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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February Round-Up

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

Given that it’s the shortest month of the year, this February contained a surprising number of excellent performances. I will return to some of these at a later point, when I write about them (or aspects of them) in the print edition of The Threepenny Review. But for now I just want to take note of them, and of my delight in them.

Jonathan Biss and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra: The always-marvelous Biss was in town for three performances with this excellent chamber orchestra, on February 9, 10, and 11 at Cal Performances‘ Zellerbach Hall. I caught two of them and heard from friends that the third was equally good. All three featured a Beethoven piano concerto paired, in each case, with a commissioned piece that was meant to allude to, or match up with, or in some other way echo that particular concerto. I heard the 3rd (paired with a Timo Andres commission) and the 4th (paired with a Salvatore Sciarrino commission), and though I mildly enjoyed each of the new pieces, the stand-out in each show was obviously Biss’s performance of the Beethoven concerto. The Fourth, on the Saturday night, was particularly outstanding:  I have heard Biss do this before, but each time he seems to do it better, reminding me why it is my favorite of all the Beethoven concertos (even better than the Emperor, I think, which is the one I missed by not going on Sunday). The orchestra supported him beautifully, for which its young guest conductor, Joshua Weilerstein, deserved a great deal of the credit. Altogether, a hugely successful mini-series.

 

Mark Morris’s Pepperland: This new piece by my favorite choreographer was commissioned by (among others) the City of Liverpool to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The dance premiered in England last year, but I restrained myself from flying over for it, knowing that it would soon be out in America. Still, I couldn’t resist flying to Seattle for its first American appearance on February 16, 17, and 18. It was hugely worth it—not only because the dance and music are both terrific, but because Seattle is where Morris grew up, and the hometown crowd was thrillingly enthusiastic about him and about the piece. I saw the one-hour work twice, once on Friday and once on Saturday, and my overall impression is that this may be the most fun piece Morris has ever done. The dancing is lively and often humorous, the costumes are gorgeous, and the music—half adapted by jazz musician Ethan Iverson from six original Beatles songs, and half composed by Iverson to bridge the spaces between those songs—is a thorough-going delight. (In addition to the expected vocalist, keyboard instruments, and percussion, it also features a soprano sax, a trombone, and a bizarre twentieth-century invention called the theremin, which is a pleasure to watch as well as to hear.) It was Iverson’s and Morris’s clever idea to include “Penny Lane” among the songs, even though it does not actually appear on the Sgt. Pepper album—but as dance and as song, it was my favorite element of the evening, and I couldn’t get the tune out of my head for the rest of the weekend. I predict that this Mark Morris work will be a big hit in the other places to which it is coming—particularly in Berkeley, to which Cal Performances is bringing it in September.

The Danish String Quartet: These talented young guys—three Danes and a Norwegian—are always a pleasure to hear, and at their San Francisco Performances concert on February 19 they gave us an added dose of pleasure by including Scandianavian folk music in their program. In fact, the whole program—beginning with Bartok’s First Quartet, and ending with one of Beethoven’s Razumovskys—had been designed to reflect the connections between folk and classical music, and in this it hugely succeeded. Not that the Bartok and the Beethoven aren’t great in themselves; but to hear them played in this lively, sensitive fashion, by a group of people who truly have an international and democratic sense of what music can be, gave them a new edge. The folk tunes that bridged the two classical works—arranged for string quartet by the players themselves, and derived mainly from songs that are still sung in the far north and remote island sections of Denmark—were completely unfamiliar to me, and yet they gave me the same feeling of tuneful satisfaction that, say, “Penny Lane” and the other Beatles melodies had offered during the prior weekend. Whereas Pepperland is mostly upbeat, however, these Scandinavian songs all seem to be in a minor key, with chord combinations that might remind you of medieval religious music. Paradoxically (or perhaps not so paradoxically, given the present state of our nation and our world), that melancholy element was a great part of the evening’s charm.

Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, and Leonidas Kavakos:  I haven’t been to this yet—it’s happening tonight, again at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall—but how can this trio be anything but great?  In New York I would have to fight through crowds to hear them at Carnegie Hall, but here, thanks to the ever-brilliant Cal Performances, I can just walk down the street and get a terrific earful. The perfect capstone to a musically satisfying month.

 

 

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Musicians from Marlboro

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

I attend a lot of good chamber music concerts, but very few great ones. It’s hard to predict in advance which ones will be top of the line, because so many elements are involved. The musicians have to be good, of course, but even the best musicians can’t always produce the best results. This fall, for instance, I attended a performance of the Tetzlaff Quartet that was merely pleasant, even though Christian Tetzlaff is absolutely my favorite violinist in the world. Other factors—the programming, the nature of the collaboration, the mood of the audience (not to mention my own particular mood)—need to be just right for the experience to be transcendent. So I am always delighted when I happen on one of these occasions.

