Bonding with the Audience

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

I have loved the Danish String Quartet ever since I first started listening to them, and I’ve already written about them once or twice in The Threepenny Review, as well as many times on this blog. I have no trouble remembering, between one concert and the next, how endearing these four guys are. And I never forget about their great musicianship, because I listen to their albums (particularly the recent Prism series) frequently and happily. But what always surprises me anew, whenever I attend one of their live shows, is how intense the bond is between them and their audience. I am apparently not the only one who loves them, and that becomes patently obvious every time.

Last night’s performance at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was a typically wonderful example. On this occasion, and in fact for this whole tour of their fourth Doppelgänger concert, they were joined by the excellent Finnish cellis Johannes Rostamo, who fit right in, as if he had been playing with them forever. They needed the extra cello because, for this version of the multi-year Doppelgänger project (in which they commission living composers to write responses to a work of Schubert’s), they were playing both Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major and Thomas Adès’s tribute to it, a 2024 work which he titled Wreath for Franz Schubert. Bravely, they played the Schubert first and the Adès after the intermission. (Anyone else would have done it in the other order, so as to end with the crowd-pleaser, but the Danes wanted us to appreciate the explicit connection Adès had forged, which we could only do by hearing the Schubert Adagio first.) And then they concluded with two “songs”—one on the program, one as an encore—that they had adapted for string quintet. The first was another piece by Schubert, “Die Nebensonnen” from Winterreise; the second was by Carl Nielsen, a Danish composer whose work often supplies their encores.

Aside from the programming itself, what was typically DSQ was the friendly, relaxed, companionable way they spoke to the audience at various points during the concert. To begin with, the violist Asbbjørn Nørgaard picked up a microphone that was lying around the stage and welcomed us all to Schubert’s String Quartet. He managed to describe it as a “huge” piece of music in a way that would have appealed to both veteran chamber-music attenders and complete novices, and though I doubt there were any complete novices in this audience, it was definitely a different kind of crowd from the usual Zankel/Carnegie regulars. For one thing, the age level seemed lower; for another, there were a lot of warm, relaxed chuckles in response to Nørgaard’s comments; and at the intermission, conversations among the small groups seemed much livelier than usual. It could be that a lot of these audience members already knew each other (I knew two or three people myself, aside from the one I brought along). But it could also be that this particular performance of the Schubert Quintet was so noteworthy, so stimulating, that people simply couldn’t stop talking about it.

It’s hard to pinpoint what the DSQ did to make that piece their own, but it was audible to everyone who had ever heard it played before. They slowed it down a bit, taking nearly a full hour rather than the usual 48 minutes, and they created a number of dramatic pauses, sometimes within short passages. Their dynamic range, from near-silent pianissimo to full-hearted fortissimo, was notable, and sometimes practically instantaneous. (It was also totally suited to the musical work, as their little discernments and reinventions always are.) Their delight in the danceable rhythms, especially in the final Allegretto movement, was palpable. And they were so united in their playing that at times the five of them felt like a single organism designed for the production of music. I especially loved the way the two violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Øland, turned their heads toward each other when playing certain repeated chords, as if to say: “Everyone else tries to jazz these bars up rhythmically and make them seem syncopated, but we know they are supposed to be Amishly plain in their repetition, and that’s how we’re going to do it.”

I’m still not sure what I thought of the Thomas Adès piece, but I loved Frederik Øland’s introduction to it. Like Nørgaard, he spoke to the expert and the newcomer alike, commenting that we maybe already knew how difficult Adès’s work could be, and that they themselves, waiting for the commission to arrive in the mail, were “excited but also a bit scared.” He charmingly took us through the things Adès had told them about how the piece was constructed, and he named each player in the group (by first name, as if we were all good friends, which is how we felt by now) when he described how their seemingly simple parts were interrelated. He described the piece as “meditative,” and that’s exactly what it was: a series of similar though never identical measures that had a subtle start and an even more subtle, though definite, finish.

