Ballet in New York

Posted on May 24, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

In a kind of battle of the bands spanning Lincoln Center Plaza, the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre both had their spring seasons running at nearly the same time during the past few weeks. I attended four of these performances—two at NYCB, two at ABT—and while ballet still seems to be a functioning art form in this city, none of the four programs was classifiable as a complete success.

I think the most pertinent thing I can say about the first NYCB program is that I’ve already forgotten three out of the four ballets. Hallelujah Junction, choreographed by Peter Martins to music by John Adams, was predictably tedious; I figured the live piano music (played by Cameron Grant and Alan Moverman) would be the best part of it, and I was right. Gianna Reisen’s Judah, also to Adams, was marginally better, as was Matthew Neenan’s The Exchange (to music by Dvorak), but I will be just as happy if I never see either again.

My real reason for attending that May 1 show was to see Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH again, and it indeed justified the whole expedition. This piece, to Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto, is one of the first things Ratmansky ever choreographed for an American company (it premiered in 2008), and it remains one of his best. The mood of the piece—with its gestural references to Soviet athletics, its charming solo, duo and particularly group compositions, its brief allusions to Russian folk dance and other forms outside ballet, and most of all its unusual combination of irony, wit, and risk—is so finely balanced between pure pleasure and something more complicated that I would have to watch it a hundred times to pin it down. And the collaboration between living choreographer and dead composer is so intense, so visceral, that one feels, upon coming out of it, not only that Ratmansky understood Shostakovich completely, but that Shostakovich, in a fit of uncanny prescience, also understood Ratmansky completely.

That, for me, was the high point of the four programs, and indeed I was mainly interested, in the other three, in seeing what else Ratmansky could do. This meant that the second NYCB program, though far better otherwise than the first, had no high points, since it had no Ratmansky. It did include an interesting if minor Jerome Robbins work, A Suite of Dances, which I found gripping mainly for how this solo has changed since it first premiered in 1994. It was designed as a rather fraught and highly interior piece—Robbins’s own psyche, set to Bach’s cello suites and transferred onto the body of Mikhail Baryshnikov—and that was how it was rehearsed and originally danced; I know this because I have obsessively watched the rehearsal tapes over and over, along with the tape of that first White Oak performance. But in the hands (and legs, and body) of the current dancer, Daniel Ulbricht, that anxiously contained quality, which may be the dance’s strongest element, utterly disappeared; it came across instead as a mere frippery, something light and frothy and easily tossed off.

Elsewhere on that May 12 program were two Balanchine numbers (including the grotesquely kitschy Western Symphony, which NYCB would do better to keep in permanent cold storage), a Justin Peck premiere called Bright, and a Pam Tanowitz premiere, set to Bartok’s Fifth String Quartet, called Bartok Ballet. The Peck was charming but slight; the Tanowitz (which was my real reason for choosing that program) was just the opposite. Bartok Ballet made no effort whatsoever to charm the ballet crowd, which is a relatively new audience for this serious, up-and-coming modern dance choreographer. Instead, Tanowitz almost literally dissected the music, rendering its buzzing complexities and folk-music allusions in frequent insect-like gestures of the arms, occasional Balkan-dance movements, and a nearly unending series of quick, rhythmically complicated steps. The piece never reached the level of what I would call dance—that lift-off feeling you get when the moves you are watching seem to enter your own body and carry you away on the music—but it was fascinating to watch and to think about.

I chose both ABT programs for their Ratmansky performances, and in fact each consisted entirely of his work, so I was perhaps too hopeful going in. I got my punishment squarely on the nose with the first concert, an evening-length performance of Petipa’s Harlequinade, as restaged last year by Ratmansky. If I tell you that this May 14 concert was even worse than Ratmansky’s 2017 confection Whipped Cream—and in most of the same ways—it may perhaps give you some idea of what was wrong with it. Both dances hark back in too many ways to the awful things the Kirov Ballet used to bring over here in the late twentieth century: that is, pieces of trashy choreography encased in horribly complicated costumes and sets but intermittently marked by moments of exquisite dancing. Whipped Cream at least had some truly comic moments and a few brief sequences of great dance; I couldn’t find any of that in Harlequinade, which began as pure pantomime and descended in the second act into endless waves of boringly repetitive court-style dancing. It was a positive relief when the evening ended.

