There could be no finer way to spend a Sunday evening than listening to Christian Tetzlaff perform Bach’s solo pieces for the violin, and Sunday, May 11 was no exception to this. Davies Hall did not fill up completely, but that simply showed that people do not know a good thing when they see it, and those who might have feared that a lone soloist couldn’t play satisfyingly in a space that large were definitely proven wrong. This great German player—the finest violinist alive, if you ask me—took possession of the stage and the auditorium, reducing the enormous space to something that felt, for the moment, like a recital hall. To quiet the rustling audience before he started, Tetzlaff simply removed his instrument from under his chin and held it by his side; this worked, and he was able to commence against a background of silence. They grew more attentive as they listened, and you could actually feel people leaning in toward him as his playing became quieter and more intimate.
The program began spectacularly and got better. In the first half, Tetzlaff played an early partita sandwiched between two early sonatas; in the second half, a slightly later sonata sandwiched between two slightly later partitas. The works got progressively more complicated as he went on—in a way, progressively weirder and more modern-sounding, with intense contrapuntal patterns that made it seem as if more than one violin were playing at a time. And, from start to finish, we in the audience had the sense of being drawn directly into the music. It was like mainlining Bach, with the sensation going directly from the music to our brains, without stopping anywhere in between for the usual performance trappings like specific interpretations, decisions about performance style, considerations of skill, or whatever. None of this matters with Tetzlaff. He is so good that despite his entrancing physical manner of dancing slightly to the music as he plays the fast parts, or leaning tenderly over his violin as he performs the slow ones, he never gets between you and the music. Instead, he becomes the music.
And yet it struck me last Sunday that there was something slightly wrong with Tetzlaff—not Tetzlaff the musician, but Tetzlaff the person (if I can be so bold as to comment on this human being I don’t know at all). And this strange feeling was only reinforced when I heard him perform the Bartok Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday night with the full San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas by his side. Tetzlaff played his agonizingly difficult part beautifully, unexceptionably, better than anyone else in the world could have done it. As always, I couldn’t take my eyes off him for the duration of the performance, and I felt once again as if I were getting Bartok whole. But even more than when he had occupied the stage alone, I had the sense that he was somehow in retreat. The way I put it to myself was that he seemed to be a man in hiding. It was not just the small beard and mustache he had recently grown to mask the lower part of his handsome face. It was not just that he looked somewhat tired, or worried, or less than fully delighted to be there in front of us. It was not just that he kept his eyes closed throughout most of the performance—more, even, than he usually does when sinking himself into the music. It was as if this time he were trying to escape into the music, and in doing so escape not just us, but himself as well. It seems strange to say this of someone so graceful, so expressive, and so physically involved in his playing, but what I felt on Friday night was that he was uncomfortable in his own skin.
None of this, of course, is any of my business. It did not affect his playing one whit. If anything, his aura of distress or discomfort (or whatever it was that I was perceiving, truly or falsely) intensified the moments of deep feeling in the slow, quiet parts of the Bach and the plaintive, anxious parts of the Bartok. Tetzlaff can still play like Tetzlaff, and that is all that should matter to me as a critic. But if you love a musician’s work as much as I love his, you can’t help but begin to think of him as a member of your own family, even if you are complete strangers to each other. And it is because of this—this technically distant, formally unconnected, but nonetheless profoundly interested relationship—that I find myself worrying about him.