Recently by Wendy Lesser

The weather in Northern California these days is unremittingly gorgeous.  It's warm enough to go outside with just a sweater, or even in shirtsleeves, and we haven't seen a drop of rain in weeks.  Why, then, did so many people at last night's San Francisco Symphony concert seem to be suffering from horrendous, irrepressible winter coughs?

I guess it was the program.  I have long since noticed that disgruntled audience members use coughing as their way of making their opinions known.  They may not know that this is what they are doing--the reflex may be unconscious. But that "reflex" is clearly preventable, for these same annoying coughers always manage to hold off when they like the music. Unfortunately, the audience at Friday's SFS concert did not like Ligeti. 

We were being treated this weekend to the San Francisco premiere of Ligeti's Violin Concerto, with the complicated, delicate, nearly impossible solo part undertaken by the matchless Christian Tetzlaff.  Michael Tilson Thomas must have sensed that there might be difficulties:  just before he picked up his baton, he spoke for a few minutes to introduce the audience to the piece, something he only does when he thinks it's really needed.  Alas, his intervention did no good.  Practically from the beginning of the five-movement work (Ligeti's 1992 revision of his three-movement concerto from 1990), the natives grew restless.  They not only coughed during the quietest and tenderest parts of the music; they also rustled their programs, retrieved drinks and snacks from their purses, whispered to their companions, and otherwise made their presence felt.  One gent a few rows behind me even spoke a few incomprehensible words aloud--whether because he was having medical problems or hating the music was not clear--and then left his seat mid-movement. 

Because the instrumentation for this work is small-scale and weird (a sprinkling of strings and flutes, a small array of brass, a larger array of percussion and keyboard instruments, and a few wild cards like ocarinas and slide whistles), and because the solo part so often descends to near-silence in its complex scurryings and retreats, the audience interference really interfered.  I have never failed to enjoy a Tetzlaff concert, and I was glad to hear him at this one, but I had to strain to do so.  Strain is of course part of what Ligeti intended here--we are not supposed to be entirely comfortable with this music that sometimes sounds like players tuning up, at other times verges on Romany-style ecstasy, and frequently mingles tones that don't really go together harmonically--but I don't think he quite pictured the degree of strain that the San Francisco naysayers imposed on their fellow listeners.  I was ready to hit the woman next to me, who coughed loudest during Tetzlaff's most extended and compelling solo. 

That such coughing was by no means an irrelevant mistake, a mere by-product of illness, became clear during the applause, when fully a third of the audience sat on its hands or tepidly brought its fingers together.  However loudly the rest of us may have clapped and roared (and we enthusiasts called Tetzlaff back to the stage four times), we could not disguise the fact that the people on either side of us hated and resented the piece. 

Where does this intense resentment stem from?  The work was listed on the program; the concert-goers knew in advance that they were going to get Ligeti sandwiched in between their Liszt and their Tchaikovsky.  Yet they acted as if they had been surprised unfairly.  They also behaved as if something were being rudely taken away from them--as if this "modern" music threatened to rise up from its seat, grab away the kind of music they liked, and destroy it on the spot.  They seemed to feel, that is, that the romantic melodies of Tchaikovsky and the stark disharmonies of Ligeti were at war, and they knew which side they were on.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  MTT had cunningly designed the program so that Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1, which came after the intermission, could be appreciated anew through the conjunction. The Ligeti work, in a way that went beyond its own virtues as a piece of music, served to elaborate and explore some of what was going on in its nineteenth-century predecessor.  After hearing Ligeti's gypsy rhythms and off-tuned arpeggios, for instance, I was much more alert to similar derivations from folk music in the Tchaikovsky; and after watching the instruments stand out as soloists or pairs in the Ligeti, I was much more likely to notice such moments of relative quiet in the symphony, which has a surprising number of places where many of the musicians just sit silently by.  Unusual combinations (of flute with strings, of pizzicato background with arco foreground, of deep-throated brasses matched with equally deep basses) caught my eye and ear in the Tchaikovsky because I had just seen them elucidated in the Ligeti.  And of course the virtues that Ligeti did not possess, and probably did not even aim for--the youthful enthusiasm of those final clashing cymbals, the galloping impulse of the repeated musical motifs, the sweet familiarity of the whole thing--stood out even more clearly in the Tchaikovsky symphony than they normally do. 