The encore was introduced by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, and like the other two, he thanked us for welcoming the DSQ to Carnegie Hall—as if it were our doing, somehow, that they had been invited back. He promised they would return with the Doppelgänger I concert next year: “We owe you a concert,” he explained, describing how the pandemic had canceled their first try. He also said what a gift it had been playing with Johannes, and we all gave the blushing cellist an extra round of applause. And then he led into the Nielsen encore by noting that although “Schubert was the king of song, we have a Danish composer who was not too shabby.” The familiar tone, the idiomatic yet slightly accent-tinged English, the whole lovely way in which these guys sought to bring us into their circle, was a joy to behold—not because they needed such speech to enhance their already great performances, but because it was an especially generous, pleasure-giving thing to do.

I have seen them communicate with the audience like this in every concert of theirs I’ve ever attended, but I’ve only been to their American shows. Next month I’ll get to hear them at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, and I’m wondering what that will be like. Will they speak in German, or will they assume that Berlin’s classical music audience understands English? And will they be able to create the same sense of warm envelopment that their fans in America so clearly feel? I am very curious to find out.

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Watching Christian Tetzlaff Dance

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

Of course, I am listening to him play as well. What would be the point, otherwise, in attending live concerts by my favorite violinist, which I do every time he and I end up in the same place? This April, luckily for me, that will happen three times in all: once last Saturday, at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, and twice toward the end of the month, when I will hear him at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, currently Tetzlaff’s hometown.

The April 6 concert at Zankel paired him with the excellent (and also Berlin-based) pianist Kirill Gerstein, in an evening of pieces by Thomas Ades, Bela Bartok, Johannes Brahms, Leos Janacek, and Gyorgy Kurtag. All except the Bartok and Brahms were short—the Kurtag, which consisted of three pieces, was only seven minutes in total—and all except the Brahms probably counted as some kind of strenuous modernism, though the Ades was sufficiently tuneful (as he often is) to seem to evade this category. About two-thirds of the audience, I would guess, were completely delighted with the program; another quarter or more accepted it with intermittent grumbles, coughs, or bored page-turnings; two or three people actually left during the performance. As I watched them disappear, I thought of Shostakovich’s instructions to the musicians who performed his final, difficult, incredibly beautiful string quartet: “Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” In other words, I took the occasional manifestations of audience resentment as a compliment to Tetzlaff’s and Gerstein’s unerring commitment to the composers’ own rigor.

For me, even the most hard-to-penetrate pieces become comprehensible in Tetzlaff’s hands, because his hands are not the only thing moving in his performances. This is a violinist who unaffectedly adopts the swaying body, bending knees, nodding head, and lifted eyebrows of a small-town klezmer musician. Even as his right arm draws the bow across the strings—sometimes in surprising, near-silent delicacy, at other times with powerful, percussive emphasis—while his left travels up and down the violin’s neck with precision and speed, the rest of him is in almost constant motion. This is not the nervousness of a tapped foot or a juddering knee; it is a constant, probably unconscious, but extremely useful guide to what is taking place, moment by moment, in the music. Rising on his toes as the musical line goes up in tone or in volume, bending at the waist as he plays a particularly harsh chord, dancing from side to side when the rhythm becomes especially lively, Tetzlaff defines for us in a measure-by-measure way what is happening in the composition he is playing. The fact that he is not doing this on purpose, as some kind of pedagogical effort, makes it all the more effective, for the motions clearly come from inside him, just as the music seems to be doing. Whether he is playing melodious Brahms or cacophonous Bartok, the composer’s spirit appears to infuse Tetzlaff’s every move, manifesting itself physically before our eyes even as he enables it to reach our ears.

In its original order, the program would have started with the more accessible works (the brief, lovely, at times pained or mournful Janacek Violin Sonata, and then the dramatically enveloping Brahms Sonata No. 3 in D Minor), and then been followed after the intermission by the more challenging ones: the Ades (a relatively new suite based on his opera The Tempest), the Kurtag Tre Pezzi, and the Bartok Violin Sonata No. 2. It’s true that the twenty-minute Bartok piece, with its frequently jarring antagonisms leading into its extraordinarily moving, blending-into-silence ending, would have made a lovely close to the program. But the masterful Brahms work, one of the towering accomplishments of the violin-and-piano repertoire, made an even better one. So the musicians rearranged things at the last minute to give us the Janacek first—just to dip our toes in the water—and then the chillier Kurtag and Bartok. That left only Ades to accompany Brahms in the second half, which worked well, because it helped emphasize the Englishman’s tuneful side. In fact, I thought this spinoff suite gave us more emotional access to Caliban, Ariel, and Miranda than the whole opera had when I heard it a number of years ago; and Gerstein and Tetzlaff, both previous Ades collaborators, did full justice to it.