The second Ratmansky program, on May 23, was better mainly because it contained three different selections (two of which I had seen before). The concert began with Songs of Bukovina, which would be a pleasant enough piece if someone else had choreographed it, but does not really employ Ratmansky’s incisive talents to the full. But it then moved on to On the Dnieper, a 2009 piece, set to Prokofiev’s score of that name, which I failed to appreciate fully when I first saw it. Now I can see that it is one of Alexei Ratmansky’s really excellent works, filled with true feeling and beautifully original movement, with not a false emotional moment from beginning to end. It is storytelling without pantomime, evocative gesture elevated in every case to dance, and the ABT dancers (who included, among others, Thomas Forster, Devon Teuscher, Catherine Hurlin, and Alexandre Hammoudi) did it full justice.

Unfortunately it was followed by The Seasons, a new Ratmansky piece, set to Glazunov, which had had its premiere at the season gala only a day or two earlier. Once again we were back in the territory of Whipped Cream and Harlequinade, with one eye always on the gala or family audience—down to the inclusion of young dancers from the ABT school (a device he also used in Harlequinade, with equally horrific effect). Perhaps I am the only person who feels this way, but what is really going on when grown men lift thinly clad little girls up in the air while the children spread their knees apart? If this kind of thing appeared in Mark Morris, it would be a purposeful commentary on child molestation, but here it seems marked by a willful obliviousness, which only makes it more disturbing. Ballet is bad enough already in terms of its highly fixed and (to me) frequently annoying gender roles; do we really need to watch this rigid behavior instilled in the impressionable young?

But enough of my ranting—you want to know about the dance. Reader, it was tedious beyond belief. Rarely have forty minutes seemed so long. I would never have guessed that Alexei Ratmansky could have reminded me of Peter Martins, but here we were, back in the world of endlessly repeated gesture and routine balletic combinations with which I had begun in Hallelujah Junction.  Well, no, that’s unfair: Ratmansky could never descend to the level of Martins, even on his worst day, and there were bits and pieces of pleasure to be found even in The Seasons. But there was not a moment of true feeling in the whole thing—a flaw that became particularly apparent when it was scheduled right after the heartfelt and beautifully executed On the Dnieper. Ratmansky, I am pleading with you: Give up on that gala audience, with its bottomless desire for confections and whimsy and superficiality, and get back to the Shostakovich-like virtues—sharpness, hardness, originality, ironic wit, and a strong dash of melancholy—with which you wowed us in the past. Ballet needs you, but not in this present form.

 

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Two in a Row

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

This past weekend was rather incredible. On Friday night I attended a chamber music concert at Carnegie Hall‘s Zankel auditorium that featured my favorite violinist in the world, Christian Tetzlaff. And on Saturday night—again at Carnegie, but this time in the main hall—I heard my favorite pianist, Mitsuko Uchida, play Schubert. Each concert alone would have been great; in combination, they were almost stupefying.

Tetzlaff was playing with the Tetzlaff Trio, which consists of himself, his sister Tanya Tetzlaff on cello, and the excellent Lars Vogt on piano. To my mind, almost nothing could be nicer than a piano trio (I cannot think of a single piece in this form that I don’t like); and to hear musicians of this caliber play first the Schumann Piano Trio in D Minor and then the Dvorak Piano Trio in F minor was a real treat. I have heard the three of them before, in San Francisco, but not with this precise combination of pieces. Once again, though, I was struck with how delicately and effectively they varied the dynamics, from assertive loudness to passages so quiet you practically had to lean forward in your seat to hear them. (In San Francisco, when I commented on this unusual range to Tanya Tetzlaff, she answered, “Well, we’re just following the instructions in the score”—as if to suggest that no one else does.) And once again I was delighted by the fact that even when Christian Tetzlaff is sitting down, he can dance his way through a piece of music.  Simply in the way he tips his head or moves his shoulders, not to mention how he taps his toes, we are alerted to the rhythmic intricacies of whatever he is playing.  In this case, that came in particularly handy in the Dvorak movement that featured fast triplets on the two string instruments played against a different, slower beat on the piano: had I not had the violinist’s gestures before my eyes, it would have taken me far longer to pick up on the relationship between the two sets of rhythms. (And this is to say nothing of the way Tetzlaff can make his violin sing—almost as if it were a human voice, capable of moving from softly plaintive to thrillingly warm, all in the space of a few measures.) The whole evening was a pure delight, enhanced by the lovely bit from the “Dumky” Trio that the group played as a generous encore.

