I am in Berlin now—a long-planned trip, so not an immediate reaction to November 5, but an escape nonetheless. It is good to be away, even if only for a short time, from the horrific goings-on I read about daily in my online version of the New York Times.
One of the key forms my Berlin escapism always takes, even in less fraught times, is to go hear wonderful music. The concerts I pack my schedule with whenever I am here almost never disappoint, but even by that standard, last week’s evening at the Pierre Boulez Saal was particularly noteworthy. I had chosen the evening for its program—Schumann’s third string quartet, followed by Brahms’s clarinet quintet—and for the participation of Jörg Widmann, an excellent clarinettist as well as a major composer, in the latter piece. The fact that the concert showcased the venerable Hagen Quartet was merely a by-product.
Silly me. How could I have failed to be aware of this terrific group, consisting mainly of Hagen siblings (the two brothers, Lukas and Clemens, on violin and cello respectively, with the sister, Veronika, on viola), though with one outlier, Rainer Schmidt, on the second violin? I can’t say whether being members of the same family helps with harmonizing over the decades, but whatever accounts for it, this is one perfectly synchronized group. Yet that is the least of it. What they bring to their music is a form of unobtrusive, undemonstrative attention that allows every little detail to become audible and visible. And the beauty of the occasion was that Widmann—who has previously made recordings with the Hagens and has allowed them to premiere some of his scores—seemed as much at home in this family as the players born into it.
The Pierre Boulez Saal is arranged in the round, so wherever you sit, somebody is bound to have his back turned to you. In this case, the Hagens all chose to turn in one direction during the first half of the program and the other way after the interval. Luckily for me, this brought them face-to-face with me for the whole of the marvelously played Brahms quintet. I could see the violist scrunching up her mouth when she got to a persnickety passage and smiling at Widmann, who sat next to her, when they were about to play a measure together. I could see Widmann himself charmingly and easily glancing around at the other members of the group even as he focused intensely on the clarinet score. And best of all, perhaps, I could watch the cellist as he performed his essential role in this quintet. I have listened to this quintet many times in recordings (to which I have now added an additional recording, the one made by the Hagens), and I could probably have told you that the cello sounded beautiful in it. But what I could not have discerned, without seeing it for myself, is the way that instrument continues to set the keynote for certain passages even when its sound is nearly drowned under those of the higher instruments.
The whole evening was a delight, and so was the aftermath, when my Berlin friend Martin and I resorted to the Pierre Boulez Saal bar for a post-concert glass of wine. Tucked into our corner of the lobby, next to a lovely former-East-German couple who had come to Berlin from Magdeburg to celebrate their wedding anniversary (and who eagerly joined in our praise for the concert), we were in a good position to watch the musicians emerging, with instruments in hand, from the Green Room downstairs. First came the two unrelated violinists; after that the cellist along with his sister, the violist; and finally Widmann himself, carrying his clarinet case. Each appearance provoked a round of applause from the remaining drinkers. And when Widmann came out at the end, I smilingly raised my glass of wine to him, at which he smiled back and gave a slight bow in my direction. “Only in Berlin!” I sighed to Martin.
Still, it’s not as if I can’t hear good music in New York. One night before departing for Berlin, and only four days after our disastrous election, I was lucky enough to attend an equally good though far less intimate concert at Alice Tully Hall. The first half consisted of Matthew Polenzani making his Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center debut in a rendition of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, which he was apparently performing for the first time. Polenzani, whom I don’t recall ever seeing before, has a strong but also delicate tenor voice and a charmingly understated stage manner. He greeted the front row of audience members by acknowledging he was glad not to see anyone he knew out there, and he carefully pitched his volume at a level that was below an opera-level blast yet audible throughout the chamber-music hall. I would never have guessed this was his first Schwanengesang—he delivered it like a master, and the Schubertian feeling of love for life, combined with an intense regret about leaving it, was all there, intact. Ken Noda, too, did an excellent job with the piano accompaniment, so that it really felt like a team effort, which the audience applauded delightedly.
If I had been arranging the program, I might have figured that would make a good close to the evening, but the CMS programmers are smarter about such things than I am. In second place, after the intermission, they put Schumann’s Piano Quintet. I like and admire the Schumann quartet that the Hagens played, but I adore the piano quintet, and have done ever since Mark Morris used it as the score to his revelatory V. Every one of the young CMS musicians who played in the Schumann on that Saturday night—Gloria Chen on piano, Sean Lee and Richard Lin on violins, Milena Pájaro-van de Stadt on viola, and my old favorite, Nicholas Canellakis, on cello—did a wonderful job of putting across each movement’s character. I had forgotten, since my last hearing, that this work gives us at least two thrilling endings, in the last two movements; one might even argue that each movement has its own distinctive ending, existing almost as a full piece of music in itself. In any case, the whole performance was a joy—enough of a joy to penetrate the dour mood of the New York audience and lift us up into our own form of escapism, without our even having to leave town.