The very first time I heard Christian Tetzlaff, he was playing Brahms: the Violin Concerto, which he performed nearly twenty years ago with a visiting orchestra, also in Carnegie Hall. I remember being completely blown away by the power of this young, Pierrot-looking violinist, who even then used his swaying body and his lifting eyebrows to communicate the music. Since then I have heard him doing Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, Kurt Weill, you name it, in a variety of venues across Europe and America, and he is always great. As a live concert experience, nothing can beat hearing him perform all the Bach partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied violin in a single afternoon and evening; I have heard it twice, and if you ever have the chance, you should grab it. But for pure listening pleasure, I often find myself returning to his recording of the Brahms and Joachim violin concertos. This latest performance at Zankel seemed to summon up both of those pieces (the Brahms Sonata No. 3 was actually written for Joseph Joachim, who was better known as a violinist than as a composer); and as I listened to it, I found myself relaxing into its rhythms, sinking into the pleasure that music at its most welcoming can bring. Gerstein and Tetzlaff continued the mood in their encore, a delightful snippet of Beethoven, and as I sat back happily in my seat after the requisite (but in this case heartily meant) standing ovation, I thought: “I wish these two could just keep playing for me all evening.”

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Looking at Love Again

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to get another glimpse of Mark Morris’s delightful tribute to Burt Bacharach songs, The Look of Love, which was playing for four days at BAM. This was actually my third encounter with the piece, since I managed to see it twice last February when it appeared at Cal Performances in Berkeley. I wrote about this hour-long dance in some detail then, so this time I am going to focus on what struck me belatedly—always a useful exercise with Morris’s work, which, as I have learned, stands up to numerous revisits over the years.

When I rewatch something as lengthy and complicated as, say, The Hard Nut—Morris’s brilliant and beautiful take on The Nutcracker—I am not surprised to notice new things, because one’s focus cannot be everywhere onstage at once, and something unusual is often going on in the corners. Still, I always find myself asking the choreographer afterward, “Didn’t you change bits of that? For instance, was there always a woman bursting into tears at the party scene?” And he always says to me (and I do mean always), “I haven’t changed a thing.” So I have learned to take him at his word.

With a shorter, simpler piece like The Look of Love, you would think it would be easier to notice everything the first time. But no: there are still odd corners where someone is doing something different from everyone else, small and nearly hidden gestures that can have large effects. And there are complexities even within the seeming simplicity. The dance to “Walk On By,” for instance, struck me now as one of Morris’s best. Last time, by comparing it in my mind to his truly masterful walking dance in L’Allegro, I failed to give it the full credit it deserved on its own. This time I saw that the subtle numerical deployment of the ten dancers—the way the successive waves of walkers met in fives and then fours and finally threes—gave the work a deeper, more subconsciously satisfying layer; and the interruption of the walking patterns with occasional flights of leaping dance (how had I failed to notice that?) was also an intense pleasure. I still love the segment set to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” the best, I think—nothing can match those syncopated rhythms and semi-comical, semi-earnest gestures—but “Walk On By” has now risen to near the top of my favorites list.

I noticed the music more this time—Ethan Iverson’s elegant piano, Marcy Harriell’s terrific voice—but perhaps that is to be expected, since I was relatively ignorant about Bacharach’s oeuvre before Morris decided to focus on it. And I noticed how beautifully the dancers all performed this time. Some of them are new to the company since I last saw it, and yet they all had the Mark Morris style down, to the point where they actually seemed to be dancing with enjoyment (something you never see in ballet, and rarely enough in modern dance). But maybe what I noticed most is that, very much like the songs it is based on, this is a successful work of art built around the idea of love. That is a harder thing to do than you might think. Every day during submissions season at The Threepenny Review, I go through dozens and dozens of horrible poems and stories about love; it has gotten to the point where, if I see the word love in the title or the first line, I cringe. Very few people can make anything new and surprising out of this hackneyed, repetitive, universal experience. But Mark Morris and Burt Bacharach, especially when combined, can.