The pleasures of hearing Mitsuko Uchida play Schubert, and especially late Schubert, are less straightforward but perhaps even more intense. She too is great at dynamics, and also at tempo: the way she pauses, at times, until the last possible millisecond before delivering the next note can take your breath away. For her concert on Saturday, she gave us three Schubert sonatas: the A minor from 1817, the C Major (also called “Reliquie”) from 1825, and the B-flat Major from 1828. (The dates are important because Schubert’s career was so tragically short: he was only twenty when he wrote the first of these, and he died at age thirty-one, of syphilis, two months after completing the last.) The Reliquie was apparently left unfinished—it contains only two movements—but it still stands as one of Schubert’s most powerful, least accommodating works. Throughout its half-hour length, it rages relentlessly and repeats itself obsessively, leaving little doubt  (at least in my own mind) that at the time of its composition, Schubert was grappling with the news of his fatal illness. The final sonata, in contrast, seems to have come to terms with death: the four movements, lasting forty-one minutes in all, cover the entire range of emotion but focus often, and finally, on a kind of tender appreciation of human existence. It was not an easy-listening program (a fair number of demonstrably insane audience members left at the intermission), but it was a great one, and it left me with an even stronger affection for both the miraculously gifted pianist and the tragic, brilliant composer she represents so well.

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A Surprise at the Komische

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

The Komische Oper is the liveliest and least formal of Berlin’s three opera companies, and I have seen many great productions there over the years—most recently, in December, Andreas Homoki’s brilliantly directed Love of Three Oranges. So when I saw that Homoki had a My Fair Lady on this week, I jumped at the chance to get a ticket: social class is always one of his fascinations, and this well-known Lerner & Loewe work seemed tailor-made for that angle. A much-touted West Side Story, directed by Barrie Kosky, was also playing at the Komische later the same week; I decided to go to that too and round out my German experience of American musicals.

What’s unusual about the Komische, which was the “people’s opera” of the old East Berlin, is that all the productions are translated into German. I thought it would be difficult to render songs like “Just You Wait, Henry Higgins” and “The Rain in Spain” in German, and I was curious to see how they went about it. The answer was: skillfully, but not quite persuasively. Because my family owned the My Fair Lady album and I learned all the songs by heart as a child, I couldn’t help hearing the superior English lyrics in the background as the German ones were sung, and though that didn’t ruin the experience for me, it did make it odd. More problematic was the fact that the central tenet of My Fair Lady—the idea that a Cockney flower-girl can be converted into a high-born-seeming lady by altering her vowels and aspirated consonants—is utterly foreign to the Berlin notion of class, which is something at once more deeply rooted and less clearly audible. The German friend who accompanied me said that Katharine Mehrling, the actress playing Eliza Doolittle, did a good job of imitating the old Berlin working-class dialect, but that made no sense whatsoever of the songs in which Max Hopp, as Professor Henry Higgins, tried to get her to pronounce her Hs and As properly. And when Homoki tried to infuse his usual working-class enthusiasms into the plot—making Alfred Doolittle’s wedding scene, for instance, a symbol of honest vitality, set against the patent deadness of the aristocratic Ascot—that only made things worse. Watching these vain efforts, I realized (possibly not for the first time) that My Fair Lady is in fact about the superficiality of class, whereas the Brechtian productions I’ve loved at the Komische, Homolki’s among them, have at their core a belief in the essential nature of class. There is no such thing as essential nature in My Fair Lady—that is its point—and Homoki would have done better to use this musical as an occasion to mock, say, the typically British looniness of Brexit.

