{"id":1209,"date":"2023-03-29T07:07:10","date_gmt":"2023-03-29T14:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2023-03-29T07:23:33","modified_gmt":"2023-03-29T14:23:33","slug":"more-than-one-tetzlaff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/more-than-one-tetzlaff\/","title":{"rendered":"More Than One Tetzlaff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since Christian Tetzlaff is\u201a and has been for decades, my favorite violinist in the whole world, I\u00a0take every available opportunity to hear him. And this has meant that\u00a0two or three times I’ve been privileged to hear the Tetzlaff Trio\u2014most recently at the 92nd Street Y<\/a>, where they played last night.<\/p>\n

There are actually only two Tetzlaffs in the trio: Christian on the violin and his sister Tanja on the cello. For many years their excellent third member was the pianist Lars Vogt, with whom they had worked so closely and so long that he almost seemed like a third sibling. But last September Vogt died of cancer, tragically young.\u00a0On this latest tour, he has been replaced\u00a0by his student, Kiveli D\u00f6rken.<\/p>\n

She may not be a full Tetzlaff yet, but D\u00f6rken more than held up her end in this concert. Her\u00a0sound\u00a0was perhaps a bit too\u00a0emphatic\u00a0in the Beethoven that opened the program (Op. 1, No. 3), but even there her skills were obvious and her playing suitably delicate in the quiet parts. By the Dvorak (No. 2, Op. 26), which came second, she had calmed down considerably, and when the trio reached the end of its program\u2014the enchanting Schubert Piano Trio No. 1\u2014her performance could not have been bettered by anyone.<\/p>\n

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that Schubert piece played more beautifully than I did last night. The accord among the three players was perfect; the way they picked up each other’s themes, alternated their trills and pizzicatos, occasionally joined together in unison,\u00a0and even left\u00a0a few momentary\u00a0silences was a pleasure to behold.\u00a0Watching the cellist as she\u00a0intermittently glanced aside at the violinist, I felt that the word “automatic” did not do just to\u00a0the sibling connection:\u00a0their shared sense of the music lies deeper than practice\u00a0or technicality, extending down\u00a0to some place that’s bred in the bone. What is magical is that the trio allows this close tie to\u00a0become manifest,\u00a0and yet still makes room for a third person in its embrace.<\/p>\n

As a soloist, Christian Tetzlaff is known for his lightness of touch\u2014he can sometimes play so softly that\u00a0you feel yourself leaning in to hear the notes\u2014and also for his intense musicality, whereby he seems to be channeling the composer’s own character in every dynamic or rhythmic shift. I have heard him do this with Bach’s challenging partitas and sonatas\u00a0(twice, in fact, both times at the 92nd Street Y); most recently,\u00a0I heard him do it in Kurt Weill’s judderingly twentieth-century\u00a0Concerto for Violin and Wind Instruments<\/em>, played under the masterful\u00a0baton of Vladimir Jurowski at Berlin’s Konzerthaus.\u00a0In other words, he is superb at the full range of the violin’s repertoire. But in the Tetzlaff Trio he\u00a0has mostly chosen to perform\u00a0works of the Beethoven-Schubert-Brahms-Dvorak period, an amazing era of just over a century that\u00a0produced a plethora of great\u00a0piano trio music.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night we were treated to that period in full, because the encore\u2014a Brahms slow movement\u2014was drawn from a piano trio\u00a0that had Vogt recorded with the Tetzlaffs back in 2014. This achingly emotional Brahms encore\u00a0was their explicit tribute to their lost comrade, but the evening’s program as a whole was dedicated to him. Perhaps as a result, the entire concert felt\u00a0moving and triumphant, joyful and sad all at once, just as the best music should be.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since Christian Tetzlaff is\u201a and has been for decades, my favorite violinist in the whole world, I\u00a0take every available opportunity to hear him. And this has meant that\u00a0two or three times I’ve been privileged to hear the Tetzlaff Trio\u2014most recently … 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":[676,28,27,22,229,677,566,678,299,330,326,454],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-92ny","tag-beethoven","tag-brahms","tag-christian-tetzlaff","tag-dvorak","tag-kiveli-dorken","tag-konzerthaus-berlin","tag-kurt-weill","tag-schubert","tag-tanja-tetzlaff","tag-tetzlaff-trio","tag-vladimir-jurowski"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","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=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1216,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}