Ligeti cannot hurt Tchaikovsky or Bach, just as Beckett cannot hurt Dickens or Shakespeare.  On the contrary, the modernist who truly understands his forebears can show us their virtues anew, even as he begs to differ with their approach to reality.  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, those old-fashioned comforts may no longer be available to us in immediate, unadulterated form:  too much death and despair separate our present composers from their past masters for the musical forms to remain the same.  But we can still have the whole range of musical experiences, whole and undestroyed, if we are alert and open enough.  Nothing that is new will wipe out the past; the old stuff is still there for the taking.  Yet we can only take it in fully, in a way that makes sense to (and of) our time, if we also listen to what the music of the present is telling us. 

After spending the entire day snuggling under a blanket with a good mystery during Saturday's unseasonable snowfall, I had to make a concerted effort to venture out into the elements in order to get to Carnegie Hall that evening. Nothing less than the combined musical power of pianist András Schiff, conductor Iván Fischer, and the Budapest Festival Orchestra could have lured me out on such a night. As it turned out, my gamble paid off handsomely.

The program (part of a Perspectives series that Schiff is curating on Bartók and his legacy) began with two Bartók works, the lively, brief Hungarian Peasant Songs and then the lengthy, complicated Second Piano Concerto. For both, Fischer had arranged his Budapest musicians in an unusual manner: the orchestra wore its belly outward and its pelt inward, so to speak, with two rows of woodwinds and brass surrounding the conductor at the center of the semi-circle, so that they were seated in front of rather than behind the evenly divided strings. This made for a bright, clear sound that suited the Bartók songs beautifully--and since there were more than enough strings to hold their own, it didn't in any way damage the balance. When Schiff entered the scene for the piano concerto, this seating seemed to make even more sense, for it gave his emphatic playing something solid--something that emphasized the piano's percussive rather than string-like qualities--to stand up against. As the concerto modulated from its frenetic, overpowering opening to its more complex echoes and patterns, one was able to sense how fully Schiff understood this music. The pianist seemed to combine inspired madness of manner with utter sanity of control, much in the way the conductor did with his instrument, the orchestra--proving once again (if such proof were needed) that you can never have too many wild Hungarians onstage at once.

For the second half, which consisted of Schubert's Great C Major Symphony, András Schiff sat in the audience (I could see him, right across the aisle from me, as he sat and listened attentively, occasionally rubbing his hands against each other to relax them from their prior exertions) and Fischer took over completely. For this performance, he moved the trumpets and French horns back to their usual position and left only a single row of woodwinds at the front. I have been steadily and passionately listening to this symphony since 2003, when I first heard Simon Rattle rehearse it and then conduct it with the Berlin Philharmonic; I probably play Rattle's excellent recording at least once a month, at home. And yet it wasn't until last Saturday night that I realized exactly how the lead oboe and the lead clarinet function in the music--how they alone start up each new theme, and then proceed to take over each other's parts, sometimes twining together as a pair, sometimes enlisting their fellow woodwinds, sometimes leading the whole orchestra into a larger sound. It was Fischer's brilliant seating arrangement that showed me this. (And it was equally brilliant of him to keep the horns at the back, so that their haunting, mournful sound could seem to come at us from a great distance.) Iván Fischer is that rare item, a choreographic showman who is also a great conductor--and what Saturday night proved to me, once again, is that both these aspects of his personality are essential to the Budapest Festival Orchestra's consistently marvelous performances.

Last night I attended a brilliant concert at the Morgan Library & Museum, focusing on the music that mattered most to Marcel Proust, in his life and in his writing.  Organized by the Helicon Foundation and held in the gorgeously intimate Gilda Lehrman Hall, the concert featured songs by Reynaldo Hahn (Proust's sometime lover and longtime friend), Camille Saint-Saëns' Violin Sonata No. 1, and César Franck's Piano Quintet in F Minor.  Both Saint-Saëns and Franck have been suggested as models for Proust's Vinteuil, composer of the famous "little phrase" that Swann treasured so deeply and associated with his love for Odette--though ultimately the phrase itself is as fictional as its composer:  it can't actually be found in any real-life music, but only in the marvelously descriptive words of its author.

