The Director Designate

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

The atmosphere was intense—like a high-stakes football game, I couldn’t help thinking (except I’ve never actually been to a football game, so I was going by what I’ve seen in movies and on TV). Every seat in Davies Hall was taken, and there was a huge feeling of anticipation in the air. When Elim Chan walked out onto the stage to conduct the introductory piece in her first concert as Music Director Designate of the San Francisco Symphony, the audience burst into wild applause and then rose to its feet and applauded some more. And that was before they had even heard her conduct one note.

A small, slim, Hong-Kong-born, American-educated woman, Chan was beautifully dressed in a black outfit that hovered somewhere between a suit and a dress, its skirt long and drifty, its jacket fitted and embroidered. She strode to the podium with a calm assertiveness, then turned to bow to the audience and, taking microphone in hand, warmly expressed her thanks and affection and gladness at being in San Francisco. She promised to speak to us further (as indeed she did, both after the second piece and after the intermission) and then launched into a sensitive, dramatic rendition of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde.

Like her concluding piece, Debussy’s La Mer, this was a crowd-pleaser designed to show off the orchestra’s skill and range; in that sense, it gratified all her clients present that night, her players as well as her audience members. I do not generally go to concerts that feature these works—the programming, in that respect, was not exactly to my taste—but my sense is that they appeal to people who think they want to feel something at concerts. Movie-music that was not written for movies, I would say if I am in a cruel mood; Romanticism carried to its highest level, if I am not. The rationale she gave for choosing each of those pieces for this concert (love like that which she was feeling from and toward the audience, in the case of the Wagner; San Francisco’s seacoast, in the case of La Mer) struck me as a bit simplistic, but never mind: the execution was excellent, and Chan’s strong, fearless gestures in evoking the melodies were suitably sweeping and watchable.

The only real surprise on the program, and my favorite part by far, was the Berlioz series of songs Les Nuits d’eté, sung by the fine mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. Cooke’s connection with the San Francisco Symphony goes way back (she mentioned that it was her 62nd performance with the symphony), and in the brief and charming conversation with the conductor that followed her vivid performance, she repeatedly praised the late Michael Tilson Thomas. The more recent Esa-Pekka Salonen got zero mention throughout the evening, which felt strange and avoidant, as if that world-famous conductor had never even been in San Francisco—perhaps signaling the shame that still hangs over the SFS administration due to its bad behavior toward him. In any case, it was clear this celebratory evening was intended to signal a new start for the symphony, as I hope it truly will be.

 I am reserving final judgment on Elim Chan herself until I see and hear more of her programming. But I have to admit that I had fun last Friday night, mainly at the excitement-filled concert itself, but also (briefly) at the after-party held on a blocked-off Grove Street for all the evening’s ticket-holders. As I strode down Grove toward BART late that night, I had a similar companionable feeling to what I had experienced on my way up from the transit station, when I passed all the rainbow flags in City Hall Plaza, waving in the early-evening breeze. In June of 2026, San Francisco seems like the right place to be.

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Chamber Music, International Version

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

There is a level of performance below which concerts at Carnegie Hall never fall, if the concert is presented under the official auspices of Carnegie (as almost all the ones I attend are). You are guaranteed a high quality of musicianship, relative to the rest of the amateur and professional musical world: in short, the performers always know how to play their instruments well. But this alone, as I learned last week, is not enough to insure a good concert.

The May 15 performance I heard in Stern Hall featured five well-known musicians—Leonidas Kavakos and Gil Shaham on violin, Antoine Tamestit on viola, and Pablo Ferrandez and Alisa Weilerstein on cello—playing Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major. That sentence alone should clue you in to what went wrong, though I myself failed to pick up the clues in advance. Number One is that chamber music really shouldn’t be played in a hall as large as Carnegie’s largest, which seats as many as 2,790 people in its multiple tiers. Number Two is that these thrown-together All-Star teams generally fail to collaborate as well as less famous but more steadily cohesive chamber groups do. And Number Three is that Schubert’s great quintet, perhaps more than any other piece of music, requires that kind of long-term and heartfelt collaboration.