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Youth and Age

Posted on March 18, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

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.

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The Italians and Schubert

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

About fifteen years ago, when I was engaged in writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets, I interviewed one of the Emerson Quartet violinists, Eugene Drucker, about the intense impact those works had on the audience. “When we put a Shostakovich quartet on a mixed program,” he told me, “no matter whether we put it before the intermission or at the end, when people come backstage, what they want to talk about is the Shostakovich. This happens even if we’re also playing something equally great, like Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden.’” What struck me at the time, and what I emphasized in my book, was how emotionally powerful the Shostakovich quartets evidently were. Still, over the years I found myself imagining the thrill of listening to two such amazing pieces—the Schubert and, say, Shostakovich’s Eighth—in a single concert. How great would that be?

So my Pavlovian response, when these very pieces appeared on a CMS program last Friday, was instantly to grab tickets. I had no prior acquaintance with the Quartetto di Cremona, the featured group, but their reputation was good, so I figured it wasn’t much of a risk. And the addition of a single brief contemporary work to the program—Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae for String Quartet—also suited me, since I figured that the congenially harmonic Golijov would offer a nice appetizer to the two meatier works. I do not mean to demean Golijov by saying this: his 2002 piece, though offering its own distinct pleasures, could never have aspired to reach the depths of the other two. But then, practically nothing written for string quartet, whether in this century or in Shostakovich’s or Schubert’s, would have stood up to that competition.

The Quartetto di Cremona’s ordering of the program—first the twenty-minute Shostakovich, next the twelve-minute Golijov, and then, after the intermission, the forty-minute Schubert—made sense in terms of timing, but it struck me as slightly perverse. With my innate bias toward Shostakovich, I expected to like the Eighth Quartet the best and to feel that everything went downhill after that. Talking to my friends at the intermission, I was still vociferously defending my Russian favorite and wondering why he couldn’t have appeared last. His emphatic, severely anxious, but also consciously self-dramatizing despair (embodied in both the strong three-beat “knocks” and his relentless repetition of the D-S-C-H theme) combined with shreds of his innate wit (those dance-of-death triplets in the middle section, for instance) to make his 1960 quartet a searing experience that was bound to burn up everything else in its vicinity. I also commented that the Italians seemed a somber group. Their playing, I agreed, was terrific, but their faces never cracked the slightest glimmer of smile, even during the uproarious applause.

As it turned out, I had to eat all those words in the second half. Never have I heard Schubert’s Fourteenth Quartet played better. In fact, never have I heard any Schubert quartet played better than this one was done by the Quartetto di Cremona on Friday, March 8, at Alice Tully Hall. It was not that the Shostakovich faded away; I was glad to have heard it live, as I am always glad whenever it appears in my life. But the Quartetto’s rendering of the Schubert was so intense, so varied, so vigorous and yet so attentive to nuance, as to leave me stunned.

My first glimmerings of how great it would be appeared as early as the opening Allegro, when I watched the face of the first violinist, Cristiano Gualco, and saw the edges of his mouth tugging upward in an involuntary smile. Gualco was facing my direction, so I couldn’t see the other countenances as clearly, but it was obvious from their playing that Paolo Andreaoli, Simone Gramaglia, and Giovanni Scaglione had also reached the moment they were waiting for. They loved this quartet. They treasured its every move from speed to slowness, loud voices to soft ones; they savored every repetition with a difference. In the course of their emphatic bowings, they lost horsehairs all over the stage, but nothing could stop the onward flow. It was as if they had been born to play this music. It spoke to them, and through it they spoke to us.

At the quiet, solemn end of the Shostakovich, the four players had held their final position, still and silent, for a noticeably lengthy time before they lowered their arms and allowed us to applaud; this is what the Eighth Quartet demands, and they were listening to it. But when they reached the close of the Schubert’s final Presto segment, they threw up their arms in joy, and we responded accordingly. If I had been invited backstage afterward (and Gramaglia’s charming introduction to the Puccini encore made me wish I had been), it was the Schubert I would have wanted to talk about.