It was with fear and trepidation that I set out for last night’s West Side Story. I have always wholeheartedly loved the 1961 movie of this musical, with Robbins’s full-scale-genius dance numbers and Bernstein’s marvelous score; there isn’t a dud song in the bunch, and I often find myself humming the tunes in the course of my daily life. It is something I carry with me all the time—I just watched the movie again within the last year—and I dreaded seeing it eviscerated by a production that was touted as having all-new “testosterone-driven” choreography by someone named Otto Pichler. (This anxiety was not alleviated by the fact that I have hated almost all the dance I’ve ever seen on Berlin stages.) And then there was my profound disbelief in the idea that any Komische translation could ever replace the brilliant lyrics Stephen Sondheim came up with on this, his first venture into musical theater.

About the lyrics, I needn’t have worried: someone at the Komische (probably Barrie Kosky, the director) was smart enough to realize that the lyrics had to remain in their original English even though the dialogue was translated into German. So for the first time ever, I heard songs in this old East Berlin theater sung in a “foreign” language. I don’t know who decided that Sondheim was more important, more necessary, than Lorenzo da Ponte or W.H. Auden or the other verse-meisters they’ve translated in the past, but whoever it was was right: the cleverly rhyming, cunningly rhythmic words are essential to the music of this musical, and without them it probably would have gone down in flames.

The choreography, too, was about a hundred times—no, a thousand times—better than anything else I’ve ever seen in a German production. I don’t know about “testosterone-driven” (that would not have been my chosen descriptor, especially for the marvelous “I Like to Be in America,” which is danced entirely by women), but Pichler managed to update the gestures and make them his own without abandoning Robbins’s feel for the connection between street movement—that is, real-life movement—and dance. Time and again, I was thrilled by how beautifully the choreography matched both the music and the action. This was especially true of the charmingly silly dance set to “Officer Krupsky,” which actually made me laugh out loud, but it was true in a different way of the opening basketball sequence introducing the Jets and the Sharks, or the dance at the gym, rendered here as a kind of Berlin late-night club, complete with face masks, disco balls, and heavily booted women. That we couldn’t always tell Jets from Sharks felt strange at first—their skin colors and clothing and hair styles were pretty much the same, so you just had to keep track individually of who seemed to be antagonizing whom—but even that came to seem part of the point: the gang differences were being presented as socially constructed oppositions, not essential qualities.  (Among other things, this twist gave a whole new ironic meaning to Anita’s song “Stick to Your Own Kind,” delivered in a very touching scene in which Anita and Maria end up sitting side by side on a bed, their backs to us.)

Throughout, in fact, the gesture of enacted emotion was as powerfully choreographed as the dances themselves. Anita’s lively temperament (embodied in a terrific Sigalit Feig), Riff’s charismatic leadership (danced and played by the very talented Christoph Jonas), Maria’s girlish delight in her new love (portrayed by a luminous Alma Sadé), and Tony’s and Maria’s avid kisses were persuasive in a way they aren’t always in the film. Johannes Dunz, as Tony, was a million times better than the ghastly stick-figure in the movie, though his excellence only showcased the fact that it is necessarily the character of Maria who always dominates the plot and makes it her own.

In the final sequence, after Tony is killed and Maria accuses both gangs of being responsible for his murder, Kosky made the intelligent decision not to have the two gangs come forward to carry the body off jointly, in the traditional healing gesture; instead he left them helplessly frozen in a surrounding semi-circle of observers—mirroring us, the still, silent audience—as we all watched Maria mourn her dead lover alone. In Berlin they have the guts to carry the tragedy all the way through like this, and it is worth it: the tears I shed at the end of this production felt, if anything, more clear-sighted and less sentimental than the ones that always flood my eyes when the beloved movie reaches its close.

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Another Mahler’s First

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

Well, that’s Berlin for you. No sooner have I pronounced a favorite performance than another leaps in to take its place. I am now in a divided state, and wouldn’t know how to choose between listening forever to Daniel Harding’s terrific version of Mahler’s First Symphony and being permanently wedded to Vladimir Jurowski’s equally wonderful one. I’d ask, I suppose, to alternate between them, as I did in real life.