I was able to do a real-world experiment testing exactly those variables, in that only two weeks earlier, on May 1, I had heard the Hagen Quartett, supplemented by cellist Julia Hagen (daughter to one of the quartet members and niece to two of them), play the same Schubert piece in the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. The Boulez Saal is the perfect size and shape for chamber music: 682 seats in just two tiers, all arranged in the round—or, technically, the oval—around the central performing area. From my seat in the fifth row of the parkett level, I could not only see every expression, every mutual glance, every glimmer of special effort on the players’ faces; I could also hear every note as if it were being played in my own living room. (Better, probably, since my living room does not have especially good acoustics.) But more importantly, the members of the Hagen Quartett have been rehearsing and performing together for decades—so much so that last year they announced they were retiring. I attended that retirement concert at Pierre Boulez Saal, and it was terrific. It was even more terrific to hear that they were coming back out of retirement to perform the Schubert with their niece and daughter Julia. Need I say that it was one of the most moving renditions of this extremely powerful piece of music I’ve ever heard? Especially in the final movement, where the composer is having trouble letting go of the masterpiece he’s wrought, you could feel the individual Hagens clinging to the moment of their reunion and resisting their ultimate dispersal. There was pleasure and excitement here (the final movement is, after all, an Allegretto), but there was also deep longing and more than a tinge of underlying sadness.

Flash forward to May 15 at Carnegie. Perhaps I exaggerate in saying that there was no feeling behind the All-Star performance of the same piece, but if there was, it didn’t affect me. (Nor did it affect any of the three people I attended the concert with, so it wasn’t just me; we were all disappointed.) The musicians all played the notes correctly—how could they not, at their level?—but something in between the notes was missing.

I had another lesson in the past month, too, and that was about novelty versus familiarity. (It may also have been about chamber music size, which is supposed to be the theme of this entry:  I do my best to stick to the title’s theme, even if I am not always successful.) At the fabled Berlin Philharmonic, first in the large hall and then in the chamber hall, I heard two concerts that turned out the opposite to what I would have predicted. That is, the surprising program—which combined two things I’d never heard before with one old favorite—turned out to be less thrilling than the familiar selection I thought I’d heard a million times before. 

The April 22 concert in the larger hall featured Simon Rattle conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. I will go to anything that Simon Rattle conducts, even if he chooses to conduct the phone book, and in the past he’s introduced me to great pieces I would never have suspected I would love. This time, though, the Bartok with which he began the concert (the Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta), though substantial enough to form the first half of the concert, felt to me like a charming novelty rather than a true discovery. The Busoni that came after the intermission—Two Studies for Doctor Faustus—was even stranger and slighter. Neither was a piece I would wish unheard, but nor will I rush out to hear them again soon, and in any case the opportunity to do that strikes me as seriously unlikely, since each of those composers wrote so much else of more interest.  As for the third and final piece on the program, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony—well, I have loved what Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic did with this piece (so much so that I stream their recording all the time), but the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, though packed with talented players, could not fill those shoes. I am sure Rattle had a point he was proving with this program, having to do with the interconnections among composers over time, but the combination failed to grab me in the moment, and that is when live music needs to grab you.

Toward the end of my three-week Berlin stay, I went back to the Berlin Philharmonie, this time to the Kammermusiksaal, to hear the Quatuor Ebene play three Beethoven quartets: Opus 18, No. 5, Opus 18, No. 4, and Opus 127. Had you asked me before I went, I would have said I was just putting up with the two earlier quartets in order to hear Opus 127, my favorite of the entire series. 

But I was wrong. The marvelous Quatuor Ebene—a French group, entirely new to me, consisting of three men and one woman, all looking surprisingly young for people who have been playing together for twenty years—made the Opus 18 pieces soar. From their first perfectly coordinated note to the final strain of each chord, I was on the edge of my seat, excited and moved at hearing such vigorous, startling, emotionally persuasive interpretations. And even Opus 127, when it came, had a novel excitement for me, despite all my over-streaming of various stunning performances by, say, the Alban Berg Quartet and the Danish String Quartet. It was as if I were hearing each of these familiar old Beethoven quartets for the first time, and that is something like a miracle. (It was also great to see the three men in the group allow the female violist to enter and leave the stage whenever she wished—first, last, in the middle—which is something I have never seen any classical musical group do before. To my mild annoyance, the music world appears to be the last hold-out of the phrase “Ladies first.” Watch, next time you’re at any sort of concert, and you’ll see what I mean.)