Last Sunday afternoon, the Musicians from Marlboro, presented at Hertz Hall under the auspices of Cal Performances, gave me everything I could have wanted. I would not have predicted this. The ensemble is not a long-term group, but a label applied to whatever musicians happen to have gathered for the latest Marlboro tour. The program (Beethoven, Penderecki, Brahms) looked nice but not particularly surprising. I was expecting pleasant. I got glorious.

The five musicians assembled for this concert—Emilie-Anne Gendron and David McCarroll on violin,  Daniel Kim on viola, Marcy Rosen on cello, and the amazing Anthony McGill on clarinet—were all more than up-to-snuff. But it was their collaboration that was stellar. Both the Penderecki and the Brahms featured a clarinet intertwining with strings, and in large part due to McGill’s tremendous breath control, the reed instrument neither overshadowed the rest nor faded beneath them. It was as if the clarinet sound and the viola sound (in the Penderecki), or the clarinet and the cello (in the Brahms), had been designed from the very beginning to go together, as twins and equals. And these musicians furthered that achievement by pausing or diminishing their volume or speeding up in such perfect unison that the five separate players felt almost like the digits of one hand—perfectly coordinated, perfectly matched.

The program, too, was extremely well thought out. It deployed the five players in increasing numbers, from Beethoven’s String Trio in C Minor to Penderecki’s Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio to Brahms’s familiar and beautiful Clarinet Quintet in B minor. To jump forward in time from Beethoven’s lovely 1798 piece to Penderecki’s profound 1993 work was not at all a leap too far; and to move backward to the magisterial Brahms at the end made all the sense in the world. Each piece was played with tremendous feeling and no showiness whatsoever; the musicians were serious but not stiff, intense but not florid. They knew their business, and their business was to allow each work’s own grand expressiveness to emerge intact.

I have listened to that Brahms quintet a hundred times, at least, but I have never heard it played this well before. And the rest of the audience seemed to feel the same way. That was part of the pleasure of the concert: the sense that we were all poised together—breathlessly, silently—listening with all our might and knowing we were getting something very special.

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Old and New

Posted on January 27, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

My family had a recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide that I must have listened to repeatedly when I was growing up in Palo Alto. But it was not until a couple of Thursdays ago, when I attended the San Francisco Symphony‘s partially acted concert version on January 18th, that I first heard it live.

The effect, at least in the first act, was galvanizing. One’s childhood musical experiences are stored at the deepest level of memory—within the body as well as the mind, it seems—and so hearing the overture was like being rocketed back to my own past and at the same time given a huge gift in the present. Throughout the entire first act, I kept happening on moments of recognition, which reached a high point in Cunégonde’s extravagant coloratura-laden solo. Meghan Picerno, the soprano who sang and acted that role, was certainly the outstanding performer in the evening’s production (though others ran a close second, particularly Michael Todd Simpson as Dr. Pangloss/The Narrator), so her skill and charm may have had something to do with my pleasure. But it was also the music of the solo itself, whose complicated, syncopated, Spanish-inflected rhythms felt as if they were an innate part of me, both unexpected and completely expected at once. Listening to it was almost like dancing: it seemed that kinaesthetic, that palpably embodied.

Candide premiered on Broadway in 1956—a resounding failure, at the time—and it must have taken about a year to produce the record, so I would have been at least five by the time I first heard it, though the memories feel much earlier. As I say, only the first half of the music was familiar to me; perhaps my mother (the performance fanatic in our household) never turned the LP over to play the second side. If so, she was right: Bernstein had just enough musical inspiration to produce fifty percent of an excellent operetta, but not a whole one. Still, it would be churlish to complain about such a vein of riches, even when it’s buried within baser materials, and I am grateful to the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas for mining it out.

Meanwhile, all throughout my California childhood another composer was working locally and, to me, invisibly, though often at the same high level as Bernstein. This was Lou Harrison, who was born in 1917 and died in 2003. He was still alive when I first became aware of his work—through Mark Morris’s use of his music as the setting for some of his liveliest dances—and I even watched Harrison take a bow onstage after one or two Morris premieres. Since he died, Lou Harrison’s reputation has only increased, and last Wednesday I heard a marvelous concert of his work, hosted by the pianist Sarah Cahill as part of San Francisco Performances‘ Pivot festival. The pieces on the program ranged from the 1941 Song of Quetzalcoatl to a 1988 piano piece, A Summerfield Set, and included a variety of instrumentation, from a standard string quartet to a series of home-made percussives made up of automobile brake-drums, cake pans, rice bowls, and so on, supplemented by imported exotic instruments like gamelans and finger-drums. Many of the instruments were made by Harrison himself, as William Winant, the leader of the featured percussion group and a longtime friend of Harrison’s, endearingly explained to us. “Where did those rice bowls come from?” Cahill asked him between pieces. “Lou’s kitchen,” Winant answered, “so that’s why the tuning turned out that way.” “And the cake pans?” “Also Lou’s kitchen.”