Two days after the Berlin Philharmonic performed the piece I praised so highly in my last blog entry, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, appearing at the lovely old Konzerthaus under the baton of the unbeatable Jurowski, played the same Mahler symphony to a sold-out crowd. Because I’d heard this conductor with these excellent musicians before, I knew to expect something special. In this case, the pleasure of the program’s second half was intensified by the mild disappointment of the first, in which Nicholas Angelich—billed as a Brahms expert—managed to tamp down and hold back the orchestra with his pedestrian rendering of the solo part in Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. Oh, well, I thought, the best is still to come.

A wild understatement. Jurowski’s Mahler One was recognizably the same piece as Harding’s (even to the offstage trumpeters in the early part, and the French horns who stood up to play their final blast near the end), so a certain amount of credit must obviously go to the composer. But something special and uniquely appealing emerged from the combination of this conductor, this orchestra, and this composer. Jurowski brings out a level of enthusiasm and individuality in these musicians that is thrilling to watch and hear; he also finds things in the music that no other conductor can find. In this performance, I was particularly aware of how intensely klezmerish the klezmer parts of the symphony sounded, thanks in large part to the brilliant solo oboist, but also to all the other supporting musicians. Jurowski has spoken before about his half-Jewish heritage, and that no doubt played a role here, but I couldn’t help feeling that his expertise in conducting Shostakovich also came into play. This was a Mahler who crossed geographical and temporal boundaries, who reveled in the strength of his youthful vision, who happily stole from everything and everywhere and yet gave it all back in the end.

I was so engrossed in the music that I didn’t even notice the goings-on in the parterre section of the symphony hall, which included a man collapsing from an apparent heart-attack and being carried out during the performance. Because of my seat (I was up in the first ring), my height (I am short), and my focused attention (I was hypnotized by the symphony’s repeated surges), I had no idea any of this was going on. But Jurowski evidently did. He kept glancing around to his right side with a worried expression on his face. I thought he was concerned about the second violins and I couldn’t figure out why, because they were playing beautifully; but a friend who had a better view said he was clearly worried about the sick patron. His facial expression, according to my friend, seemed to ask, “What should I do? Should I stop playing? A terrible thing is happening, and we are powerless to help. Do we just carry on?” The answering expressions on the faces of the musicians must have said yes, because carry on he did, with all the full force of his emphatic talent. It was the only gift he could give at that point to the rest of us, and our evident approval of his decision was signaled by the wild intensity of our collective ovation at the end.

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Discovering a New Conductor

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

Of course, I am very late to the show on this one, since Daniel Harding is already a known quantity in the classical music world. But I had never before heard him conduct live (never, to my knowledge, even heard a recording of his conducting) before last Friday night.

I chose that Berlin Philharmonic program, as best as I can recall, for three reasons. One was that it was the last program the orchestra was giving before they left town on their spring tour, and I wanted to drain that particular cup to its last drop. Another was that I had heard good things about Harding, and this would be a great chance to hear this youngish British conductor (he is now in his early forties) in the best possible setting. And the third was that the program—some Ives, some Berg, and Mahler’s First—looked really interesting.

Programming well is part of the conductor’s job, and I have long since learned to trust my favorite conductors in their choices and arrangements. The Berlin audience, which in this case seemed slightly younger and hipper than the usual Philharmonie crowd, seemed a little dubious about the Charles Ives piece— titled “Three Places in New England”—which opened the program, but after listening to the entire set, I was completely won over.  “Ives is America’s Shostakovich,” I whispered to my seatmate when it ended; “you can never tell when he’s kidding.” And, I should have added, even the kidding is always deadly serious: that too is like Shostakovich. In this case, the aura of celebratory patriotism and nostalgia that marked these three pastiche-filled bits of Americana was infused throughout with a darker, scarier tone that manifested itself mainly in the purposeful wrong notes (again, a Shostakovich strategy, though one that Ives clearly invented for himself, since Shostakovich was only a small child when this orchestral set was written).