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Giulio Cesare at the Deutsche Oper

Posted on May 11, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

I have noticed, in the course of my opera-going life, that other people go to opera for the singing. It is not that I ignore the singing—certainly I would be distressed if it were missing, or bad—but for me, when I am at a live opera, other things are equally important. I don’t just mean the quality of the orchestral music (though that is important too). What I look for, at an opera, is a sense of felt life, felt connection to reality, even if in a very distorted or exaggerated form, just as when I read a novel, I want to sense sympathetic or unsympathetic characters acting out a plot, however implausible that plot may be. And just as with a novel, I want to feel that there is an author guiding my path through the opera, which generally means a director, since the composer and librettist, even if they are alive (and they usually aren’t), can never bring the piece to the stage unaided.

Last Sunday’s performance of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin had everything, to my taste, but the author. It had a director—the famous Scots opera director David McVicar, who crafted this production for Glyndebourne in 2005 and has now brought it to Berlin—but his take on the piece was so screwy (to use a highly technical term of art) that I had trouble figuring it out. In the opening scenes, Julius Caesar appeared to be a British soldier from roughly the late nineteenth or earlier twentieth century: he and his army were garbed in the traditional red uniforms, including a Scottish kilt in the outfit of his second-in-command. Much later in the performance, they came back in the kind of sunhats and shorts that would have suited explorers in Africa—no doubt because at this point they were invading Egypt, which is, I suppose, part of the African continent. But meanwhile, the performance treated us to a range of Egyptian figures—from Cleopatra and her evil brother Tolomeo, to Cleopatra’s aide and confidant Nireno, to Tolomeo’s henchman Achilla, to a whole collection of servants-as-backup-dancers—who all seemed to come from some undesignated Eastern location. Their costumes and movements suggested everything from ancient Greece to Turkey to India to the Roaring Twenties. (I realize that era is not exactly a geographical place, but Cleopatra nailed it perfectly in her one scene as a Louise-Brooks-style flapper.) In other words, they were all over the map, in what struck me as a particularly cavalier British attitude toward the “lower orders” of the Empire. Possibly this was all meant as satire on the colonialist English view—I wouldn’t put it past a Scotsman to do that—but to me it just came across as a mixed metaphor. And given that these comedic, sometimes cartoonish elements were mixed with the seriously tragic plot involving Cornelia and Sesto, the wife and son of the murdered Egyptian king Pompeo, I couldn’t figure out how to mesh them into the whole.

But then, Handel himself is notorious for mixing modes, leaping from serious tragedy to droll high spirits in the space of a few measures. And besides, I adore the music of Giulio Cesare, which I often stream for myself at home, all four hours of it. In this case it was played to perfection by the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper under the baton of Alessandro Quarta (an exuberant and unconventional fellow himself, to judge by his curtain calls). And the voices were sublime, every single one of them. I mean, what’s not to like about an opera with three countertenors, all of them operating at the top of their field?  Christophe Dumaux, in the huge role of Caesar, was consistently wonderful and clear; Francis Gush as Tolomeo was suitably frightening, needy, and hateful; and Edu Rojas, as Nireno, played Cleopatra’s Gay Best Friend with panache and humor, all rendered in his diction-perfect countertenor voice. The African-American bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, who took on the thanklessly mixed role of Achilla, performed it with grace and persuasiveness. The young soprano Martina Baroni was so good in her pants part as Sesto that at the curtain call she got practically the biggest ovation in the house; and as her mother Cornelia, the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Wake-Edwards was suitably tragic and moving.

But without a doubt the star of the show was Elena Tsallagova as Cleopatra. A Russian-born soprano, she has been a regular performer with the Deutsche Oper Berlin since 2013, though I’ve never had the treat of seeing her before. It seems she can do anything: dance, sing, flirt with the audience, dress and undress onstage, wear period outfits and period wigs that look like they belong on her…her achievements are endless, and all without missing a note. In fact, I’d be willing to say that of all the outstanding voices in this production, hers was the most remarkable—but never as a voice in itself, always as a vehicle of what she was putting across in her performance. Because she was the singer who most thoroughly embodied McVicar’s slap-happy approach to the temporal unities, I was initially resistant to her charms. But it was Tsallagova herself, in her late-stage exuberant aria about Caesar’s boats (which she performed in a World War I flyer’s outfit, transcending even her back-up dancers in the precision of her movements), who finally caused me to burst into spontaneous and heartfelt applause

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Tetzlaff!

Posted on May 7, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Sometime in the first few months of 2025, Christian Tetzlaff announced that he would no longer be touring in the United States, as he avoids performing under authoritarian regimes. I heartily endorsed his position on a political level and greatly admired him for taking it. On the other hand, it represented something of a personal loss for me, as I have come to depend on hearing his live performances as often as possible.