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Rainy Days and Live Music

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Wendy Lesser

January was a dry spell—not so much in terms of the California winter rains (we had the normal level) but in terms of live concerts I could attend. I wasted away at home, watching endless Netflix serials, some of which were worth recommending (for instance, The Golden Hour, a Dutch police procedural) but most of which were not.

Then, this past weekend, I was treated to two excellent concerts in a row. Unfortunately, it was also a weekend of heavy, threatening rain and wind, so to the usual “It’s great to get out of the house” was added an unusual “But will I make it home again?” In both cases—to the San Francisco Symphony concert in Davies Hall, and to the much closer Cal Performances concert in Berkeley—I had to drive rather than walk or take public transportation. Surprisingly, I was able to park close enough both times to avoid getting drenched. Unsurprisingly, the best thing on each program was a Beethoven piece.

I went to Saturday night’s San Francisco Symphony concert in part for the attractive program (Schubert’s Sixth combined with Beethoven’s Seventh), but also because it featured a conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who was new to me. He turns out to be far from new to conducting: an eminent, grey-haired Finn, Saraste, who now heads up the Helsinki Philharmonic, is a veteran of guest-conducting and regular-conducting positions worldwide. His manner was brisk and effective, with clear distinctions between the parts of the music that were supposed to be sharp and angular (jagged, cutting hand gestures) and the parts that were more flowing and smooth (sweeping, curling hand gestures); he rarely ascended, or descended, to a full-body sway, but he did bend his knees a few times when he was really swept away by the music. His Schubert, I would say, was fine but no more. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was thrilling. Admittedly, the Seventh Symphony is one of the great musical works of all time, but even it can be ruined. (I saw Loren Maazel ruin it once.) In this instance, Sarastre drew the absolute best out of the San Francisco players, and it was a complete delight to hear them perform.

Sunday afternoon’s concert was something else entirely. Held in Hertz Hall, the chamber-music venue on the UC Berkeley campus, it featured a string quartet, the Attacca Quartet, that I’d heard of but never seen live. The first half of the program was a smorgasbord of pieces that bore a family resemblance to each other (tuneful modernism, I guess you’d call it) and that were mostly snippets from longer works, strung together and performed “attacca”—that is, without breaks in between. So we got excerpts from Caroline Shaw’s Three Essays and The Evergreen (both 2022 compositions), a segment from Paul Wiancko’s 2020 Benkei’s Standing Death, a Radiohead song adapted for string quartet by Attacca’s violist, and one movement of Ravel’s marvelous string quartet from 1903. I was relieved when I heard the Ravel—not only because it was the only thing I recognized on the program, but also because the Attacca players performed it so gorgeously. This, I thought, was a good sign. It signaled that the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Beethoven’s Opus 131, would be worth hearing.

That, it turned out, was an understatement. With their ear for the unexpected and the revelatory, the Attacca Quartet made something new of this great Beethoven work, even as they also played it exactly as written. I listen to various recordings of it all the time, and none of what they did jarred my ear; they did not depart noticeably from the tradition. Yet in tiny ways (varying the volume on repeats, for instance, or emphasizing the rhythmic shifts) they managed to imprint their own technical expertise on the venerable quartet. They showed us—as if anyone still needs showing—exactly how much of a “modern” composer Beethoven was in those late, great quartets, and at the same time they remained completely true to his unsurpassable ear for melody. The performance was moving and thrilling, and it earned its uproarious standing ovation—followed by a brief and delightful encore of a John Adams snippet: a tip of the hat, perhaps, to our local musical hero. All in all, it was a concert well worth braving the storm for.

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Delirious Pleasure

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

In most years—and this one was no exception—my favorite concert of the year is the appearance at Carnegie Hall of Harry Bicket and his English Concert, performing yet another Handel opera or oratorio. Last Sunday it was Rodelinda, which happens to be one of the operas I play on my devices all the time. And it turns out that I can even stream a 2021 English Concert version these days, featuring at least two of the stars, Lucy Crowe and Iestyn Davies, who appeared in this December’s Carnegie concert.

