It’s always great to return to Carnegie Hall with a bang, and I certainly got that thrill last week. I was able to attend two amazing concerts with two days of each other, each exemplifying something completely different about the virtues of musical performance.
First up, on Wednesday, was the young Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki, whom I had discovered for myself in Berlin about five years ago. That was a purely chance encounter—he was substituting for some ailing eminence in a piano concerto at the Konzerthaus, and I bought the ticket at the last minute—and I was blown away, as was the rest of the discerning, normally reticent Berlin audience. When Lisiecki (who must have been all of 23 at the time) finished his undemonstrative but wonderful performance, we all howled and stamped our approval. So when I heard he would be holding the stage of Stern Hall all by himself on March 13, I hastened to get a ticket.
It was the kind of program only a young man would put together. The first half consisted of fifteen preludes by various different hands, some as short as sixty seconds and none lasting longer than eleven minutes. In quick succession, without pausing to allow for any applause, he gave us pieces by Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Szymanowski, Messiaen, and Gorecki—all without any musical score in front of him, and all rendered beautifully. He hadn’t said anything about his attacca approach beforehand, but he didn’t need to, because his body language was enough to keep us quiet and attentive throughout. Not a whisper or a page-flutter could be heard in the packed hall; as far as I could see, not a head moved from its focus on the lone figure on the stage. I felt as if we were all hiding in a forest, watching and listening to some gorgeous rare bird that might fly away if we moved a muscle. The audience members were so stunned by Lisiecki’s performance that they forgot to give a standing ovation at the end of the first half, something they normally do just to get out of their seats. But the applause, when it finally came, was thunderous.
The second half was equally thrilling in a different way: it consisted entirely of Chopin’s Twenty-Four Preludes (Opus 28), where the composer pays a brief and enchanting visit to every major and minor key. This gave Lisiecki a chance to show his range within a single composer’s work, and I have to say, he managed to enlarge my feeling for Chopin to an extent I would not have thought possible. Every available emotion seem to be covered in these twenty-four little pieces, and the way they differed, rhythmically and dynamically, showcased Lisiecki’s skill without ever making it seem like mere virtuosity. Throughout, his manner was entirely unmannered; his huge talent was gracefully and modestly worn, so much so that it was a pleasure to watch him as well as hear him. This time the audience was prepared, and this time we did stand (and howl, and applaud until our hands hurt). And Jan Lisiecki responded in just the way a young man should, with an encore that was at once witty and touching: a Romance, because, as he said, “what should follow all these preludes but Love?”
Neither Mitsuko Uchida nor Mark Padmore is what I would call old. As performers they are still in their prime, and their evident vigor and grace as human beings makes them seem ageless. But they bring to Schubert’s Winterreise, which they performed together last Friday night in Zankel Hall, the kind of experience and knowledge that can only be acquired through years of living. Poor Schubert, who died at the age of 31, never got to have a “late style” in the sense that, say, Beethoven or Shostakovich did. But Uchida and Padmore kindly gave him one in their March 15 concert, and I was grateful to witness it.
Partly, it was a matter of pacing. Like Glenn Gould in his final recording of the Goldberg Variations, the pair slowed things down, even giving us pauses—not just between the songs, but also within them. To me, this was particularly apparent in Uchida’s piano-playing, as if it were she, and not the tenor, who had willfully decided to make each note linger in our minds as long as possible. Yet Padmore matched her in gravity and honesty, managing to bring a new interpretation to this piece he has done so many times before. The songs were less fluid and more wrenching; one could sense a certain harshness behind them, as if they had been pulled up with great effort from terrifying abysses of feeling. In this sense, the journey was even more wintry than usual: the narrator’s character had deepened and darkened, to the point where he was reflecting at a distance on his own illusions and disillusions. I found the whole seventy-five-minute performance extraordinarily moving, and I think everyone around me did too.