So it was with enormous delight and anticipation that I attended his solo performance last Sunday at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Tetzlaff’s home town. I had heard somewhere that he was using this occasion to celebrate his own sixtieth birthday, which took place a few days before the concert. And what he chose, for this celebratory occasion, were four out of the six Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin.

I have twice heard Christian Tetzlaff do the whole set of six in New York. With intermissions, the entire performance takes over three hours, so he usually divides it up into two concert-length sections, with a short meal break in between. The entire experience is incomparably thrilling and moving. I have also listened to the six pieces on my streaming devices (I am doing so now as I write), but that is not at all the same, for reasons I will go into in a minute.

Even when the marvelous Sonata #1 in G Minor and Partita #1 in B Minor have to be cut out for length reasons, as happened in the Boulez Saal concert, what remains is still a transcendent experience. And because I have heard this amazing performance repeatedly, it has become something of a madeleine for me. That is, sitting there last Sunday, listening to the opening sections of the Sonata #2 in A Minor, I was reminded of the last time I heard Tetzlaff playing those exact notes, when I attended the most recent New York performance with my friend Joe, who has died since then. So the sadness that is somehow inherent in these pieces, even at their most Allegro, was strengthened by my memories of hearing them in those circumstances—just as the depth of my gratitude and excitement is strengthened, every time, by the flood of past and present emotions they bring out.

This time was special, though, because I was hearing and seeing Christian Tetzlaff in the wonderfully intimate setting of the Pierre Boulez Saal. In this oval-shaped chamber music hall, the highly attentive audience members (there is no more silent crowd during a performance, and no more enthusiastic one afterward) surround the players, who routinely perform facing one way before the intermission and the other way after. This meant that for the whole first half, when Tetzlaff was looking away from me, I could only see his shrugging back, his bending knees, his pointing toes, and his other endearingly klezmerish mannerisms. But when he turned toward me in the second half, I saw that I had not previously missed having him “face to face,” as it were, because the Tetzlaff who performed those Bach pieces was not looking outward. His eyes, when they were open at all, wore a glazed, veiled look, as if he couldn’t see what was in front of him. His whole effort, his whole thought process (but thought cannot be separated from hand and arm, in this case: music at this level is surely a physical as well as a mental skill), was bent on looking inward at the music he held there.

I love the solo sonatas, but I think I love the partitas even more—perhaps because they are slightly more complicated, or maybe just because they poignantly signal the ending of each pair. This time, as Tetzlaff moved through the last sections of the Partita #3 in E Major—the Menuets I and II, the Bourrée, and finally the closing Gigue—I realized something I have understood before but get to discover anew in each performance. Tetzlaff in recordings is a wonderful musician, able to supply pleasure to his listeners worldwide. But Tetzlaff in person is something else. When he is playing the solo Bach pieces there in front of us, all sense of musicianship or interpretation disappears, and what we are left with is Bach itself, Bach incarnate, as if the music were coming to us direct from the composer’s brain, with no intermediary barriers of time or space or personality. This is the great gift Tetzlaff is able to give us, and it makes me feel more alive every time I receive it.

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Vikingur Olafsson

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

You could have heard a pin drop. (At least, up until the near-final moments, when a few rogue cellphones rang out and then were quickly, embarrassedly silenced.)

For over ninety minutes last night, Vikingur Olafsson held his Carnegie Hall audience spellbound with an uninterrupted series of beautiful rendered Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven. I have been listening to this great Icelandic pianist in recordings for two or three years now, so I knew to expect something good. But I had no idea how good. I don’t just mean the way he played the notes, though that too was gripping—especially, I thought, in Bach’s long and thrilling Partita No. 6 in E Minor, which formed the centerpiece of the program. Others in my party favored instead the Beethoven Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109, with which the concert concluded—and I have to admit that was a rare treat, too. But what really made the whole evening so great was the thought that went into the construction of the program, combined with the unnerving, almost other-worldly concentration with which it was played.

Just Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven: that was the whole recipe, and yet it seemed to cover a huge swath of music, at the same time as it all seemed intimately interrelated. We began with a mere snippet of Bach, the Prelude No. 9 in E Major, and then went straight into Beethoven’s rousing Piano Sonata No. 27. (If you notice the prevalence of the key of E in this program, that was purposeful: Olafsson himself, in his elegant and expressive program note, pointed out that his synesthesia causes him to picture the pitch of E in some kind of green color, so he composed the whole program in various shades of green.) After the Beethoven, without pause, came the central and essential Bach Partita, followed immediately by Schubert’s Piano Sonata in E Minor from 1817. This led seamlessly into the Beethoven Op. 109, composed only three years later than the Schubert, but so different in manner and tone that we seemed to have stepped both forward into the twentieth century and backward into Bach’s eighteenth.