The high point of the evening came when Richard Howard, noted Proust translator and excellent poet in his own right, read aloud the section of In Search of Lost Time in which Swann first discovered Vinteuil's "little phrase."  Howard read his own English translation beautifully, giving full poetic weight to each verbal phrase, but also giving comprehensible meaning to each sinuous and strangely conversational sentence.  And then, immediately after he spoke, Pedja Muzijevic (on piano) and Jennifer Frautschi (on violin) gave such a splendid and mutually complementary rendition of the Saint-Saëns sonata that I almost seemed to be hearing Proust's account all over again, twining within and around the music as they played.  The performance, that is, lived up to the matchless prose--and that is saying a great deal.

As I left the concert hall, invigorated by the whole concept as well as its flawless execution, I wondered if there were any other writers whose musical tastes could be celebrated in a similar way.  We could have Beethoven's Fifth played in conjunction with E. M. Forster's Howards End, or Thelonious Monk combined with Arne Dahl's Misterioso.  Last year's White Light festival gave us Samuel Beckett's prose mingled with the Schubert lieder he loved, and this year's will offer us T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Beethoven's Opus 132.  But none of these combinations has the power of the Proust analogy, for the simple reason that none of these poets and novelists wrote in the manner of their favorite composers.  Only Proust accomplished this seemingly impossible task:  he turned language into music at the same time as he allowed it to retain its descriptive function.  And last night's concert did full justice to his achievement.

Most pre-concert, post-concert, and connected-to-concert talks are, quite frankly, a waste of time--and I say this as someone who has given a few of them myself.  You might pick up a bit of history or a brief passage to look out for, but more likely you are made impatient by the unhelpful summaries, critical gobbledegook, and stiltedly informative manner of the speaker. 

Last night, however, I went to a talk at the Music@Menlo series that was, if anything, as good as the concerts it accompanied.  Granted, the speaker was Ara Guzelimian, the acknowledged master of live music talks, whose interviews with Mark Morris, John Adams, and Paul Jacobs have delighted me in the past.  But in this case Guzelimian transcended even himself.  He had put together a two-hour evening about late Brahms that was intended to enhance Music@Menlo's three weeks of marvelous Brahms-related concerts.  I know they were marvelous because, prior to the talk, I had already attended two of the concerts--but I didn't fully realize how marvelous Brahms himself was until Guzelimian led me through the steps to that realization.

His argument--which he amply proved in the course of the evening--was that Brahms was both the last classicist and the first modernist.  (Even fans of the composer tend to take one side or another in this argument; Guzelimian is rare in advocating both.)  He talked about the earlier composers who had influenced Brahms and the later ones he had in turn influenced; he elaborated on the pianist (Clara Schumann), violinist (Joseph Joachim), and clarinetist (Richard Mühlfeld) who had inspired some of his greatest works.  But best of all, he brought the excellent musicians from the Music@Menlo community to the stage to help him illustrate his points.  To hear Wu Han play side-by-side piano pieces of Milton Babbitt and Brahms (Babbitt was, apparently, a lifelong fan of the German master), and then to hear her elaborate on what she loved about each passage, and how the two pieces reflected each other, was a rare pleasure--and it was Guzelimian who evoked these revelations from her, in a completely warm and informal way.  It was like being present at a rehearsal, or a heavenly music lesson, in which we were treated to the most insider-ish observations voiced in plain speech.

And then, as a finale, Guzelimian brought on the five players who tonight and tomorrow will perform the Clarinet Quintet in the closing concert of the festival:  David Shifrin on the clarinet, Philip Setzer and Ani Kavafian on the violins, Yura Lee on the viola, and Paul Watkins on the cello.  I had heard Shifrin do the Brahms clarinet trio and a couple of the clarinet sonatas the preceding Monday, so I already knew how great his playing was going to be--but what I didn't suspect was how, in the small setting of the Martin Family Hall, even this grand quintet could be made to seem intimate and personal.  Before and during their snippets from the Adagio and their full performance of the first movement, the musicians exchanged comments with Guzelimian about exactly how the passages worked, and why they worked.  Again, it was almost like being at a rehearsal, but even better, because they were directing their observations at intellectual clarity for us, not just practical clarity for themselves. 

