This Past Month or So

It’s a truism, I suppose, that there is no such thing as listening objectively to music. But criticism is somehow built on the idea that the critic is doing exactly that—bringing her expertise to bear on the sounds emerging from the musicians and then conveying her non-subjective, analytic assessment to her readers. I’ve never pretended to any major level of expertise (my sole qualifications for this role being some years spent as a violin student in my youth, plus decades of assiduous concert-going since then), and I confess that most of my previous blog posts have revealed a significant degree of subjectivity. Still, the events of the past five weeks have forced me to reconceive the relationship between what I am taking in when I go to a concert and what is there inside me to begin with.

It began with my return from Berlin in the second week of May, when I had to accustom myself again to being back under our current authoritarian regime. Somehow it’s very different reading the New York Times online from across the Atlantic and actually waking up to it each morning in situ. But I got over that shock rather quickly and resumed my usual habit of New York concert-going. Top on my schedule were two Evgeny Kissin concerts at Carnegie Hall, one featuring him as a soloist and the other billed as “Evgeny Kissin and Friends.”

I had never actually heard Kissin live before, so I was amazed to discover what a phenomenon he is. I don’t just mean his playing, though he is certainly at the level of my other favorite pianists: Mitsuko Uchida, Igor Levit, Kirill Gerstein, Jan Lisiecki, and so on. But I don’t think he is noticeably above their level, and yet the audience response to him makes him seem like some kind of rock star. For the May 17 solo concert, which featured pieces by Bach, Chopin, and Shostakovich, the house was packed, with some audience members even crowded onto the stage behind Kissin. The conclusion of each segment of the show was greeted by wild roars and avid clapping, and the final set of standing ovations went on so long that Kissin was forced, or at least encouraged, to give three separate encores. I enjoyed the Shostakovich pieces and loved the Bach; my companion at that concert loved the Chopin works, which she knew well. But I never got the sense of lift-off that a great concert always leaves me with. I’m thinking, for instance, of the mammoth performance of all 24 Shostakovich preludes and fugues that Igor Levit treated us to at Carnegie not so long ago—a knockout that was greeted by the normal level of intensely admiring applause rather than Kissin’s nearly insane level.

My spring stay in New York had been prolonged until the end of May mainly so that I could hear the second of the two Kissin concerts, which featured Shostakovich’s 1934 Cello Sonata in D Minor, his 1968 Violin Sonata, and his 1975 Viola Sonata, the last piece he ever wrote. I love the viola sonata and had never heard it live, so I knew this would be a treat; and given the other two “friends,” cellist Gautier Capuçon and violinist Gidon Kremer, whose work I already knew and loved, I figured the chosen violist, though unknown to me, would be up to snuff. 

In the event, the Ukrainian-British violist Maxim Rysanov more than exceeded my expectations. His rendering of the viola sonata was out of this world, and since it was the one piece on the program where the piano was absolutely required to fade into the background, we could hear him beautifully over Kissin’s soft chords. It helped, too, that I could remember the circumstances of Shostakovich’s composition of this piece. Dedicated to the young violist Fyodor Druzhinin—who had recently taken his teacher’s place in the Beethoven Quartet, the composer’s lifelong musical mouthpiece—it was finished only a month before Shostakovich died. After playing through the piece for the first time on August 6, 1975, Druzhinin was so thrilled that he sat down that very night to write a long, grateful letter to Shostakovich, who was by then in the hospital. According to Shostakovich’s wife, Irina Antonovna, the letter had its intended cheering effect. “Dmitri Dmitriyevich read your letter and was very pleased,” she told the young violist. “It was the best medicine for him.” But days later, on August 9, he succumbed to the lung cancer that was killing him, so he never got to hear his final work played live.

There is something I haven’t told you yet, which you probably need to know to understand the rest of this blog post. Ever since about 2018, my only and much-loved younger sister had been battling metastasized colon cancer. At first she was told the disease was simply “chronic” and she was able to take chemo pills to control it; later, though, this morphed into painful chemo infusions every two weeks, which gradually destroyed her body without fully getting rid of the disease. In early December of last year she bravely decided to quit chemo and take the consequences. I visited her in San Antonio for Christmas that year—the first time, we realized, that we had spent Christmas together since our childhood—and she was in remarkably good spirits, given the circumstances. But since then things had been getting worse.  I had been back to see her in mid-March, and I was scheduled to go again on June 9. We were speaking regularly on the phone together, at least twice every week, and she promised me she could hold out until then.

