Christian Tetzlaff.
Cal Performances, Berkeley,
February 12, 2013.
Christian Tetzlaff is my favorite violinist—I think he may well be the best violinist in the entire world—and yet I do not own a single one of his recordings. This is odd, but the oddity of it only struck me very recently. And what’s odder still is that the realization came to me not in the form of something missing, but in terms of what I had briefly, if fleetingly, possessed.
Last February I returned home from his latest solo concert in Berkeley filled with the experience of listening to him, desperately trying to hold onto the actual sensation of hearing him play. No CD could have helped me. To resort to a recording, in such circumstances, would have been like accepting a mnemonic device symbolizing the planets (Mary’s Violet Eyes Make John Stay Up Nights, say) in place of an intense, all-encompassing view of the astronomical bodies themselves. But this perception, this analogy, only came to me later, for on that particular February night I did not check to see if I owned a Tetzlaff CD. Even at the time, I knew instinctively that what I wanted—the permanent preservation of an ephemeral, one-of-a-kind experience—was not to be had.
This is not, I hasten to add, because Tetzlaff has failed to record great music. Among his currently available CDs are the Bach partitas and sonatas, Mozart’s violin concertos, Beethoven’s concerto and romances for violin, Brahms’s concerto and sonatas, the Bartok violin sonatas (with Leif Ove Andsnes on the piano), and a range of enticing works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Sibelius, Ligeti, and others. These are all delicious choices; I know just how delicious because I’ve heard Tetzlaff play many of these things live. But that is the problem. The sense memory of being in the room listening to him may have ebbed away, but my conscious mind retains an awareness of exactly how pleasurable the experience was, in each and every case. And my ear, it appears, will accept no substitutes. No, not my ear alone, for mine is a simpleminded ear, clearly delighting in all the other recordings—from Bach cantatas and Beethoven quartets to Rossini operas and Schubert symphonies—with which I routinely keep it entertained. It’s all the rest of me, in addition to my ears, that knows the difference between a Tetzlaff concert and a Tetzlaff recording.
When I say I can remember each and every concert, I am not exaggerating. I don’t think there is another musician I could say this about, even among those I love. My first encounter with Christian Tetzlaff’s playing took place about five years ago, when I heard him perform the Brahms violin concerto at Carnegie Hall. I don’t remember who the conductor and the orchestra were; all I can recall are the sight of that Pierrot-like figure on the stage, the astonishment of the music that came out of his violin, and the enormous impact they both had on me. Within a year I had heard him do the complete Bach partitas and sonatas (one of the high points of my concert-going life, right up there with hearing Yo-Yo Ma perform the complete Bach cello suites in an Edinburgh church in 1995), as well as Shostakovich’s wonderful First Violin Concerto, a piece so difficult that it cannot be played at all unless it is played well. After that came sonata performances with Leif Ove Andsnes on both the west and east coasts; appearances with the Boston Sym-phony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony in which he played, respectively, Bartók and Ligeti concertos; an evening at Zankel with the Tetzlaff Quartet, featuring not one but two Tetzlaffs (his sister Tanja is the cellist); and a particularly charming Ensemble ACJW concert in which he joined with recent Juilliard graduates to perform a segment of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre under the lively direction of Simon Rattle. Each one of these performances was a knockout in a different way, and each strengthened my resolution never to miss a Tetzlaff concert that occurred anywhere in my vicinity.
You would think that with expectations like these, I would be in grave danger of eventual disappointment. I was conscious of fearing this myself, as I looked forward with a combination of nervousness and anticipation to his performance in Berkeley last February. But the minute Tetzlaff began to play, my fears were assuaged. There he was again, that slender, unassuming, gracefully expressive figure, standing alone on the stage at First Congregational Church, surrounded by the quietest, most attentive Berkeley audience I have ever had the pleasure of joining. It was as if we were holding our collective breath, waiting for the next note, the next remarkable sound, to emerge from his violin.
The program began with a piece I had never heard before—Ysayë’s 1924 Sonata No. 1 in G minor—and then moved to Bach’s complicated and moving Sonata No. 3 in C major. At the end of the Ysayë I whispered to my companions that it sounded as if it had been based on Bach; and indeed the program note, when I read it at the interval, confirmed this guess. But it was Tetzlaff’s playing, rather than the written text, that gave me the hint, by showing me how those weird, often atonal, sometimes barely musical chords echoed the more familiar strains of Bach. And if the Ysayë was made to seem venerably ancient, the Bach was similarly made modern in Tetzlaff’s hands: I could hear its weirdnesses, its near-atonalities, as I had never done before. But it wasn’t just the two pieces in combination that gave them their richness, their enveloping intensity. It was something about the way Tetzlaff seemed to be listening to each work as it unfurled in his hands, waiting for those sounds to emerge into the world as if for the very first time. His listening complemented our listening, just as our bated breath complimented his playing; we were all, for the duration, communicants at the same ceremony, bringers of the music to life.
The second half of the program was the Hungarian half, featuring Kurtág and Bartók, and if the emotional impact was less overwhelming than in the first half, the performance was nonetheless remarkable. Again the two works functioned in relation to each other—one extremely modern-sounding, the other an older and more established gem—but in this case Tetzlaff’s cleverness lay in getting us to accept Bartók, rather than Bach, as the classical foundation. He rewarded us for this mild suspension of disbelief by giving us, in the encores, two somewhat more accessible works: first, as if to dispel any aura of musical snobbery, a thrilling bit of Paganini, and then the deep, beautiful Andante of Bach’s A minor Sonata, which perfectly closed the whole evening.
I used the word “cleverness” above, but it is probably not the right one to apply to a performer who so scrupulously avoids the merely showy; “wisdom” might be more appropriate, if it didn’t suggest a ponderousness that is never there in the sprightly Tetzlaff, who almost dances as he plays. And just as I hesitate between these two words, I also find myself hesitating to mention Tetzlaff’s self-evident technical gifts. Christian Tetzlaff can clearly do anything he wishes with his fingers and his bow. The pieces he performs sometimes approach the impossible in terms of fingering and timing, and the tones he can produce are so unusual that I often hear audience members remarking afterward, “I can’t believe the sounds he got out of that violin!” Yet one of the greatest things about Tetzlaff is that all the technique, essential as it is, simply falls by the wayside when you hear him play. The music gets transmuted directly into emotion, as if it did not even have to pass through his fingers and his bow and his violin to get to us. It becomes a presence in the room, and as we lean forward to catch the quietest strains, or straighten our backs to welcome the return of a lyrical passage, we become part of it. This is the feeling I look for every time I go to a Tetzlaff concert, and he has never failed me yet.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her ninth book, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, is now available in paperback; her tenth, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, will be out next January from Farrar, Straus & Giroux