By the end of the evening, Olafsson had made his case thoroughly, illustrating how clearly these works connected to each other even as he subtly displayed their differences. The roar that met him at the conclusion, after that prolonged stillness and silence, was only the surface indication of how delighted and amazed we all were. And he responded to our enthusiasm with an almost boyish warmth, not only speaking to us directly, but also generously giving us three encores—one from Bach (the “Air in G” in his own arrangement, dedicated to the hundred-year-old Gyorgy Kurtag) and two from Rameau. It was certainly an evening to remember.

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My Paul Krugman Addiction

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

For years I read his columns in the New York Times, and always liked and admired them. But things have reached a whole new level of dependence since Trump was elected and Paul Krugman departed the Times for Substack—events which, probably not coincidentally, happened within a month or so of each other. Now I can barely get out of bed without reading him first thing, either on weekdays, when he sends around a daily newsletter, or on weekends, when he does a topical interview on Saturday and an in-depth piece of economic analysis on Sunday. The latter investigations are not really aimed at me (I have no economics training), but I find it useful to try to struggle through them anyway.

What are aimed at me—and at everyone else to whom I’ve recommended Paul Krugman’s Substack, including a number of European friends—are his trenchant daily eviscerations of the Trump administration and its “policies” (if such a rational word can be applied to these selfishly greedy, despicably venal, and ultimately scattershot procedures). These are very hard times to be living through, and we need all the good company we can get. Krugman is that company, and more. He is fearless and smart and funny and sane: a good combination any time, but especially necessary now.

I don’t know why it’s so comforting to read about the current American disasters—which are rapidly becoming worldwide disasters—in his clean, clear prose; you would think I would have enough of the bad news with just the daily paper. But there is something about seeing these horrible events grasped and reckoned with, even by one person’s mind, that makes me feel better. Thought and analysis and intelligent critique are a kind of power, too. And in the absence of any serious legislative or judicial opposition to Trump, the sound of one man fighting against all this with just his brain and his words is about the best medicine available.

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Winter Reading

Posted on February 1, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Even in California, the winter months feel like a good time to start on a big fat novel. I am currently about halfway through Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta, and no matter what happens in the next 400 pages, I can pretty assuredly say that it is an absolutely major nineteenth-century novel (a competitive category that, as we readers all know, had more than its fair share of excellence).

I have vague memories of running across Pérez Galdós’s name and perhaps even his work in my high school Spanish classes, but no one I’ve spoken to recently seems to have heard of him. Yet he was considered by many to be the greatest Spanish novelist of the nineteenth century. This book, widely described as his masterpiece, came out around 1887, and it covers the years from roughly 1869 to 1875 in Madrid. And I do mean covers. The basic skeleton of the plot—which should cause you to snatch up the book right away—is that Fortunata is the mistress and Jacinta the wife of Juanito Santa Cruz, the privileged young man who is technically the book’s central character. But though Juanito, as a child, appears within the first few pages, it takes the narrator about eighty or a hundred pages to introduce us to the two women, who are really more important in the story. In the meantime, this curious narrator indulges himself by giving us every possible detail about life in Madrid, a capital city that nonetheless had an almost small-village feel at that point. So along the way we see a wealthy woman and her male attendant making multiple daily trips to the food stalls of the street markets, or hear extended analyses of the kinds and colors of cloth worn by Madrid women of different classes, or learn the minutiae of a minor character’s regular café visits, including where he places the sugar bowl as he watches the waiter pour the proper amounts of coffee and milk into his glass. This stuff is not boring at all; on the contrary, you seem to be experiencing directly the texture of life as it was lived at the time. And the narrator himself is a kick: unnamed and often absent from the action, he nonetheless has a voice and opinions and direct acquaintance with some of these people, though he also describes intimate scenes (for instance, between Jacinta and her husband, when they are discussing his affair with Fortunata) at which he couldn’t possibly have been present.

