The Power of Performance

Last Saturday I attended yet another musical marathon, this one devoted to Schubert’s final year. He died in 1828 at the age of only thirty-one, in terrible health but with all his musical faculties working overtime. This I had learned, along with much else, at Ara Guzelimian’s wonderful lecture, delivered the previous Monday as part of Music@Menlo’s “Encounter” series. Out of the three solid weeks devoted to Schubert at this year’s Music@Menlo festival, I heard only the Guzelimian lecture and the final concert, but the festival regulars who had been immersed for 20 days seemed, if anything, avid to hear more. It was as if the composer’s desperation to continue against all odds had somehow transmitted itself to his eager listeners nearly two centuries later.

The Saturday marathon began at 5:00 with two string quartets that Schubert apparently loved, Haydn’s op. 103 and Beethoven’s op. 131. I don’t know the Haydn well, but the Beethoven is one of my very favorite pieces of music, and it was part of the reason I had decided to drive an hour south to attend this concert. Yet the performance by the young Dover Quartet left me completely cold. It was not that they were actively bad—they hit all the proper notes, there was nothing wrong that one could point to—and yet the music completely failed to come alive. Oh, dear, I thought, and we have hours still to go. I should have stayed in Berkeley and gone to my friends’ cocktail party instead.

Things perked up somewhat in the middle section of the program, which featured late Schubert songs accompanied by Wu Han on the piano (joined in one case by a French horn player and in another by a very able clarinetist). Nikolay Borchev, the baritone who sang three of the four songs, had already strutted his stuff during Guzelimian’s lecture, so I knew he was good, and on Saturday I especially liked the way he performed the dark, creepy Der Doppelgänger. But the real surprise of this segment was the soprano Joélle Harvey. Hearing her beautiful, expressive voice intertwined with José Gonzalez Granero’s clarinet in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen was only part of the joy; the rest lay in Harvey’s profound evocation of the music’s emotion, which arose from her combination of intense dramatic ability and complete lack of pretense. Okay, I thought, things are looking up.

But I really had no idea how high they could go. The final section of the program consisted entirely of Schubert’s 55-minute String Quintet in C Major, performed by Arnaud Sussman and Benjamin Beilman on the violins, Lawrence Lesser (no relation, at least that I know of) and Keith Robinson on the cellos, and Paul Neubauer on the viola. These musicians do not form a regular group, so any practicing they did came about purely for the purposes of this performance. Yet I have never heard such perfection in terms of vivid, mutually reinforcing, delicately complementary collaboration. Every moment was alive with feeling—a feeling which could shift on a dime, as assertive vigor gave way to pensiveness and melancholy and then to a thrilling resurgence of delight. The mood shifts happened over and over again in what seemed, because of the intensity of the performance, to be a single moment of time, even as it also, miraculously, managed to cover every possible span of narrative and musical experience.  I don’t think I have ever heard a performance quite like it. Under no circumstances would I have said, before last Saturday night, that Schubert’s Quintet was a better piece of music than Beethoven’s op. 131—and yet that marvelous performance forced me to feel that it was. Nothing can compare to having one’s ears opened in this way. It brings you to life not only for the duration of the performance, but for hours afterward, long past the point when the music itself has faded from your mind. Cocktail party, shmocktail party, I thought. This time I definitely made the right choice.