The musicianship was superb throughout, and so was the feeling in the room, which included old friends and colleagues of Harrison’s as well as new San Francisco converts to his music. Every piece was interesting in a different way. Perhaps my favorite was the String Quartet Set of 1979, movingly played by the Alexander Quartet—but I also loved the Threnody for Carlos Chavez and the concluding Varied Trio. As I said to my companions when we were walking away from the Strand Theater (located along one of the more insalubrious stretches of Market Street), it was the kind of concert that made me feel patriotic about being a Californian.

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Hearing It Live

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Wendy Lesser

There are lots of obstacles that might keep you at home listening to favorite performances on your music system instead of venturing out to an opera house or a concert hall. Price is one of the big ones, but transportation, cold weather, exhaustion at the end of the workday, uncomfortable theater seats, and annoying fellow audience members might also enter into the calculation. Yet if a performance is good enough, it will transcend all that and make you very glad indeed that you came out.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a tiny New York living room listening to a much-loved performance of The Marriage of Figaro on my tiny iPod. As I listened, I leafed through the pages of that week’s New Yorker and noticed that a revival of the Richard Eyre production of Le Nozze di Figaro was being performed at the Metropolitan Opera that very week. I saw that it featured Luca Pisaroni, whom I have loved in other Mozart operas, as the Count, and though I didn’t recognize any of the other names, I decided to grab a ticket for three nights later.

As it turned out, Pisaroni was the least of it (though he was very good, and so was the Figaro, a singer I’d never heard before named Adam Plachetka). This production turned out to star the women, as seems fitting for a plot whose twists all depend on female intelligence. One after another, the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos came out and wowed the audience, until we could barely believe our luck at the combination of singing talent and persuasive acting (supported, as all such performances must be, by the sensitive orchestra and its conductor, who was in this case the brilliant Harry Bicket). Susanna, the key figure in the plot—since she is not only Figaro’s bride, but also the object of the Count’s predatory lust and the deviser of the plot that defeats him—was performed by the Met newcomer Christiane Karg, whose lively intelligence and assertive physical presence was reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich. The Countess, sung by Rachel Willis-Sørensen, had one of the most meltingly knock-out voices I’ve ever heard in the part, which made the Count’s cruel treatment of her all the more affecting. And Cherubino—always my favorite, if the role is properly done—was endearingly played by Serena Malfi, whose boyish gestures evoked the sweetness of Harpo Marx (though obviously without his muteness). Even the bit parts like Marcellina (sung by Katarina Leoson) and Barbarina (the very animated Hyesang Park) were beautifully done. The whole set-up made it seem as if the world of this opera was secretly governed by the women, even as the men believed they had the upper hand.

It is an ugly plot, as Anthony Tommasini pointed out in his review, and particularly so when one is thinking constantly about the issue of sexual harassment, as people are these days. But simply representing a lascivious seigneur attempting to claim his ancestral droit does not in itself constitute ugliness. It is the game-like manner in which the subject is treated—and especially the emotional cruelty perpetrated by almost all the characters on their actual and potential sexual partners—that makes this opera so disturbing. I am thinking particularly of the scene in which Susanna, knowing that Figaro has come out to spy on her, pretends she is meeting a lover just to get back at him; for me, this was the most viscerally painful moment in the whole evening, given the way Eyre had directed it. And in this respect Nozze di Figaro is not unlike the composer’s other major operas. Cruelty, and especially sexual cruelty, seems to be Mozart’s great theme. That he made light of it, for the most part—except when he resorted to excessive heaviness, as he did in Don Giovanni—is one aspect of the problem; and that his wondrously seductive music tempts us to make light of it is another.

Still, I wouldn’t have it otherwise. It is the plots that make his operas so distressing, but anyone who wishes they could get just the music without the painful plot should try going to a performance of La Finta Giardiniera, composed when he was just eighteen. The music is recognizably Mozartean and has many lovely bits, but the plot, to the extent it exists, is a boring mess. After watching a very intelligently directed performance of this embryonic opera at Juilliard last month, I began to think for the first time that perhaps Lorenzo Da Ponte was right. Da Ponte claimed in his Memoirs that it was he, with his brilliant librettos, who really made Mozart’s reputation, and I have always treated this as an idle boast (comparable, for instance, to his numerous tall tales about how many beautiful ladies he left in his wake as he fled town with their fathers’ ducats). But now, having seen what Mozart did before he met Da Ponte, I have come to a new respect for the librettist. Better to have a cruel plot than none at all, because at least it gives us something to react against—and, in the hands of the proper director, something to think about as well.

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