In that sense, he reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s narrators, though he’s a lot more cheerful than they are. The profuse sense data he repeatedly offers us makes me think of Zola—especially the Zola of The Ladies’ Paradise, my favorite of his novels—or perhaps the Arnold Bennett of The Old Wives’ Tale. Like them, Pérez Galdós is fascinated by the way people live their daily lives: he can’t bear to leave a thing out, and the result is a novel that introduces us to a whole world we might not have known about, much in the way Eça de Queiros’s The Maias introduces us to late-nineteenth-century Portugal.

And, by the way, when you’ve finished the 815 pages of Fortunata and Jacinta, feel free to start on one of the other novels I mentioned in that last paragraph—all fine selections for winter reading. Be sure, though, to choose Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of The Maias, and no other, if you want to see why it is one of the greatest novels of all time. For the Pérez Galdós, unless you read Spanish, you will have no option but the Penguin edition, which is ably translated by Agnes Moncy Gullón (though with the usual annoyingly educational footnotes that Penguin insists on including).

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Moon

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Wendy Lesser

Last night I finally got a chance to see Mark Morris’s newest piece, Moon, which premiered at the Kennedy Center last spring and has just now reached Berkeley under the auspices of Cal Performances. The last time I watched a new Morris piece in the middle of political turmoil, it was the fall of 2001, and his brilliant V (set to Schumann’s Piano Quintet) roused me out of my post-9/11 sense of anomie. But Moon, which may be equally brilliant, had the opposite effect on me: it only deepened my despair about our current national situation. Perhaps that says more about the difference between 2001 and 2026 than it does about the respective dances. But precisely because it was so moving and evocative—of a lost time in history, and of our nearly lost feelings of innocence and wonder—Moon made me sad rather than joyful.

Take, for example, the effect of the work’s opening moments. After the lights came down in Zellerbach Hall, with the stage still dark, the two musicians who played all the live music in the show—Colin Fowler on keyboards and Michel Taddei on double bass—struck up the slow-paced notes of a weirdly inviting modernist piece of music. Then, as the backdrop came to life with the first of Wendall K. Harrington’s charming (and invariably appropriate) projections, we saw the words “President of the United States” arching over the presidential seal. The shocked silence in the Berkeley auditorium had the feel of a collective gasp—and then the seal dropped down to reveal a portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The audience silence turned into a relieved laugh, but for me the shock persisted, because the symbols brought me face-to-face with the changes that have occurred in our national self-image since Kennedy’s “Moon Shot” excitement of 1961 and 1962.

America’s exploration of outer space and in particular its astronauts’ moon landings form a big part of the one-hour dance, but so do many other associations with that planetary, mythological, romantic entity. The music alternates between live performances of Debussy (Clair de lune), Ligeti, and other classical moderns, and recorded melodies, mostly derived from the world of popular song. So we get “Roll Along, Prairie Moon” and “Blue Moon” by Al Bowlly, “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, “Dark Moon” by Bonnie Guitar, and “Honey-Colored Moon” by Henry Hall & the BBC Dance Orchestra—to each of which Morris, in his inimitable way, has composed a dance that both gestures toward couple dancing and also stresses the group patterns of modern dance. These “social dances” may well have been my favorite parts of the show, seconded by the initial Balanchine-style chorus line of rah-rah cheerleader/dancers celebrating the “Dawn of a New Day.”

I also deeply admired, and would love to watch again, the strange, wondrous interludes that took place behind a scrim. In each of these, performed to the music of the two-man live band, one to four dancers at a time would cross the slightly darkened stage on pivoting wheeled stools. Generally they lay face-down, with their stomachs on the stools; they alternated between extending their arms and legs outward and curling them up, thus spinning the stools faster or slower. It seemed to me that all this supported yet restricted propulsion evoked the condition of astronauts in a gravity-less environment, while at the same time reminding us of children on a playground wheel. Perhaps the best of these ghostly and alluring intervals was the one where the dancer Noah Vinson stood among a group of four spinners, holding their hands and twirling them in various directions as we tried to puzzle out which body connected with which and in what direction it was moving. That sequence was magical, and somehow incredibly moving.

Isaac Mizrahi’s costumes—identical for all the dancers, who included four women and five men—could not have been bettered. With their all-white fronts (resembling space suits) and all-black backs (like wetsuits), they managed subtle and humorously to evoke the pale moon and its eternally dark side. All nine dancers were top-notch, too, and though my eye was drawn as always to Dallas McMurray, Courtney Lopes, and Billy Smith, it really seems unfair to single out any one dancer, since their success lay in being wholly persuasive as a group. At the end I wanted nothing more than to applaud these dancers and their choreographer, and I did. Yet even as I clapped enthusiastically, I was weighed down by the residual sorrow they left me with. For the evening pointed out (as if it needed pointing) the vast distance between Cape Canaveral’s hopeful optimism of 1961 and the reprehensible tragedies unfolding in Minneapolis right now. America has come a long way in those sixty-five years, and at the moment none of it seems like progress.

