend two Great Performers concerts at Lincoln Center. Both of them, not at all to my surprise, completely lived up to the series name.

The first, on March 28, featured my favorite violinist, Christian Tetzlaff, playing four of the six Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin. I have heard him do the whole sequence twice at the 92nd Street Y, and each time it was one of the most thrilling musical experiences of my life. If this Alice Tully event felt slightly less overwhelming, that may have been because the gargantuan physical effort required to play all six had been reduced to the length of a normal chamber-music concert. But by laying aside the marathon aspects, Tetzlaff in a way made it easier for us to pay attention to the straightforward musical pleasures. With the first sonata and partita omitted, we were able to leap directly into the glories of the middle section, which ended just before the intermission on what many people consider the high point of the whole series, the Chaconne of Partita 2. Certainly this is an amazing movement, composed as if for two or three violins but with only one player sounding all the notes on his verifiably solo instrument. It was as if Bach said to himself, “I think I’ll compose something impossible and then see if someone comes along in the next four hundred years who is able to play it well.”

Yet even at this most difficult, strenuous point in the concert, Tetzlaff’s playing seemed effortless—not slight or facile in any way, but also not diligently self-congratulatory. It felt completely natural: an odd thing to say, I realize, about a performance of such supernatural delicacy and tonality, but that is the impression Tetzlaff always leaves me with, a sense that the music is emanating without strain from his own body. And when he reached the final two movements of the third partita—a Bourrée and a Gigue that his swaying body and tapping feet visibly confirmed as dance rhythms—we could feel the joyous triumph of this partnership, a pairing between player and composer so closely matched that one could no longer tell the dancer from the dance.

Something oddly similar happened in the second Great Performance, on April 19, where the singer and the pianist, Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, exhibited their own uncanny capacity to merge their separate artistic natures into one.  Instead of Bach, we had high German romanticism, in the forms of songs by Schumann and Brahms based on poems by Heinrich Heine. In my youth, I would have scoffed at the idea that I would ever have enjoyed a concert of German lieder. I think my youthful attitude was similar to Lucky Jim’s when he complained about “filthy Mozart”: not so much a philistine response as a sign of class resentment. (The two may overlap, but whereas philistinism is almost always thoughtless, class resentment can be and often is well-grounded.) But what Padmore cleverly did, in this case, was to defuse some of that class element by speaking at the beginning about the people behind these pieces. By lending character and plot to the evening—in terms of Clara Schumann’s relationship with both men, their personalities in relation to hers, and the very different moods they evoked from Heine’s poems—he made the performance something other than a mere lieder recital, something more human and easily graspable. And that is how he embodied the songs as well: as living documents representing intense relationships, between man and woman, between artist and self.

Padmore’s introduction also served to emphasize the piano’s important role in these pieces, by pointing out that Clara, the noted pianist for whom they were written, would have sounded them out in the privacy of her own home, and that Brahms himself performed on the piano in some of the early concerts. In doing so, he shifted the sense of the evening from a tenor recital with accompanying pianist (which is the way these things are so often billed) to a full collaboration between singer and musician. And Paul Lewis more than lived up to that expectation, lending his own aura of quiet charm and infinite craftsmanship to the evening’s performance. Often it would be left to the pianist to finish the songs, to elaborate their emotions and then delicately close them down. One of my favorite examples of this occurred during the first half, in Schumann’s Liederkreis, where the singer stands silent as the piano sounds three repeated notes in an ending. Lewis drew out the spaces between the notes, as if to tease us with the possibility of endlessness—and then, between the second and final notes, he flicked a glance toward us, as if to say, “Are you ready and waiting now?” Padmore’s grin at this point was one signal of their intense solidarity; another, more solemn instance occurred at the end of the concert, when the tenor, having had his impassioned say in the Dichterliebe, stood in silence, his clenched, upraised fist gradually opening and dropping to his side, as the piano had the final wrenching word.

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Heaven

Posted on March 26, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

One of the high points of my spring visits to Carnegie Hall, these past few years, has been the annual performance by the English Concert of a Handel opera. It is the closest thing to a sure-fire ticket there is, and this year’s was no exception. The opera was Rinaldo, and it was performed concert-style, as always (which means with a certain amount of tremendous acting and some clever costuming), under the expert guidance of Harry Bicket.

We didn’t get Joyce Di Donato this year, but in her place we had the wonderful countertenor Iestyn Davies in the title role—not to mention two other up-and-coming countertenors, Jakub Josef Orlinski and James Hall, in supporting parts which they executed beautifully. Three countertenors onstage at once! This alone was enough to give a rare verve to the production. But then in addition we had Luca Pisaroni, one of my favorite bass-baritones, in the villainous but strangely sympathetic role of Argante; the always-trustworthy mezzo Sasha Cooke in the central pants part of Goffredo; and two new-to-me but equally stellar sopranos, Jane Archibald and Joelle Harvey, as the wicked sorceress and the ingenue princess. That these two were both costumed in clingy, sparkly gowns (the sorceress’s gray and low-cut, the princess’s modest and white), and that the oppositional figures of Rinaldo and Argante wore similar-looking suits, suggested to me that somebody—Bicket is my guess—had a hand in the costuming as well as the other minor but important bits of staging.

Rinaldo, like most Handel operas, features a complicated, patently incredible plot, this time involving the Christians fighting against the Saracens along with a great deal of supernatural collaboration on both sides. (When the wicked sorceress first appears, “She has come straight from Hell,” according to the synopsis—and Archibald played that characterization for all it was worth.) Love scenes turn on a dime, with betrayed lovers suddenly announcing they have stopped being angry and are now back in love. Shape-shifting maneuvers (as in a screwball comedy like The Lady Eve) result in true feelings being revealed by mistake. The villainous characters get converted to Christianity in the last five minutes of the show. All this lends a certain comic element to the piece which would not, I think, have been invisible to Handel himself. The result is a lighthearted, unrealistic romp which nonetheless exposes deep and tender feelings. There is possibly no more beautiful aria in all of Handel, for instance, than the lament Rinaldo sings after he has lost his beloved princess to the wicked sorceress—and Davies did full justice to it, as he did to every grief-stricken or triumphant moment of his performance.

The semi-screwball element was enhanced rather than damaged by the fact that Luca Pisaroni and Iestyn Davies seemed to be acting in two different movies—the bass villain practically twirling an invisible operatic mustache as he grandly lorded it over the stage, while the countertenor hero adopted a much more realistic mode, like an everyday guy caught up in an extraordinary situation. In fact, all the shadings and nuances of every performance contributed something to the whole, and that included outstanding bits by the musicians: Tabea Debus’s birdlike solo on the sopranino recorder, for instance, or Tom Foster’s marvelous (and possibly improvised) unaccompanied excursion on the harpsichord, the like of which I have never heard in any opera before. Throughout, as is always the case in Handel, the voices melded beautifully with the music assigned to them, and thanks (again) to Harry Bicket’s skilled leadership, the period instruments never overpowered the singers. Supertitles enabled us to follow the plot and also to understand the humorous elements of the staging, which was crucial to the afternoon’s total enjoyment—though I guess you could have listened with your eyes closed to the whole three-hour-plus performance and enjoyed it nearly as much, since the purity of the music was galvanizing and unceasing. It was, in short, heaven.

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