When we got to the second work on the program—three excerpts from Berg’s opera Wozzeck, two of them featuring the soprano Dorothea Röschmann in the role of Marie—I realized that military music, ironically treated, was central to Harding’s unifying idea for the evening. Wozzeck himself is of course a badly treated soldier, the lowest of the low, and Marie, his lover, betrays him with a more glamorous drum major—an act for which he, now driven mad by his own mistreatment, murders her. I love this opera and have never seen a bad production, but since it always causes me to sympathize with the victimized Wozzeck to the exclusion of nearly everyone else, it was useful to be asked to contemplate Marie separately: first in her relatively joyful mode, against the background of a military march, and then in the scene when she is being murdered. It was the third section, though—a purely orchestral sequence, in which Harding brought out the immense complexities and subtleties of Berg’s music—that clearly won over this previously dubious audience. I imagine that they, like me, could now begin to see what Harding was getting at in putting these two near-contemporary composers—one American, one Austrian—together in a commentary on the allures and dangers of military music.

We all had a wonderful treat still in store for us, though. In the second half of the program, Harding and the Berlin Philharmonic brought out every echo, every source, every borrowed element in Mahler’s First Symphony (including, of course, the patriotic/military ones) while nonetheless making it feel entirely original. The conductor managed to forge a direct connection between the Berg and the Mahler by, in both of them, sending some of the brass players offstage to play behind the scenes—and he also managed to suggest a link between the dark ironies of the program’s first half and the various pastiches one could hear in the Mahler. Most of all, he made me understand, as I have never understood before, why the young Shostakovich adored Mahler’s music so much. (The affection must have included, for instance, an awareness of their shared passion for Jewish klezmer music, which was particularly noticeable among the other influences in this rendering of the Mahler.)

At this point, if I could only listen to a single Mahler symphony over and over, it would be Daniel Harding conducting Mahler’s First at the Berlin Philharmonic. The daring choices Harding made as a conductor (which he was able to carry out fully, thanks to having a precision instrument of an orchestra at his disposal) caused every sequence of the ambitious work—each delicate solo, each lengthy pause, each booming crescendo—to seem meaningful in a new way. When the long-anticipated conclusion finally arrived, with its clash of symbols sounding amidst the frenzied outpouring of strings, brass, winds, and drums, the normally sedate Philharmonie audience went wild. Their enthusiasm wasn’t just audible in the loud cries of “Bravo!” that accompanied the deafening applause, but also in the non-verbal whoops and yells, the likes of which I have never heard in this hall before. People were clearly thrilled to have witnessed this stupendous performance—and, to judge by the wide smiles on their faces, Harding and the musicians were thrilled to have given it.

 

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Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out, has accrued to me over the years through my attendance at Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken over the orchestra. He was already something like a rock star, in terms of local popularity, and I and my friends attended every concert we could. Over the years I have kept up with these musicians whenever they visited New York or whenever I visited Berlin, and the results were never less than thrilling.

Now that Rattle has officially left the Berlin Phil for the London Symphony Orchestra, that era has come to an end. Whenever he is brought back as a guest conductor, as he certainly will be over the years, the feeling is likely to be slightly different—more formal, perhaps, and with less taken for granted. (That may not be altogether a bad thing.) This March, which included performances of the St. John Passion and a symphonic program the week after, marked the first of such returns. And so here I am in Berlin as well, since I am not about to miss the chance to hear this great conductor at the head of the great orchestra he both shaped and was shaped by.

The St. John Passion—a revival of the original 2014 production—is actually the second major Bach collaboration between Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars, the first being the St. Matthew Passion from the year before. I adore the music of St. Matthew and I have loved almost every production I’ve seen of it, from Mark Padmore’s scaled-down version at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw to Jonathan Miller’s English-language version at BAM. The Sellars-Rattle production, which I saw in both New York and Berlin, was no exception; it may even have been a high point of the genre. For me, St. Matthew is a religious work that transcends religion, a passion-play that evokes all the contemporary human passions, and a magnificent choral work that depends equally on its orchestral music, so that each aspect finally becomes indifferentiable from the other.

