This past weekend was rather incredible. On Friday night I attended a chamber music concert at Carnegie Hall‘s Zankel auditorium that featured my favorite violinist in the world, Christian Tetzlaff. And on Saturday night—again at Carnegie, but this time in the main hall—I heard my favorite pianist, Mitsuko Uchida, play Schubert. Each concert alone would have been great; in combination, they were almost stupefying.
Tetzlaff was playing with the Tetzlaff Trio, which consists of himself, his sister Tanya Tetzlaff on cello, and the excellent Lars Vogt on piano. To my mind, almost nothing could be nicer than a piano trio (I cannot think of a single piece in this form that I don’t like); and to hear musicians of this caliber play first the Schumann Piano Trio in D Minor and then the Dvorak Piano Trio in F minor was a real treat. I have heard the three of them before, in San Francisco, but not with this precise combination of pieces. Once again, though, I was struck with how delicately and effectively they varied the dynamics, from assertive loudness to passages so quiet you practically had to lean forward in your seat to hear them. (In San Francisco, when I commented on this unusual range to Tanya Tetzlaff, she answered, “Well, we’re just following the instructions in the score”—as if to suggest that no one else does.) And once again I was delighted by the fact that even when Christian Tetzlaff is sitting down, he can dance his way through a piece of music. Simply in the way he tips his head or moves his shoulders, not to mention how he taps his toes, we are alerted to the rhythmic intricacies of whatever he is playing. In this case, that came in particularly handy in the Dvorak movement that featured fast triplets on the two string instruments played against a different, slower beat on the piano: had I not had the violinist’s gestures before my eyes, it would have taken me far longer to pick up on the relationship between the two sets of rhythms. (And this is to say nothing of the way Tetzlaff can make his violin sing—almost as if it were a human voice, capable of moving from softly plaintive to thrillingly warm, all in the space of a few measures.) The whole evening was a pure delight, enhanced by the lovely bit from the “Dumky” Trio that the group played as a generous encore.
The pleasures of hearing Mitsuko Uchida play Schubert, and especially late Schubert, are less straightforward but perhaps even more intense. She too is great at dynamics, and also at tempo: the way she pauses, at times, until the last possible millisecond before delivering the next note can take your breath away. For her concert on Saturday, she gave us three Schubert sonatas: the A minor from 1817, the C Major (also called “Reliquie”) from 1825, and the B-flat Major from 1828. (The dates are important because Schubert’s career was so tragically short: he was only twenty when he wrote the first of these, and he died at age thirty-one, of syphilis, two months after completing the last.) The Reliquie was apparently left unfinished—it contains only two movements—but it still stands as one of Schubert’s most powerful, least accommodating works. Throughout its half-hour length, it rages relentlessly and repeats itself obsessively, leaving little doubt (at least in my own mind) that at the time of its composition, Schubert was grappling with the news of his fatal illness. The final sonata, in contrast, seems to have come to terms with death: the four movements, lasting forty-one minutes in all, cover the entire range of emotion but focus often, and finally, on a kind of tender appreciation of human existence. It was not an easy-listening program (a fair number of demonstrably insane audience members left at the intermission), but it was a great one, and it left me with an even stronger affection for both the miraculously gifted pianist and the tragic, brilliant composer she represents so well.