{"id":901,"date":"2018-04-22T07:21:21","date_gmt":"2018-04-22T14:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=901"},"modified":"2018-04-22T08:37:41","modified_gmt":"2018-04-22T15:37:41","slug":"great-performers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/great-performers\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Performers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0this\u00a0wintry New York spring, I have thus far managed to attend\u00a0two Great Performers concerts at Lincoln Center<\/a>. Both of them,\u00a0not at all to my surprise, completely lived up to the series name.<\/p>\n

The first, on March 28, featured my favorite violinist, Christian Tetzlaff, playing four of the six Bach sonatas and partitas\u00a0for solo violin. I have heard him do the whole sequence twice at the 92nd Street Y, and each time it was one of the most thrilling musical experiences of my life. If this Alice Tully event\u00a0felt slightly less overwhelming, that may have been\u00a0because the gargantuan physical effort required to play all six had been reduced to the length of a normal chamber-music concert.\u00a0But by\u00a0laying aside the marathon aspects, Tetzlaff in a way\u00a0made it\u00a0easier for us to pay attention to the straightforward musical\u00a0pleasures. With the first sonata and partita\u00a0omitted, we were able to leap\u00a0directly into the glories of the middle section, which\u00a0ended just before the intermission on\u00a0what many people consider the high point of the whole series, the Chaconne of Partita 2. Certainly this is an amazing movement, composed as if for two or three violins but with only one player sounding all the notes on his verifiably solo instrument. It was as if Bach said to himself, “I think I’ll compose something impossible and then see if someone comes along in the next four hundred years who is able to play it well.”<\/p>\n

Yet even at\u00a0this most difficult, strenuous point in\u00a0the concert, Tetzlaff’s playing\u00a0seemed effortless\u2014not slight or facile in any way, but also not diligently self-congratulatory. It\u00a0felt\u00a0completely natural:\u00a0an odd thing to say, I realize, about a performance of such\u00a0supernatural delicacy and tonality, but that is the impression Tetzlaff always leaves me with,\u00a0a sense that the music is emanating without strain from his own body. And when he reached\u00a0the final two movements of the third partita\u2014a Bourr\u00e9e and a\u00a0Gigue that his swaying body and tapping feet visibly\u00a0confirmed as dance rhythms\u2014we\u00a0could feel the joyous\u00a0triumph of this\u00a0partnership, a pairing between player and composer so closely matched that\u00a0one could no\u00a0longer\u00a0tell the dancer from the dance.<\/p>\n

Something oddly similar happened in the second Great Performance, on April 19, where the singer and the pianist, Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, exhibited their own\u00a0uncanny capacity to merge their separate artistic natures into one.\u00a0\u00a0Instead of Bach, we had high German romanticism, in the forms of songs by Schumann and Brahms based on poems by Heinrich Heine. In my youth, I would have scoffed at the idea that I would ever have enjoyed a concert of German lieder<\/em>. I think my\u00a0youthful attitude\u00a0was similar to Lucky Jim’s when he complained about\u00a0“filthy Mozart”:\u00a0not so much a philistine response as a sign of\u00a0class resentment. (The two may overlap, but whereas philistinism is almost always thoughtless, class resentment can be and often is well-grounded.) But what Padmore cleverly did, in this case, was to defuse some of that class element by speaking at the beginning about the people behind these pieces. By lending character and plot to the evening\u2014in terms of Clara Schumann’s relationship with both men, their personalities in relation to hers, and the very different moods they evoked from Heine’s poems\u2014he made the performance something other\u00a0than a mere lieder<\/em> recital, something more human and easily graspable. And that is how he embodied the songs as well: as living documents representing intense relationships, between man and woman, between artist and self.<\/p>\n

Padmore’s introduction also served to emphasize the piano’s important role in these pieces, by pointing out\u00a0that Clara, the\u00a0noted pianist for\u00a0whom they were written, would have sounded them out in the privacy of her own home, and that Brahms\u00a0himself performed on the piano\u00a0in some of the early concerts. In doing so, he shifted the sense of the evening from a tenor recital with accompanying pianist (which is the way these things are so often billed) to a full collaboration between singer and musician. And Paul Lewis more than lived up to that expectation, lending his own aura\u00a0of quiet charm and infinite craftsmanship to the evening’s performance. Often it would be left to the pianist to finish the songs, to elaborate their emotions and then delicately close them down. One of my favorite examples of this occurred during the first half, in Schumann’s Liederkreis<\/em>, where the singer stands silent as the piano sounds three repeated notes in an ending. Lewis drew out the spaces between the notes, as if to tease us with the possibility of endlessness\u2014and then, between the second and final notes, he flicked a glance toward us, as if to say, “Are you ready and waiting now?” Padmore’s grin at this point was one\u00a0signal of their intense solidarity; another, more solemn instance occurred at the end of the concert, when the tenor, having had his impassioned say in the\u00a0Dichterliebe<\/em>, stood in silence,\u00a0his clenched, upraised fist gradually opening and dropping to his side, as the piano had the final wrenching word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0this\u00a0wintry New York spring, I have thus far managed to attend\u00a0two Great Performers concerts at Lincoln Center. Both of them,\u00a0not at all to my surprise, completely lived up to the series name. The first, on March 28, featured my favorite … 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":[502,17,27,22,146,237,503,291],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-alice-tully","tag-bach","tag-brahms","tag-christian-tetzlaff","tag-lincoln-center","tag-mark-padmore","tag-paul-lewis","tag-schumann"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","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=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}