The St. John Passion, on the other hand, is something much weirder and harder to grasp. As an atheist Jew, I have always felt somewhat more excluded from the emotions it generates, which depend heavily on sympathizing with the tortures Christ endured. Orchestrally, too, it is less fascinating and integrated than the St. Matthew, which excels at solo instruments matched with solo voices, and which generally is performed with two separate orchestras, each backing half of the chorus. St. John, though equally complex, relies much more on its singers, and particularly on the tenor who sings the Evangelist role.

Luckily, this Berlin production in March featured—as it has always featured—Mark Padmore. I will cross oceans, and have done, to hear Padmore sing just about anything, from German lieder to Handel operas to Czech and English songs. He excels not just at making you understand the words (even if they are in a language you don’t know), and not just at putting across the music through his straightforwardly appealing voice, but also at conveying emotion through his bodily stance, which is never histrionic yet always expressive. Nothing he has ever done is better than his Evangelist in this St. John. He almost literally knits the piece together—with his recitatives, which join up the others’ passages, and also with his physical expressions of caring and concern. Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance, Padmore’s St. John crouches by Christ’s side, or carefully shadows Pilate, or tenderly lends his support to Peter, or simply listens attentively to the chorus, all the while maintaining the look of a man immersed in what is happening around him. It is through him that even the least Christian among us can begin to apprehend the point of the suffering we are witnessing.

And he is helped, in this production, by a stellar cast of singers, including the outstanding members of the Rundfunkchor Berlin, who allowed themselves to be deployed to wonderful effect in Sellars’ typically wild crowd movements. I was disappointed, at first, to learn that Christian Gerhaher (also a singer for whom I will cross oceans) was being replaced by Georg Nigl, an Austrian baritone previously unknown to me. But I needn’t have worried. Nigl’s lovely voice is almost as delicately nuanced as Gerhaher’s, and his acting in this case was perfect— his Peter movingly distraught, his Pilate even better, with a combination of arrogance and self-doubt that ultimately made sense of the strange role. Camilla Trilling made a great Mary, and Magdalena Kozena an equally persuasive Magdalene (though I could have done without the excessively sexual gestures that Sellars always encourages her to perpetrate in this role). And no one could have made a more sympathetic Christ than the terrific baritone Roderick Williams. Even the bit parts, all played by Andrew Staples, were beautifully performed. It was like watching a play underlaid by the world’s greatest music—gripping from beginning to end, and satisfying in just about every way. All of us who were in the audience that night (and I speak for the strangers around me as well as my four friends) felt we had witnessed something special.

To go from a sublime work like Bach’s to the more routine excellence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century masters is necessarily a bit of a comedown, but in the hands of Simon Rattle, even a Schumann symphony can scale the heights. I was particularly happy to hear him conduct Schumann’s Second—which he did a week after the St. John—because I had just listened, on the preceding Monday, to a performance of that same work by the Philharmonie’s youth orchestra, playing under the baton of Jörg Widmann. I always love to hear and watch the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, a collection of incredibly talented, enthusiastic youngsters who end their concerts by hugging each other. But no youth group could live up to the professionalism of the Philharmonie itself, and Widmann (who is primarily known as a composer and clarinetist) is by no means the conductor Rattle is. Under Widmann, the Second was a single prolonged, excitable blast of sound, with softer, slower passages intervening only in the third movement; whereas under Rattle, practically each measure seemed to have its own dynamic, its own tempo. Because the orchestra knows him so well (and because they have played this piece together numerous times, in numerous places), Rattle barely had to move a muscle to evoke the perfect performance: it had all been done beforehand in rehearsals, and what we were seeing was merely the outward reminder, with a gesture here and there to bring out or tone down the sound.

Silences at the Berlin Philharmonic can be as telling as overt music. This had been especially noticeable in the St. John Passion, where the silences between the passages of recitative seemed almost as memorable as the lines themselves. For his final performance (for now) in this august concert hall, Rattle knew how to introduce such silences even into the oceanic Schumann symphony. It may not have been my favorite Rattle performance ever—I would be hard put to choose that one—but es war genug.

 

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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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