But there is absolutely no comparison between listening to this reduced version at home and hearing the real thing, live, at Carnegie Hall. Part of the enhancement is visual: although these are concert versions rather than fully staged operas, the singers (under Harry Bicket’s direction, I presume) do their best to take on the characters and gestures of their parts. A touch on the arm here, an embrace there, an angry or wistful or regretful expression—these are enough to give life to the figures of Rodelinda and her husband Bertarido, the usurping king Grimoaldo and his evil advisor Garibaldo, the loyal servant Unulfo and the strangely mixed figure of Eduige. It’s also fun to watch the musicians themselves: the two harpsichords facing each other (one manned by Harry Bicket himself), the four terrific wind-instrument players in the back row, the huge theorbo up front, and all the other talented and essential strings. For an opera company, it is a relatively small group of instrumentalists and singers, but they pack a wallop far beyond their size.

Of course, the main benefit of hearing it live is auditory, and Carnegie Hall is the perfect setting for that. This was clear to all of us the minute the overture was over. To hear Lucy Crowe’s pearly soprano beam out across the seats and upward through the successive balconies—a gem of a voice, with perfect diction and occasional moments of wild expressiveness, never pushed too hard, never unmusical—was a delight of the first order. And to hear it in combination with Iestyn Davies’ golden countertenor (which we finally got to do at the end of the second act: Handel always makes us wait for a combination of voices) was to hear both singers at their very best. Bicket always gets good people for the solo parts, but in this instance he exceeded even his usual brief, for there was not a singer onstage who was less than stellar. The other countertenor, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, was tender and delicately rich. The bass-baritone, Brandon Cedel, had that rare deep voice that could hit all the notes perfectly and boom out loudly (and he had a lovely semi-comic manner as well, which suited his role as the truth-telling bad guy in the plot). Eric Ferring carried his heavy tenor role with dignity and grace. And Christine Rice was a wonderful Eduige, her mellow mezzo-soprano placing her midway between the high-voiced heroic characters and the lower-voiced villains.

But just as you can’t get a true sense of any opera from a mere recording, my mere assertion of how great this performance was cannot begin to duplicate for you the actual experience of being there. So I have just one piece of advice. If you are anywhere near Carnegie Hall next time the English Concert and Co. come around with one of their Handel operas, do yourself a favor and buy a ticket. You will thank me, and more to the point, you will thank them for the deep, irreplaceable, long-lasting pleasure.

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Some Notes for Peace

Posted on November 18, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

Like everybody else, New Yorkers are feeling pretty terrible these days. It 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 more soothing and familiar and at the same time stirring and rewarding, if it is done right?  And what were the chances that the New York Philharmonic would do it wrong?

As it turned out, zero. Under the baton of the lively and charmingly fuzzy-looking guest conductor, Stéphane Denève, the orchestra’s players were excellent, allowing the dynamics of the piece to 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”—on longterm loan to him from the Royal Danish Theatre—as 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.

When he came out after the fourth round of applause to play an 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 “dialogue,” and somehow managed to 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.

Later, on the subway home, I read the program note about Szeps-Znaider and also Googled him on my phone. It turns out he was born in 1975, in Copenhagen, to a Polish-Israeli father and a Danish Jewish mother. The 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 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 “longtime collaborator,” the pianist Saleem Ashkar. So clearly this is a guy who is used to reaching across the aisle.

Sitting in my seat at Geffen Hall, and thinking back on those moments in the week since then, I felt extremely grateful to Szeps-Znaider for sharing his cosmopolitan, humane vision with the rest of us. As much as the gorgeous music, it was what I desperately needed.

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Open Season

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

Every year, when I arrive in New York in early September, I always forget that it’s going to be another month or so before I can regularly start attending the concerts I love. Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, it turns out, only really get going in October—and now, at last, I have been to one event from each.

First up on my calendar was one of the two opening concerts at Carnegie Hall, both of which featured Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony. I chose the second night—Thursday, October 5—in part because it included a New York premiere by Philip Glass, whose music I almost always enjoy in a low-key, calming sort of way. The Triumph of the Octagon, his single-movement piece written specifically for Muti (in honor of a photo of the 13th-century Castel del Monte that Glass saw hanging on Muti’s office wall), was no exception, though I felt it ended rather abruptly.

