New York is viewing itself as pretty much post-pandemic these days, and the result is that the full array of concert offerings is once more in place. Last week I benefited from this at an extraordinary level.
First up, on Sunday afternoon, was a production I knew would be good because I’d seen it before. John Boyle’s staging of Peter Grimes at the Met is one of the great operas put on in the last decade by that august house, and I was thrilled to get the chance to experience it again. Everything from the music (eloquently performed this time under the baton of Nicholas Carter), to the set (a clever house-front-like facade with windows that open at various levels like those of an Advent calendar), to the projections that appeared during the orchestral interludes (storm-tossed waves, for the most part), made this a delight to the eye and particularly the ear. The opera itself is brilliantly ambivalent about its main character, who is both a harsh, cruel man and an unfairly persecuted figure in a stuffy, self-righteous village. And this time we benefited from a magnetic singer in the title role: Allan Clayton, who had recently come off his Met debut as Hamlet (another notoriously ambivalent figure, though in quite a different way). Clayton is a tenor worth following, not only for the purity of his beautiful voice, but also for the clarity of his diction, which made it unnecessary to read the English supertitles when he was singing his lines. His acting, too, was somehow vehement as well as restrained—a difficult trip tock pull off in a huge space that seats thousands, but he managed it. Counting the two intermissions, the opera was well over three hours long, but no one in my vicinity left: we were all gripped from beginning to end.
The very next night, I was lucky enough to attend a much smaller and more intimate concert at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Organized, as usual, by the intrepid and inventive Pedja Muzijevic, this part of the BAC’s chamber series featured Owls (they abjure the article), a four-person string quartet. Unlike most quartets, however, they have two cellos instead of two violins, and this means that the range of music they play is not the standard one for a string quartet. On Monday, their hour-long show included two pieces by their resident composer (Paul Wiancko, one of the cellists), a jazz adaptation from Chick Corea, a pop-folk adaptation from a Norwegian group called Trollstilt, Terry Riley’s “Good Medicine” (with the other cellist, Gabriel Cabezas, playing the second violin part on his cello), a new and rather lovely piece by an Azerbaijani composer named Franghis Ali-Zadeh, and a very old piece by François Couperin. The Couperin, though brief, thrilled me to the core, and I very much enjoyed the rest of the program too, but what I liked best was the camaraderie and friendly musicianship of the four players. It felt as if they were performing for friends in their own living room—as indeed, it often feels in the BAC Howard Gilman Studio, which is why I keep returning there again and again.
And then, in this week of miracles, came the most miraculous performance of all: Tuesday night’s Carnegie Hall program of all 24 of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, performed by the pianist Igor Levit. I have heard and admired Levit before—he is really an excellent player—but this concert went beyond even my expectations. Though I’ve written about Shostakovich’s string quartets, I knew almost nothing about these piano pieces, which he wrote as homage to (and in partial imitation of) Bach; I’d heard at most four or five of them played in a mixed concert years ago. Now I was introduced to all 24 of them at once, in a mammoth undertaking that would have tried the skills and the endurance of any pianist on earth.
The two-and-a-half-hour program (a rarity at Carnegie, where the doors tend to shut tight at ten) was neatly divided into a first half and a second half, each containing twelve of the pieces. The first half seemed to waver amusingly back and forth between Bach and Shostakovich—that is, sometimes I was highly aware of the homage being paid to the rigorously precise German source, and sometimes I was more aware of the wild humor and deep-seated anxiety that pervaded the work of his Russian inheritor. That was fascinating in itself; but in the second half, this separation of powers began to disappear, as Bach seeped more fully into Shostakovich and vice versa. One reached the end of the program with the sense of having gotten somewhere—of having traveled on a journey accompanied not just by the vibrantly alive man up on the stage in front of us (and his calm, helpful page-turner), but also by the two ghostly figures who infused the music, one by way of the other.
I would say, without a doubt, that it was one of the best Carnegie concerts I ever attended. And this was not just because the playing itself was so good (though it was), nor that the physical achievement itself was so astonishing (though it was). It had to do with the felt rapport between the performer and his audience. Never have I been to Carnegie with such a quiet, attentive audience—the usual coughs and page-turnings and shiftings in the creaky seats had all been banished, as the whole crowd silently and almost religiously attended to the notes emanating from the stage. At one point in the second half, after a particularly difficult, fast, and emphatic fugue, an overwhelmed audience member let out a subdued, inadvertant “Woo-hoo!” Rather than allowing the interruption to ruin the atmosphere, though, Levit turned toward the audience, smiled his thanks, and gestured at the score, as if to say, “It’s his achievement, not mine.” At this the whole audience burst at once into spontaneous applause, and again Levit responded—nodding his thanks, but also demonstratively grasping the unplayed pages of music, reminding us there was still a lot left to do. So, after that brief moment of total communion between the pianist and his thousands of fans, we all quieted down and allowed him to finish. It was live music at its very best, and we all knew it.