Rainy Days and Live Music

January was a dry spell—not so much in terms of the California winter rains (we had the normal level) but in terms of live concerts I could attend. I wasted away at home, watching endless Netflix serials, some of which were worth recommending (for instance, The Golden Hour, a Dutch police procedural) but most of which were not.

Then, this past weekend, I was treated to two excellent concerts in a row. Unfortunately, it was also a weekend of heavy, threatening rain and wind, so to the usual “It’s great to get out of the house” was added an unusual “But will I make it home again?” In both cases—to the San Francisco Symphony concert in Davies Hall, and to the much closer Cal Performances concert in Berkeley—I had to drive rather than walk or take public transportation. Surprisingly, I was able to park close enough both times to avoid getting drenched. Unsurprisingly, the best thing on each program was a Beethoven piece.

I went to Saturday night’s San Francisco Symphony concert in part for the attractive program (Schubert’s Sixth combined with Beethoven’s Seventh), but also because it featured a conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who was new to me. He turns out to be far from new to conducting: an eminent, grey-haired Finn, Saraste, who now heads up the Helsinki Philharmonic, is a veteran of guest-conducting and regular-conducting positions worldwide. His manner was brisk and effective, with clear distinctions between the parts of the music that were supposed to be sharp and angular (jagged, cutting hand gestures) and the parts that were more flowing and smooth (sweeping, curling hand gestures); he rarely ascended, or descended, to a full-body sway, but he did bend his knees a few times when he was really swept away by the music. His Schubert, I would say, was fine but no more. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was thrilling. Admittedly, the Seventh Symphony is one of the great musical works of all time, but even it can be ruined. (I saw Loren Maazel ruin it once.) In this instance, Sarastre drew the absolute best out of the San Francisco players, and it was a complete delight to hear them perform.

Sunday afternoon’s concert was something else entirely. Held in Hertz Hall, the chamber-music venue on the UC Berkeley campus, it featured a string quartet, the Attacca Quartet, that I’d heard of but never seen live. The first half of the program was a smorgasbord of pieces that bore a family resemblance to each other (tuneful modernism, I guess you’d call it) and that were mostly snippets from longer works, strung together and performed “attacca”—that is, without breaks in between. So we got excerpts from Caroline Shaw’s Three Essays and The Evergreen (both 2022 compositions), a segment from Paul Wiancko’s 2020 Benkei’s Standing Death, a Radiohead song adapted for string quartet by Attacca’s violist, and one movement of Ravel’s marvelous string quartet from 1903. I was relieved when I heard the Ravel—not only because it was the only thing I recognized on the program, but also because the Attacca players performed it so gorgeously. This, I thought, was a good sign. It signaled that the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Beethoven’s Opus 131, would be worth hearing.

That, it turned out, was an understatement. With their ear for the unexpected and the revelatory, the Attacca Quartet made something new of this great Beethoven work, even as they also played it exactly as written. I listen to various recordings of it all the time, and none of what they did jarred my ear; they did not depart noticeably from the tradition. Yet in tiny ways (varying the volume on repeats, for instance, or emphasizing the rhythmic shifts) they managed to imprint their own technical expertise on the venerable quartet. They showed us—as if anyone still needs showing—exactly how much of a “modern” composer Beethoven was in those late, great quartets, and at the same time they remained completely true to his unsurpassable ear for melody. The performance was moving and thrilling, and it earned its uproarious standing ovation—followed by a brief and delightful encore of a John Adams snippet: a tip of the hat, perhaps, to our local musical hero. All in all, it was a concert well worth braving the storm for.