The Glass piece set the note for the Italian theme that pervaded the evening. Next up was Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, which the orchestra (clearly delighted to be re-united with their recently retired conductor) performed beautifully, and which was wholly enjoyable if not terribly earthshaking. Then, after the intermission, came Richard Strauss’s “Aus Italien,” a series of tone-poems or lyrical interludes on such subjects as “Amid the Ruins of Rome” and “Neapolitan Folk Life.” I couldn’t for the life of me detect anything Italian about the piece or its segments—it all seemed a very Germanic take on Italy, to me—but again, the orchestra performed wonderfully. It wasn’t until the encore, however—the overture to Verdi’s rarely performed opera Joan of Arc—that the true melding of conductor and musicians came forth at full strength. Now here was something Italian to listen to, for a change, and something marvelous besides. If I hadn’t just heard Verdi’s Requiem performed at the Metropolitan Opera (spectacularly done by everyone involved), I might have been tempted to classify this little overture as my favorite piece of Verdi music, ever. That’s how good it sounded.

On the very next night, Friday the 6th, I was at Geffen Hall listening to the New York Philharmonic perform another premiere by another New York composer. This was Steve Reich’s Jacob’s Ladder, a world premiere of a piece for vocal ensemble and chamber group which was having only its second outing, after its first on the night before. Reich has always been a more complicated composer than Glass, and you never quite know what you’re going to get with him, but in this case I found the work completely compelling. The soprano and tenor voices were otherworldly, or unearthly, or whatever you want to call singing that does not sound like normal people carrying a tune but that nonetheless works its way into your emotions. And the instruments—which included clarinets, oboes, flutes, vibraphones, strings, and piano—carried on a continuous and occasionally emphatic humming throughout, so much so that when a single violinist left off his rhythmic bowing, another had to pick up the beat seamlessly. In a Reich work, time always disappears as rhythm comes to the fore: you have no idea how long you have been sitting there, but you know exactly what beat your body is thrilling to. Here the captivating rhythms built toward the end, not by speeding up but by portentously slowing down.  It was fun to see Reich himself there in the audience, wearing his standard baseball cap; that made it feel like an important New York musical event, as did his warm bow with the musicians at the end of his piece.

The rest of the program was divided between the outstanding (Lief Ove Andsnes as the soloist in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto) and the ho-hum (Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which I am convinced he left unfinished for a reason). But though the quality of the music ran the gamut, the audience seemed equally thrilled at every piece. In fact, they seemed thrilled just to be present in Geffen Hall, which was packed to the rafters. I agree that Geffen is a huge improvement, acoustically, over the Avery Fisher Hall that preceded it, though I think it lacks the amazing warmth of Carnegie or the perfect balance of the Berlin Philharmonie. But hey, who’s complaining? The music is good enough—and when Gustavo Dudamel shows up next year to replace the competent but lackluster Jaap van Zweden, the quality of the concerts and the response to them should go through the roof.

Third up in my series was the season opener of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, in the ultra-comfortable, perfectly sized, warmly glowing Alice Tully Hall. I admit I am a sucker for chamber music in general and for this group’s performances in particular. But even I could not have predicted the pleasure I would derive from the October 17th concert, which was titled, with complete accuracy, “String Sonorities.” That’s exactly what we got in each of the five pieces on the program: the sound of violins, violas, cellos, and a double bass blending together in various harmonious ways. No single piece on the program would have drawn me by itself (though Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony for Strings, which closed the concert, was so terrific that I will take my first chance to hear it again). But as we moved from Elgar to Bartok to Grieg to George Walker, I had a chance to savor musicianship at its most skillful and comradely level. The lead violinist changed in each piece, and players who had stood in the back row before came forward to strut their stuff.  Even David Finckel, the grand old cellist who helps run CMS, went from prominence in the Elgar to nearly hidden in the Britten, as if he were just another working musician. The featured players were mostly young, and many of them were recent additions to the CMS family, but they blended with the oldsters as if they were all, so to speak, on the same page. I’m glad to think that with such a good collection of talented and collaborative members, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has a long and healthy future ahead of it.

 

 

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Britannia in Berlin

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Wendy Lesser

A couple of weeks ago I attended two terrific concerts as part of Berlin’s Musikfest, and both, by chance, had British links. This was not why I picked them—I chose them for their intriguing programs and their great conductors—but this Britannic element turned out to be something they had in common.

