Of course, I am listening to him play as well. What would be the point, otherwise, in attending live concerts by my favorite violinist, which I do every time he and I end up in the same place? This April, luckily for me, that will happen three times in all: once last Saturday, at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, and twice toward the end of the month, when I will hear him at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, currently Tetzlaff’s hometown.
The April 6 concert at Zankel paired him with the excellent (and also Berlin-based) pianist Kirill Gerstein, in an evening of pieces by Thomas Ades, Bela Bartok, Johannes Brahms, Leos Janacek, and Gyorgy Kurtag. All except the Bartok and Brahms were short—the Kurtag, which consisted of three pieces, was only seven minutes in total—and all except the Brahms probably counted as some kind of strenuous modernism, though the Ades was sufficiently tuneful (as he often is) to seem to evade this category. About two-thirds of the audience, I would guess, were completely delighted with the program; another quarter or more accepted it with intermittent grumbles, coughs, or bored page-turnings; two or three people actually left during the performance. As I watched them disappear, I thought of Shostakovich’s instructions to the musicians who performed his final, difficult, incredibly beautiful string quartet: “Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” In other words, I took the occasional manifestations of audience resentment as a compliment to Tetzlaff’s and Gerstein’s unerring commitment to the composers’ own rigor.
For me, even the most hard-to-penetrate pieces become comprehensible in Tetzlaff’s hands, because his hands are not the only thing moving in his performances. This is a violinist who unaffectedly adopts the swaying body, bending knees, nodding head, and lifted eyebrows of a small-town klezmer musician. Even as his right arm draws the bow across the strings—sometimes in surprising, near-silent delicacy, at other times with powerful, percussive emphasis—while his left travels up and down the violin’s neck with precision and speed, the rest of him is in almost constant motion. This is not the nervousness of a tapped foot or a juddering knee; it is a constant, probably unconscious, but extremely useful guide to what is taking place, moment by moment, in the music. Rising on his toes as the musical line goes up in tone or in volume, bending at the waist as he plays a particularly harsh chord, dancing from side to side when the rhythm becomes especially lively, Tetzlaff defines for us in a measure-by-measure way what is happening in the composition he is playing. The fact that he is not doing this on purpose, as some kind of pedagogical effort, makes it all the more effective, for the motions clearly come from inside him, just as the music seems to be doing. Whether he is playing melodious Brahms or cacophonous Bartok, the composer’s spirit appears to infuse Tetzlaff’s every move, manifesting itself physically before our eyes even as he enables it to reach our ears.
In its original order, the program would have started with the more accessible works (the brief, lovely, at times pained or mournful Janacek Violin Sonata, and then the dramatically enveloping Brahms Sonata No. 3 in D Minor), and then been followed after the intermission by the more challenging ones: the Ades (a relatively new suite based on his opera The Tempest), the Kurtag Tre Pezzi, and the Bartok Violin Sonata No. 2. It’s true that the twenty-minute Bartok piece, with its frequently jarring antagonisms leading into its extraordinarily moving, blending-into-silence ending, would have made a lovely close to the program. But the masterful Brahms work, one of the towering accomplishments of the violin-and-piano repertoire, made an even better one. So the musicians rearranged things at the last minute to give us the Janacek first—just to dip our toes in the water—and then the chillier Kurtag and Bartok. That left only Ades to accompany Brahms in the second half, which worked well, because it helped emphasize the Englishman’s tuneful side. In fact, I thought this spinoff suite gave us more emotional access to Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda than the whole opera had when I heard it a number of years ago; and Gerstein and Tetzlaff, both previous Ades collaborators, did full justice to it.
The very first time I heard Christian Tetzlaff, he was playing Brahms: the Violin Concerto, which he performed nearly twenty years ago with a visiting orchestra, also in Carnegie Hall. I remember being completely blown away by the power of this young, Pierrot-looking violinist, who even then used his swaying body and his lifting eyebrows to communicate the music. Since then I have heard him doing Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, Kurt Weill, you name it, in a variety of venues across Europe and America, and he is always great. As a live concert experience, nothing can beat hearing him perform all the Bach partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied violin in a single afternoon and evening; I have heard it twice, and if you ever have the chance, you should grab it. But for pure listening pleasure, I often find myself returning to his recording of the Brahms and Joachim violin concertos. This latest performance at Zankel seemed to summon up both of those pieces (the Brahms Sonata No. 3 was actually written for Joseph Joachim, who was better known as a violinist than as a composer); and as I listened to it, I found myself relaxing into its rhythms, sinking into the pleasure that music at its most welcoming can bring. Gerstein and Tetzlaff continued the mood in their encore, a delightful snippet of Beethoven, and as I sat back happily in my seat after the requisite (but in this case heartily meant) standing ovation, I thought: “I wish these two could just keep playing for me all evening.”