First, though, I returned to California for the last three of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final four concerts with the San Francisco Symphony. The circumstances of Esa-Pekka’s hiring and then departure have been enough to break the hearts of all music-loving San Franciscans. When he first arrived, just as the pandemic had started, we saw him as an immense sign of hope, and his concerts after that were indeed so thrilling that we all felt as if we had a marvelous new orchestra in our midst. Then, last year, the short-sighted symphony board decided that they could do without his inventive, expensive programs (not to mention raises for all the symphony players), and they cut back on the budget they had promised Esa-Pekka in order to lure him in. He promptly refused, rightly, to renew his contract. We all wrote letters to the board begging them to reverse their decision, but to no avail: they wanted to save on artistic funds so they could renovate and expand their symphony hall. So now we in San Francisco will have an upgraded building in which nothing of interest will be performed. What this meant, for me, was that in addition to the nationwide disaster of our 2025 government and the huge personal tragedy of my sister’s health, I was suffering from the minor but still significant prospect of this local loss. Hence the importance, and the emotional impact, of Esa-Pekka’s final concerts.

On May 30, my first full day back in the Bay Area, I attend the first of the three remaining concerts, the “Beethoven” one, which featured Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony along with his Violin Concerto. Hilary Hahn was the scheduled soloist, so that was guaranteed to be great, right? And can any Beethoven symphony be a disappointment? Well, maybe. I don’t think it was just jetlag that made me feel the Fourth is not Ludwig’s best work; as I said to a friend at intermission, there’s a reason we don’t hear it very often. And though every note of the Violin Concerto was familiar and precious to me, that too was a problem. I had heard it all before, and I wasn’t hearing anything new, as one must in a live concert if it is to be outstanding. As I say, this could be my problem as much as the program’s, since I was sleepy and anxious and worried about whether I would reach San Antonio in time. And in fact I texted my brother-in-law the very next day, or perhaps the day after, asking him to alert me if there was any sudden change in my sister’s condition.

He wrote to me on Tuesday, June 3, saying there had been a sudden decline that morning—my sister had stopped eating and was sleeping all the time—so I instantly changed my airline ticket to the next day. I was there with her on Wednesday night, Thursday all day long, and Friday morning, by which time she had lapsed into complete unconsciousness. She was still partly awake on the Thursday, though, and I am pretty sure she knew I was there; I knew I was there, anyway. On that Friday morning I kissed her forehead, stroked her hair, told her I would love her always, and left to return home, since the hospice nurse was saying it could take her a week or more to die. 

You will think I am crazy, perhaps, but I did not give up my ticket to Esa-Pekka’s concert that Friday night. On the contrary, I decided that Salonen’s version of Sibelius (whose Seventh Symphony formed the bulk of the program) was exactly what I needed at that moment. I have always loved music with the forward impulse of a narrative and the measurable rhythm of a dance, but it this case I found Sibelius’s characteristic floatiness—his suspension of time, his refusal to come down to rest, his overall vagueness, if you will—to be immensely soothing. And that initial sense of relative peacefulness carried me through the rest of the program as well: a world premiere, Rewilding, by the talented young composer Gabriella Smith (whose work I have been following since she was fifteen years old), and Richard Strauss’s 1895 Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. I cannot tell you whether either of these works was objectively good, or even objectively well-played. All I can say was that, following on the beautifully performed Sibelius, they allowed me to remain passive and unthinking.   

My sister died the next morning, on June 7, and nothing will ever be the same again. But like a good little critic who knows that life (and music) must go on, I took myself off to the final Esa-Pekka concert the following Friday.  The featured piece—in fact, the only piece—was Mahler’s Second, and though I am not a huge Mahler fan, I thought that his Resurrection Symphony might somehow be consoling. But it was not. Death in music, I learned, is not at all the same as death in life. The former is willful, changeable, melodramatic, and a tad self-glorifying; the latter is just pure pain.

It didn’t hurt me to be at the concert, but it didn’t help. And in reporting on it, I can therefore be of no help to you, because my internal state so overwhelmed the external circumstances as to make me useless as a critic. I am not blaming myself for this; it is the natural reaction, and I would be ashamed not to have it. Whether it is of any interest to you, I cannot say. I do not, in general, talk about my personal life in these blog posts, because they are supposed to be about the external world: our shared external world, in which I include music and the other arts. But in this case I thought you ought to know the whole story.