{"id":119,"date":"2010-03-25T09:45:49","date_gmt":"2010-03-25T16:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=119"},"modified":"2013-07-13T09:48:32","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T16:48:32","slug":"an-excess-of-riches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/an-excess-of-riches\/","title":{"rendered":"An Excess of Riches"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I went to a perfectly nice concert in\u00a0Carnegie\u2019s Weill Hall<\/a>. It was the New York debut of a very talented young Scandinavian cellist named Andreas Brantelid, accompanied on the piano by the older and also talented Bengt Forsberg, and they were playing what looked in advance to be an interesting program: Schubert\u2019s \u201cArpeggione\u201d Sonata, Faur\u00e9\u2019s Cello Sonata No. 2, Debussy\u2019s Sonata in D Minor, and Prokofiev\u2019s sole cello sonata. And in the event it\u00a0was<\/em> interesting, and pleasant, and completely unannoying. But it was not thrilling. I have the feeling that the problem lay less in the performers than in the wide variety of profoundly exciting performances I had already witnessed that week. The nice little concert in Weill, which I would have killed for during the largely vacant months I spend elsewhere, just did not live up to the rest of New York\u2019s late-winter riches.<\/p>\n

The week began, for me, with a Saturday night solo recital by Andras Schiff in Avery Fisher Hall. Schiff is always worth hearing (I was to hear him again two days later, in conjunction with the\u00a0New York Philharmonic<\/a>), but there is a special appeal to hearing him alone onstage, because he always makes something unexpected out of the music. In this case, he played four pieces\u2014two each by Mendelssohn and Schumann\u2014and made them sound like nothing I had ever heard before. In the case of two of them, Mendelssohn\u2019sVariations s\u00e9rieuses<\/em> in D Minor and Schumann\u2019s Sonata No. 1, I believe I actually\u00a0had<\/em> never heard them before; but what he made of the more familiar Mendelssohn and Schumann\u00a0Fantasies<\/em> that he played after the intermission was equally surprising. Whether he is uncovering rarely played works or investigating familiar ones, Schiff is always discovering something. Going to one of his solo concerts is like listening in on a private session between a pianist and his piano\u2014not that there is any tentativeness or redoing of errors, but there is a kind of openness and exploration that one expects to hear only in private.<\/p>\n

That was followed, on Sunday afternoon, by just about the best performance of Shostakovich\u2019s Fourth Symphony I have ever heard (and I have heard Gergiev do it with the Mariinsky Orchestra, which was my previous standard of comparison). In this case, the young Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski was leading his home orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra\u2014again at Avery Fisher Hall, but this time under the auspices of the\u00a0Lincoln Center Presents \u201cGreat Performers\u201d<\/a> series. The marvelous Shostakovich symphony in C Minor, written in 1936 but unplayed until after Stalin\u2019s death, might just be Shostakovich\u2019s best work on that scale; it is at any rate one of his most thrilling, with ear-splitting cacophanous vivacity countered by moments of quiet tenderness and a trailing-off ending that is filled with something close to mortal terror. And Jurowski and his London chums did it full justice.<\/p>\n

Then it was Monday night and the\u00a0New York Philharmonic<\/a>, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, for whom these musicians always play their best. Friends who had been to a previous night of this program advised me in the strongest terms to leave at intermission and skip the Hindemith Symphony in E Flat\u2014and though I am not prone to taking other people\u2019s advice, this suggestion was so emphatic (\u201cIt was horribly annoying; it left me in a terrible mood,\u201d said one friend, and \u201cIt was composing indicative of the most rigid mind,\u201d said another) that I happily obeyed. This left me with a one-hour gemlike concert\u2014Andras Schiff performing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 as Muti led the Philharmonic beautifully in the background. It was the kind of perfect experience that made you wish all concerts lasted just an hour, and it only heightened my admiration for Schiff, and for Brahms.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights Valery Gergiev was conducting his own excellent Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus in a concert version of Berlioz\u2019s\u00a0Les Troyens<\/em> at\u00a0Carnegie Hall<\/a>. Though I am not normally a big Berlioz fan, I have learned to go to anything of his that Gergiev conducts, and this was no exception. The solo performances were great, the chorus was outstanding, and the orchestra was, as usual, beyond reproach. I basked in the ninety-minute intermissionless first part on Tuesday, and though I had to stay home on Wednesday to rest up for my big Thursday event, my friends who went to both halves said the second half was, if anything, even better. But that is the thing about New York: one lacks the pure bodily endurance to go to everything, even if conflicts, price, and distance were not a factor.<\/p>\n

And then on Thursday I attended what, for me, was the high point of the week: William Kentridge\u2019s terrific new production of Shostakovich\u2019s first opera,\u00a0The Nose<\/em>, with Gergiev conducting the Met\u2019s orchestra. I am going to write about this production in\u00a0The Threepenny Review<\/em> and elsewhere, so I won\u2019t say any more for now, except to comment that the three collaborators\u2014Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge\u2014turn out to share a sensibility that makes the sum of their collaboration even better than the individual parts. I went back to the\u00a0Metropolitan Opera House<\/a> less than two weeks later to seeThe Nose<\/em> again, and if I could, I would go twice a month for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

So you can imagine what Brantelid and Forsberg were up against, coming on the Friday after all\u00a0that<\/em>. I only hope I someday have a chance to hear them again with a more open mind and a less depleted heart.<\/p>\n

\u2014March 25, 2010<\/em><\/p>\n


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A couple of weeks ago I went to a perfectly nice concert in\u00a0Carnegie\u2019s Weill Hall. It was the New York debut of a very talented young Scandinavian cellist named Andreas Brantelid, accompanied on the piano by the older and also … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[76,64,74,61,75],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-andras-schiff","tag-carnegie-hall","tag-lincoln-center-presents","tag-new-york-philharmonic","tag-valery-gergiev"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}