I haven't heard such great music talk since the day I went to hear Alex Ross's touring version of The Rest Is Noise, with Ethan Iverson performing the piano illustrations.  At the time, I figured I'd never hear anything like it again, but last night's experience certainly rivaled it.  I hope it signals a new trend in music talks.  We should be so lucky.

The San Francisco Bay Area is a major center for early music, but it's also, in the end, a rather tiny population cluster, compared to places like London and New York.  This means there are fewer musicians to fill the many available slots.  So when we Bay Areans attend baroque concerts, we are likely to see some of the same performers over and over, populating the stages of entirely different performing groups.  This is actually a good thing, in that it a) enables us to see our best performers repeatedly and b) gives a kind of intimate, homey quality to the various concerts.

Last night I attended the opening night concert of the American Bach Soloists' summer festival, now in its second year at the lovely main concert hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  It was an all-Bach program, but in particular, it was an all-chamber program, so there were never more than a handful of musicians on the stage at once.  These included Katherine Kyme, familiar to me mainly as one of the two violinists in the excellent New Esterhazy Quartet, but here appearing as a guest violist with the ABS; Tanya Tompkins, who is known throughout the Bay Area for her fine solo performances on the baroque cello and who normally performs with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; and the marvelous Elizabeth Blumenstock, for many years the lead violinist with Philharmonia Baroque and a frequent guest soloist at ABS concerts.

The first three pieces on the program were a sonata for violin, cello, and harpsichord; one of the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello; and a sonata for oboe and harpsichord.  All three were performed against a wooden screen that separated off the majority of the stage from the audience and made the subdued baroque sound completely audible.  (This was especially important in Tanya Tompkins's terrific but often very quiet performance of the Sixth Cello Suite, performed on an unusual five-string cello which was even smaller than the average baroque cello.)  All throughout these pieces, I was idly wondering how the stagehands were going to clear away the screen and add twenty seats in the brief moment between the penultimate piece on the program and the listed finale, which was the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. 

Well, they never did clear away the screen.  They simply moved the harpsichord back a bit and added stands for four standing and two sitting musicians.  The Brandenburg concerto was played with only seven performers: one violin soloist and one flute soloist, a harpsichord for continuous backup and one brief solo, and four intermittent backup musicians, who included one other violin, a viola, a cello, and a violone (which, to the amateur eye, closely resembled a double bass).  This meant that every musician's sound came through clearly and individually, so that you could choose to follow any performer's role and hear it as a single line of music before returning to the closely woven group sound that they were all creating.  It was almost like listening to a string quartet, but with the added richness of a full concerto.  Suddenly I realized why most previous live performances of the Brandenburgs have sounded muddy to me -- there were just too many instruments onstage!  In this seven-hundred seat hall, with its excellent acoustics and attentively silent audience, seven was the perfect number of players; and I felt, for once, as if I were getting the Bach masterpiece in exactly the intimate form it was meant to take.

It had been nearly a year since I'd been to Bargemusic, the floating concert hall docked at the Fulton Street pier in Brooklyn, so it was a great pleasure in any case to be back there last Saturday night.  They have even acquired new chairs in the interval, so to all the other pleasures of the Barge--that is, classical music in an intimate setting, the stupendous view of the Manhattan skyline out the glass wall behind the stage, air-conditioned splendor in summer and congenial warmth in winter, and the occasional gentle rocking of the boat--one can now add seating comfort.

But simply being back in this delightful setting was not enough to account for my exuberance last Saturday.  That can be attributed to the three musicians: Mark Peskanov on violin, Nicholas Canellakis on cello, and Adam Golka on piano.  Together, they selected and performed the kind of program that I only get to hear about once out of every thirty or forty tries--a program in which everything seems both perfect and exciting.