The first concert consisted entirely of Simon Rattle conducting Mahler’s Ninth with the London Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, an Englishman, has lived in Berlin since the beginning of the twenty-first century, when he took up the artistic leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic. After roughly fifteen years there, he moved over to the London Symphony, which he has led for the past six years, but he is now about to give that up in order to conduct the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. So this outing with the LSO was one of his last formal appearances as their official conductor. The Philharmonie was sold out for the occasion, and everyone (including the audience) lived up to the high expectations.

Every bit of the seventy-five-minute Mahler symphony was thrilling, but perhaps none more so than the closing moments. As the strings softly sounded their final few notes, gradually fading away into nothingness, the listeners respectfully maintained a total silence. The musicians kept their bows resting on the strings, with Rattle’s arms remaining outstretched in his final gesture, and still the hush continued. I began counting in my head: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand… We had reached the fifteen-second mark when the conductor finally lowered his arms and the audience burst into wild applause. I treasure moments like this at the Philharmonie: those prolonged silences, when not a cough or a rustle can be heard. And though I am not always a huge Mahler fan—sometimes he strikes me as too floaty and amorphous—Rattle’s knife-sharp interpretation of the Ninth made me into one.

The second great concert was Vladimir Jurowski’s evening with his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin—Berlin’s equivalent of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra that Rattle is about to take over. Jurowski has been with them since 2017, and under his hands the RSB has become a fine-tuned instrument, capable of doing anything well.  In this case, in celebration of their 100th anniversary, they performed three pieces: Kurt Weill’s 1929 suite of music from The Threepenny Opera (labeled the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik für Blasorchester); Thomas Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring the marvelous pianist Kirill Gerstein (who also helped out in the Weill piece); and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3. All three were a revelation in different ways. I know the Weill practically by heart, but this version felt delightfully fresh and new. I’d never heard the Adès concerto before, but it was performed with such clarity and precision that every movement was graspable. And the symphony! I’d foolishly thought I had Rachmaninoff’s number, but it turned out I didn’t have a clue. Vladimir Jurowski has conducted the Third Symphony before, and has made at least one recording of it (which I will now proceed to listen to over and over). He was able to take us deep inside the music, to the point where even those of us with reservations about the composer could only give up and adore this symphony.

In a charming speech he made to the audience at the end of concert, Jurowski pointed out all the British elements in the program—Threepenny‘s London setting (along with its origins in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera); Adès’s British citizenship; and, not least, Rachmaninoff’s warm welcome to England by Sir Henry Wood, who first brought the composer and this symphony to London. As an encore, therefore, Jurowski offered us a piece by Henry Wood himself, a figure best known as the founder of the Royal Albert Hall Proms. (As an added fillip, Jurowski mentioned to us—in a confiding rather than boastful manner—that that RSB had recently played this exact programs at the Proms.) Both the speech and the encore were a lovely gesture of friendship across the water, and they rounded out the program to perfection.

I missed a third opportunity to hear a British-connected performance when a last-minute illness kept me from attending John Eliot Gardiner’s concert version of the five-hour Berlioz opera Les Troyens. Other things kept the eighty-year-old Gardiner himself away from it. In the week before his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique were scheduled to come to Berlin, they performed the same Berlioz program at another European festival, and that concert ended, backstage, with the conductor punching one of the soloists in the face. (The baritone’s crime had apparently been to exit on the wrong side of the podium.) This caused such an outcry, reasonably enough, that old J.E. was instantly shunted off to London, while his conducting duties were reassigned to his assistant, Dinis Sousa. The scandal only whetted my desire to hear the program, but a severe cold—and the fear that I might end up coughing for the whole five hours—kept me home in the end.

The next day I wrote to my friend Pamela (who, as a former artistic director of the San Francisco Opera and a former intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic, is far more musically aware than I am) to ask her how the performance had gone. “I don’t want to fill you with regrets,” she wrote back, “but the performance last night was simply phenomenal: wonderful singers, the best chorus ever, orchestra excellent and the conductor was TERRIFIC.  It was the highlight of my musical year so far.  I’m still floating.” Ah, well. One can’t be everywhere all the time, and a little well-earned regret is not a bad thing for a habitual audience member to feel, even—or especially—in Berlin.

 

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