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Violinists

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

In the course of this November and December, here in New York City, I’ve been able to hear some of the most noteworthy violinists in the world, playing wondrous pieces of music that I have either loved forever or else proceeded to fall in love with on the spot.  The players were big names—Gidon Kremer, Maxim Vengerov, Augustin Hadelich—and their performances were exquisite. And yet the violin concert that has most stuck with me, from the past month or so, is one that featured no famous names at all. But I will get to that at the end of this post.

First up on my schedule, on November 21, was my final concert of the season at the New York Philharmonic. I had chosen the program entirely because Augustin Hadelich was to appear on it; I’d never heard of the conductor (Dima Siobodeniouk) nor the composer of the requisite introductory premiere (Sebastian Fagerlund), and the prospect of sitting through Sibelius’s amorphous Symphony No. 2 in the second half was not particularly enticing. But Hadelich, whom I had heard only once before, was scheduled to play Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra just before the intermission.

It was an astounding performance in every way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Barber live, if at all; I expect it’s extremely difficult to play. Hadelich is one of those musicians who make difficulty seem easy or at least natural. He’s not a show-off, but he’s tremendously virtuosic, yet at the same time he makes every note count toward the ultimate goal of feeling. With his strangely masklike face (he was in a terrible fire at the age of fifteen), he presents an unusual, compelling figure onstage—as if he were an endearing new form of superhuman, perhaps, purpose-built for violin-playing. And the Barber concerto—what a thing that is! I’m almost afraid to go to another performance of it, for fear I won’t love it as much as I did this time.

I’ve been to many performances by the eminent violinist Gidon Kremer, from small gatherings at the Baryshnikov Arts Center to full-scale orchestral appearances at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and I always love to hear him play. So do others, to judge by the wild enthusiasm that greeted his appearance at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on December 4. It was billed as a tribute to the great (and still living) Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and the program included three lovely Pärt pieces (Für Alina, Fratres, and Mozart-Adagio) in its first half, along with a moving work by a Georgian composer unknown to me, Giya Kancheli, called Middelheim. Kremer was joined in these pieces by an excellent cellist, Giedre Dirvanauskaite, and an equally excellent pianist, Georgijs Osokins, and the three of them made Zankel seem just the right size for the chamber music they were playing. I also appreciated the little solo by Valentin Silvestrov (a Ukrainian, born in 1937) that Kremer performed at the start of the second half, as a gesture of support for a friend and his besieged country. But then came a pounding, overwhelming, seemingly endless Rachmaninoff work—the Trio élégiaque—to conclude the program. In my worst moods, I wonder why people persist in playing Rachmaninoff at all; at my more charitable, I feel he’s totally unsuitable for a piercingly emotional, tenderly intimate concert like this one was. Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to conclude the Zankel evening with him? But Kremer’s devoted audience, which spring to its feet at the conclusion, seemed not to mind.

Just last night I was back at Carnegie again—big Carnegie, by which I mean Stern Hall—to hear what promised to be a perfect program, billed as “Maxim Vengerov and Friends” playing Brahms. The first half consisted of the dream-team of Vengerov, Vilde Frang, James Ehnes, Daniel Müller-Schott, and Yefim Bronfman performing the Piano Quintet in F Minor; in the second half, Anthony McGill replaced Bronfman and they played the Clarinet Quintet in B Minor. These are among my two favorite pieces of music—I stream them frequently, often together—and one couldn’t ask for better musicians. Perhaps my expectations were too high. But something about the evening disappointed. It may have been the sight of those five little musicians stranded on the huge Stern stage, which really isn’t suitable for chamber music. But I think it also has something to do with the fact that these all-star groups, brought together for a specific concert, somehow lack the unity of long-time collaborators who have been playing the work together for ages. My ear isn’t good enough to pick up exactly how this works: it’s not that there were any missed cues, or anything like that. But the overall performance lacked a sense of coherent interpretation, of new insight imposed on the old score, that you only get when the players are intimately acquainted with each other and the music. I am not sorry I went; it was a perfectly pleasant evening. But it just felt a little flat.

