{"id":1294,"date":"2023-11-18T07:14:24","date_gmt":"2023-11-18T14:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1294"},"modified":"2023-11-18T07:18:22","modified_gmt":"2023-11-18T14:18:22","slug":"a-note-for-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/a-note-for-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Notes for Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like everybody else, New Yorkers are feeling pretty terrible these days.\u00a0It was with the hope of forgetting about the world’s problems, at least for a couple of hours, that I attended last week’s performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at Geffen Hall. I mean, what could be\u00a0more soothing and familiar and at the same time stirring and rewarding, if it is done right?\u00a0 And what were the chances that the New York Philharmonic<\/a> would do it wrong?<\/p>\n

As it turned out, zero. Under the baton of\u00a0the lively and\u00a0charmingly fuzzy-looking guest conductor, St\u00e9phane Den\u00e8ve, the orchestra’s players were excellent,\u00a0allowing the dynamics of the piece\u00a0to range, as they must, from the forceful to the subdued. But the real hero of the evening was a soloist I’d never heard if before, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. He wielded his 1741 Guarneri “del Gesu”\u2014on longterm loan to him from the Royal Danish Theatre\u2014as if he’d been born with it in his hands, and though his stance was a bit more stolid than I am used to in my favorite violinists, his playing was a fluid as one could wish. It was a delight to hear him, and to hear the orchestra backing him up so well; he and they appeared to get along like a house on fire.<\/p>\n

When he came out after the fourth round of applause to play\u00a0an encore, he spoke to us first, thanking us for our enthusiasm and announcing he would now play a short Bach partita. I cannot reproduce his words exactly, but I know they contained the words “reflection” and\u00a0“dialogue,” and somehow managed\u00a0to allude to the disaster in the Middle East without overtly saying so. We all got the point, and a large portion of the audience applauded his words as well as the beautiful piece that followed them.<\/p>\n

Later, on the subway home, I read the program note about Szeps-Znaider and also\u00a0Googled him on my phone.\u00a0It turns out he was born in 1975, in Copenhagen, to a Polish-Israeli\u00a0father and a Danish Jewish mother.\u00a0The timing suggests to me that his father was one of those Polish Jews (I knew several in my youth) who fled from Poland’s wave of anti-semitism in the late 1960s. In any case, Nikolaj was brought up in Denmark but now plays all over the world, including as a violinist and<\/em> conductor with orchestras in Singapore and France. One of his numerous concerts this season will be an appearance at Wigmore Hall with someone he describes as his\u00a0“longtime collaborator,” the pianist Saleem Ashkar. So clearly this is a guy who is used to\u00a0reaching across the aisle.<\/p>\n

Sitting in my\u00a0seat at Geffen Hall, and thinking\u00a0back on those moments in the week since then, I\u00a0felt extremely grateful to\u00a0Szeps-Znaider for sharing his cosmopolitan, humane vision with the rest of us. As much as the gorgeous music, it was what I desperately needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like everybody else, New Yorkers are feeling pretty terrible these days.\u00a0It was with the hope of forgetting about the world’s problems, at least for a couple of hours, that I attended last week’s performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at Geffen … 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":[28,61,712,713],"class_list":["post-1294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-beethoven","tag-new-york-philharmonic","tag-nikolaj-szeps-znaider","tag-stephane-deneve"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294","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=1294"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1302,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions\/1302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}