I made a special effort to catch what was being billed as the “New York premiere” of the Vertigo Quartet at the February 3rd Schneider Concert, part of a series held on Sunday afternoons at the New School. Actually, this very young ensemble, formed at the Curtis Institute in 2005, has been playing across the river at Bargemusic since last year, but apparently Manhattan does not consider Brooklyn a part of New York. I began following these four musicians avidly after hearing them do a masterful and moving rendition of Shostakovich’s Twelfth Quartet nearly a year ago; since then they have given equally amazing performances of Beethoven’s Opus 131, Corigliano’s massively complex 1995 string quartet, and Shostakovich’s Seventh. This time, at the New School, they played pieces by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and William Walton, and though the strikingly elderly audience had doubtless turned out to hear the nineteenth-century works, it was Walton’s String Quartet in A minor that turned out to be the surprising high point of a generally terrific concert. The Vertigos excel at difficult modern music, and that is not merely for technical reasons—that is, this is not just a matter of young fingers and young sensibilities keeping up with fast, jarring rhythms and harsh chords. What these four players have, above all, is a feeling for the drama and meaning of a musical piece. When you hear them play a quartet, from whatever century, you can sense that they have actually asked themselves what the composer thought he was doing at each moment in the music. Their subtle shifts in volume and pacing, the responsive echoes in their various melodic voices, and the significant silences they occasionally introduce are all part of that effort to convey meaning. It’s as if they are performers in a play as well as musicians on a stage, and their alertness to the composer’s intentions is as rewarding as an actor’s allegiance to a playwright’s words. The group’s name, by the way, comes from Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo, rather than from the dizzying sensation itself. The violinists are Jose-Maria Blumenschein and Johannes Dickbauer, the violist is Lily Francis, and the cellist is Nicholas Canellakis. Watch for them; they are going places.
Mark Morris’s production of Purcell’s King Arthur is coming to New York City Opera for a brief run this spring. Do not miss it. I already had my full-length say about this piece when it opened in Berkeley a while back, but I plan to go again, as often as I can. Its pleasures are deep and lasting.
I wish to register my distress that the best American movie of 2007, In the Valley of Elah, went completely unrecognized by the Academy Awards. Of course we all know that the Oscars have very little to do with actual quality, that bad movies constantly win over good ones, blah blah blah. But this case seems to me more egregious than usual. In the Valley of Elahwas such a subtle, restrained, but searing look at our current foreign-policy disaster — focusing on Iraq by looking almost entirely at events that take place at home, forecasting with eerie accuracy the actual behavior of recent soldiers, and wrenching us with irresolvable emotions — that it seemed a particular shame not even to nominate it for an award. At least as disturbing was the failure of Tommy Lee Jones to win a Best Actor award for a performance that nobody else even came close to rivaling. Daniel Day Lewis gave a fine and skilled performance in There Will Be Blood, and Javier Bardem was delightfully, brilliantly scary in No Country for Old Men, but finally these were entertainments: actorly jobs well done in actorly roles. Tommy Lee Jones, in contrast, became the disillusioned veteran he played in In the Valley of Elah, to such an extent that I felt I was watching and getting to know a kind of person I have never actually met. Everything about the way Jones delivered this performance, from the tiniest movement of the corner of his eyes to the way his weary body looked from the back as he walked down a long hallway, gave depth and reality to the character, and to the character’s increasingly tragic situation. That this is, in effect, our situation — one of disillusionment and despair at the way our country’s faraway violence is bound to come home to roost — is possibly what made the movie too painful for most viewers to bear. The film’s disappearance without a trace is indicative of politics as usual: not just the petty Oscar politics about whose budget is bigger, whose dress prettier, but the larger politics of America, which prefers not to look its worst tragedies directly in the face until they have become so old as to be inert, and therefore safely convertible to “art.”
— February 26, 2008