Musicians are fond of saying that Shostakovich’s compositions only really come to life when they are played before a live audience. It also helps, I’ve found, when they are performed by excellent players. In the last year alone, I’ve been exposed for the first time to two Shostakovich pieces—the First Violin Concerto from 1948 and the Second Violin Concerto from 1967—that struck me as among the high points of his achievement as a composer. And I have no doubt that part of my enthusiasm stems from the remarkable violinists who played the solo parts in these galvanizing performances.
The First Concerto, though completed during a gloomy period when Shostakovich was distinctly out of favor with the Soviet regime (it remained unperformed until after Stalin’s death), is nonetheless the work of a vigorous and still youthful composer. This vibrant, intense, complicated piece makes huge demands on the violinist’s technical abilities, even as it also requires a near-theatrical immersion in the music’s extreme emotions. Last May I heard Christian Tetzlaff perform it as part of a New York Philharmonic concert under the baton of David Zinman (who was substituting at the last minute for an indisposed Esa-Pekka Salonen). Tetzlaff was very much on my radar: I had heard him do an astonishing Brahms Violin Concerto with James Levine’s Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall the previous fall, and had then rushed out to hear his excellent chamber group, the Tetzlaff Quartet, play at Zankel some weeks later. I was, in other words, already an avid fan. Even so, I was not prepared for the thrill of hearing him do the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto. The performance was so powerfully alive, so alert to every twist and turn in the music, that I was almost breathless when it was finished.
And then the same thing happened all over again when I heard Guy Braunstein perform the piece this October in Berlin. Braunstein, of whom I had never heard, was playing with the Berlin Philharmonic under the conductor Semyon Bychkov, who was also unknown to me; I was there purely because I never miss a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic when I am on their home turf. To my amazement, the First Violin Concerto sounded just as remarkable in Braunstein’s hands as it had in Tetzlaff’s. The virtuosity was perhaps a bit more evident—Tetzlaff makes everything, even Bach partitas, look easy—and possibly the eerier, darker tones in the piece were brought forward a bit more by the Russian conductor. But in any case it was once again a thrilling, invigorating musical experience, the kind of thing that makes you feel more alive than you do in your normal life. And Braunstein (whom I’ve just heard again with the Berlin Philharmonic in New York: he is their leading concertmaster, as good at Brahms as he is at Shostakovich) is now firmly ensconced on my radar, too.
I was grateful in an entirely different way for Gidon Kremer’s movingly elegiac performance of the Second Violin Concerto, which I heard on that same October trip to Berlin. In the kind of weirdly mismatched program to which Shostakovich’s divided nature so often lends itself, Daniel Barenboim and his Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra had paired the haunting, fragmentary, disturbingly profound late violin concerto—written when Shostakovich’s old friends, including one beloved violinist, had started to die off around him—with the bombastic, generally annoying, if dutifully philo-semitic Thirteenth Symphony, which takes Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” as its departure point. I have disliked the Thirteenth Symphony when I’ve heard it in New York, and I disliked it again in a different way in Berlin. But Kremer’s first-act rendition of the violin concerto was such a revelation that I forgave all. Well, not completely all: when I went back the very next night to hear Gidon Kremer perform his magic once again (this time from a seat about twenty feet away, so that even the silences and near-silences came across as undiluted emotion), I made sure to leave at the intermission so as to preserve my ecstatic state. Live music, alas, cannot be preserved for long, and by the time I was having my solo dinner at the counter of Lutter & Wegner, I could barely recapture the feeling of being in the concert hall under Kremer’s wondrous spell. But I could remember having that feeling, and that memory will stay with me for as long as I am alive and conscious.
—November 16, 2009