They began with Mozart's Piano Trio in G major, which was fine, and probably the draw for most people.  But the real excitement came with the next two pieces.  Canellakis and Golka played Chopin's Sonata for piano and cello with such verve and complicity that I was practically bouncing in my seat with enthusiasm.  They seemed born to play this music, and to play it together: that's how right the performance felt.  And then Peskanov joined them for the last piece, a spirited, intense rendering of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor.  The speedy virtuosic bits were thrilling enough, but the subdued, mournful ending was, in its own way, even more so.  I am always surprised when I love Tchaikovsky (I forget, that is, that he can move me in this way), and here it was again, that enormously pleasurable surprise, brought on by the commendable teamwork of these great musicians.  Bravo, Bargemusic!

Those words rarely belong together, because opera is such a complicated form that some bit of it -- some aspect of staging, or singing, or plot -- is almost bound to be slightly annoying or at the very least worse than the rest of it.  But the production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck that is now at the Metropolitan Opera is about as close to perfect, I think, as anything can be.

For one thing, it is only an hour and forty minutes, performed without intermission.  (If only everything, on every stage, could be performed that way!)  For another, it is conducted by James Levine, rapturously welcomed back from his recent illness by a knowledgeably excited audience.  The cast -- Alan Held as Wozzeck, Waltraud Meier as Marie, and Gerhard Siegel, Walter Fink, and Stuart Skelton in the other major parts -- is uniformly excellent, with no let-downs in terms of either acting or singing.  But best of all is the opera itself, and Mark Lamos's production is designed to allow that "thing itself" to shine through with utter clarity.

There is not a single excess piece of set or costuming on the stage:  Robert Israel, who was responsible for both, confined himself to a stark, expressionist design that is filled with haunting shadows (courtesy of lighting designer James Ingalls).  This is the sad, oppressive, grotesquely unfair world of the army private Wozzeck, as Buchner conceived it and as Berg translated it into music.  That music is both forcefully expressive and disarmingly adventurous, and the purely musical interludes (which come, in this opera, between each stark scene of action) have been given tremendous power by the way they are performed:  a black safety curtain comes down during the last lines of singing, and then the interludes are played against that blank screen, so that our attention is fully focused on the music.  Yet this seeming interruption does not detract in any way from the forward motion of the story; on the contrary, Wozzeck's and Marie's painful fate seems to hurtle toward its ending with even more inevitability than usual.  This Wozzeck is horrifying without being sentimental, beautiful without being pretty, and it grips one's attention from start to finish.

There are only two performances left, and, shockingly, there are seats available, because people think they do not want to hear atonal music in an opera.  They are wrong.  Benefit from their ignorance, and go.

The only other time I ever saw Donizetti's "Elixir of Love" was years ago at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, and the tenor--a wonderfully talented local boy--brought down the house with his second-act solo. This time, at the New York City Opera, the same thing happened: the entire action ground to halt while the audience roared its wild approval. And this time I realized that the effect, though highly dependent on the skills of the individual tenor, is actually built into the opera.

In the version that is now running at NYCO, directed by Jonathan Miller, all five principals are terrific in their parts, but David Lomelí, a young Mexican tenor, is especially outstanding as the awkward, dopey, but finally triumphant Nemorino.  He starts out fidgety and pathetic, a guy who will clearly never get the girl he loves, the beautiful Aldina (here played by the charming Stefania Dovhan as a Marilyn-Monroe-lookalike who owns the local diner). But by middle of the second act he has gained new confidence through drinking a love potion supplied to him by a passing quack (the brilliant Marco Nisticò) -- and in fact by this time Aldina has indeed fallen in love with him, largely as a result of his new-found self-confidence. Just after accurately perceiving her change of heart, Nemorino gets a moment alone onstage to express his delight that she finally loves him, and it is this solo that stops the show.

It's not just that the music itself is piercingly beautiful, nor that Lomelí sings it with incredible tenderness and grace.  It's also that this character, for whom we've secretly rooted but whom we've also slightly despised for his stupidity and his clumsiness and his unthinkingly dog-like devotion, now turns out to be a man with a terrific voice.  So we fall in love with him, too, and it helps make sense of Aldina's rapid conversion.