The opposite was true of the Chamber Music Society concert featuring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that I heard at Alice Tully Hall on December 6. I was drawn to the concert by the other composer names (Bach, Handel, Corelli, Telemann) that were featured in the first half of the program, and indeed, I was a little nervous about sitting through a live performance of such an old chestnut as the Four Seasons, which I felt I had outgrown sometime during my college years. But boy, was I wrong. It turns out that each season features a remarkable solo performance by one of the five violinists needed to produce all the necessary sound effects, which also require a violist, a cellist, a double-bass player, and a harpsichordist. The CMS group handled this by allowing a different violinist—first Chad Hoopes, then Julian Rhee, then Kristin Lee, then Richard Lin—to take the lead for each season, and then having them retire to the second row to play backup for the others. The fifth violinist, Arnaud Sussmann (who was the only CMS name I recognized from other concerts) genially played backup the whole time; but then, he had garnered his time in the limelight earlier, when he gave an absolutely stellar performance in Bach’s Concerto in E Major for Violin, Strings and Continuo right before the intermission. There was something truly delightful about seeing these incredibly skilled musicians collaborating in this way—putting each other forward, supporting each other, and having a great time doing it.  We in the audience had a great time, too, and as I left Alice Tully Hall, I murmured to my companion, “I wish the Democratic Party had as deep a bench of presidential candidates as CMS does of talented violinists.”

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David Cromer’s Gift

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

In a long life of choosing what to see in the world of the arts, I have learned that it is important to follow people. If Vladimir Jurowski or Simon Rattle is conducting a concert, I try to be there. If Mark Morris or Alexei Ratmansky has choreographed a new dance, I do my best to see it. And if David Cromer directs a play, I go to it, whether it is a new play or an old one, in a tiny theater or a larger one.

He first came to my notice when he directed an obscure 1923 play called The Adding Machine (obscure to me, anyway) in a small downtown theater. I don’t even remember what made me go see it—proximity, perhaps—but I was greatly impressed with the way all his directorial decisions brought this expressionist and somewhat programmatic work by Elmer Rice to life. So it was with serious interest, not to say anticipation, that I bought tickets to his next production in my neighborhood, of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Since most of us in America have actually performed in Our Town sometime during our childhoods, it’s a very difficult work to see or present anew; it has been so ruined by accumulated sentimental guff that one can barely perceive it any more. What David Cromer did with it was miraculous. Casting himself in the role of the Stage Manager, with his un-actorly yet warmly sympathetic voice, and setting the audience in pewlike rows in amongst the actors, he made it seem like the finest play that had ever been written in—and about—America. He brought out the best in his actors, so that they actually seemed to be these strange, sometimes unreal but at the same time ever-so-real characters; and at the end of the play, when Emily’s voice spoke to us from beyond the grave, I saw tears in the eyes of all the audience members sitting across from me, even as I felt them on my own cheeks.

I have been to at least six or seven more Cromer productions since then, all of new plays, and while none was as good as Our Town (mainly due to the fact that almost no new play approaches that level), they were all worth seeing for the directorial choices he made. Working with new plays by living playwrights is always a risk, and sometimes Cromer’s gamble doesn’t quite pay off. But in Caroline, which I just saw over the weekend at the small MCC Theater on West 52nd Street, that gamble finally yielded tremendous returns.

The play itself, by Preston Max Allen, is competent without being necessarily great. If I read it on the page, I would no doubt find it too schematic: Single mother (and former drug addict) who is raising a trans kid finds that her angry boyfriend has broken the kid’s arm, so she has to flee to her long-abandoned hometown, where her rich-bitch of a mother tries to take the kid away from her… Too much topicality here, I would have said; too many flashpoint issues. But Cromer has taken this unpromising material—which, granted, is written with a certain humanity and indeed humor—and shaped it into something nearly perfect. He is aided by the three incredible actors (Chloë Grace Moretz as the single mother, Amy Landecker as the bitchy grandmother, and especially River Lipe-Smith as the remarkable trans girl, Caroline) and also by the small size the MCC theater, which made us all feel like silent onlookers watching a real family drama in a living room. And silent we were (except when we laughed aloud at Caroline’s humorous, insightful remarks)—during the intensely emotional scenes between each mother and each daughter, you could have heard a pin drop. For those of us lucky enough to be there, it was ninety uninterrupted minutes of pure receptivity, pure emotional openness: a rare enough gift anywhere these days, but especially in the theater, which always invites a sense of falseness if it is not done absolutely right.

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