I can't get over how clever it was of Donizetti to save up this secret weapon for the second act.  Handel, having discovered how to write that beautifully, would have used his discovery over and over (and in fact he did exactly that, note for note, in opera after opera). Mozart, the king of the beautiful, would have been unable to hold off his firepower to the second half of the show; he would have insisted on letting us know from the beginning how great his compositional powers were.  But Donizetti was a stage person above all:  he knew just how to save up the best for exactly the right moment.  And the result is magic.

Anybody who has ever attended the Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center or just about any music performance in the BAC's Jerome Robbins Theater knows who Pedja Muzijevic is.  A Bosnian-born, Juilliard-educated concert pianist, he is officially called the "Artistic Administrator" of the BAC (a role assigned to him by the far-seeing and generous spirit of the place, Mikhail Baryshnikov).  Unofficially, he is the man behind many of the most exciting and unusual events that take place there.  Roundly admired as an artist yet resolutely unpretentious, beloved by many of the music world's best performers, he is able to draw on friendships and professional connections to create performance magic over and over again.

Pedja has what I would call a literary sensibility (but a painter would probably call it a sense of form, and a dancer would call it a choreographic sensibility) -- that is, he is able to perceive connections between different parts of a whole, which allows him to imagine and then create a narrative arc in a performance.  The things he puts on at the BAC are not just concerts:  they have a point and a shapeliness that make you feel an intelligence behind them.  Sometimes it is the intelligence of the artists themselves (as it was in last fall's galvanizing concert by the St. Lawrence Quartet); sometimes it is Pedja's; most often it is both.

Last night's double concert at the Jerome Robbins Theatre was a Pedja event, for sure.  It consisted of two one-hour concerts (separated by an hour in which you could grab a meal at a nearby bar), each ending with Czerny's 1830 "Quatour Concertant," a weird, amusing, rather wonderful piece for four pianos.  Prior to this ending, each concert featured two of the four pianists in solo works.  In the first hour, Pedja himself played Liszt plus two twentieth-century composers (Feldman and Knussen); then a talented young woman named Natasha Paremski played a new piece by Gabriel Kahane.  In the second hour, the brilliant Inon Barnatan played Scarlatti plus a recent piece by Currier that echoed Scarlatti, and the always-terrific Anne-Marie McDermott undertook Wuorinen's massive and challenging Fourth Piano Sonata.  In other words, the opening pieces were all serious. 

The Czerny was something else.  Written for four of Czerny's female students, it was lively, charming, and -- in the hands of these four masters -- marvelously invigorating.  You could see how fun it was for pianists to be playing in a quartet with other pianists, for a change, as they nodded at each other over their pianos and smiled in response to each other's cadenzas and flourishes.  And you could also see how this work and the much more recent ones that had preceded it were connected in a strange way, despite the obvious differences of tone.  It was a lesson about listening and observing, timing and time, precedence and succession, but it didn't feel like a lesson at all:  it felt like a romp.  In each concert, before they played the final piece, Pedja introduced each of the players by the part he or she was to play, which was the name of the original performer -- Countess This, Countess That -- until he reached himself:  "And I am the only non-noble lady playing this evening:  your hostess, Mrs. Albrecht."  What a very good hostess he is, indeed!

Recently the accomplished pianist Jenny Lin gave a terrific concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  It consisted of five of Bach's preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier, each sandwiched between two of Shostakovich's compositions from 24 Preludes & Fugues--a work that was itself inspired by Bach's Clavier. In other hands than Lin's, this plan might have gone astray, but her arrangement was never wearyingly mechanical: the pieces were not simply matched up by sequence number or key, but instead were paired in whatever way made the most musical sense, so that we could actually hear echoes of style and pacing between the Bach works and the Shostakovich ones.  And, surprisingly, Shostakovich held up to the comparison.  It is not that he is as good as Bach (no one is), but that his inventiveness, his complex simplicity, his feeling for the solo keyboard instrument, and his ability to convert pattern into emotion are worthy of being matched with Bach's in a concert of this sort.  There was no terrible sense of letdown or disjunction when we went from the Leipzig master to the Moscow student: simply a change in voices.

And Jenny Lin's performance was perfect.  Neither self-dramatizing nor overbearing, her playing was precise, strong, and beautiful--just what was needed to let the musical pieces speak for themselves. Brava!