In mid-October, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra visited Carnegie Hall for what amounted to a mini-Wagner festival. On the first night, there were excerpts from Götterdämmerung. On the second night, there was Act I of Die Walküre. On the third and final night, there was Tristan und Isolde, complete. Thus did we experience Bayreuth on Fifty-seventh Street.
But it wasn’t all Wagner, for the conductor, Daniel Barenboim, held a couple of wild cards. Night One began with Bruch’s Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra, played by Yo-Yo Ma “in memory of Isaac Stern.” (The beloved violinist had died a few weeks before.) Ma played in his usual soupy, emotive style, but the piece bore it well.
Next was Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto, written last year with Ma in mind. Carter is a sprightly ninety-three, still composing like himself, and bounding (or almost bounding) onto the stage after premieres. His new concerto is, indeed, Carterian: energetic, busy, propulsive. The soloist’s part is quite challenging, and Ma handled it well. It was odd that he hadn’t memorized the piece— one written especially for him, and receiving its New York premiere. It cannot, at this point, be as familiar to him as, say, the Haydns, but still …
The Götterdämmerung excerpts were typical Barenboim, and this conductor is a worthy interpreter of Wagner. The playing was often visceral, aggressive, and thrilling— “vertical” Wagner, all up and down, rather than “horizontal,” more continuous. It was rather heavy Wagner, too. Sometimes it was overly blunt, lacking in mystery. Barenboim is prone to conducting this music as a football coach might—which is not as negative an appraisal as it might first appear. Usually, Barenboim’s Wagner is rich, glorying, and bold. On this night, the horn section was a mess, which was surprising for such a blue-ribbon bunch. Principal clarinetist Larry Combs, however, was elegant and assured.
Coming on for Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene was the veteran Wagner soprano Elizabeth Connell. She, too, had the score in front of her, which was astonishing, for music so familiar, especially to such a singer. Her voice has perhaps seen better days, but it is still an exceptional one. Connell has the ability—critical in Wagner—to create a beautiful wall of sound. Her voice has a good cutting quality, too. Her breathing seemed just slightly shallow, making for difficulty on high notes, but she produced some truly lovely lyrical singing.
On Night Two, Barenboim began with a new piano-and-orchestra piece by Isabel Mundry, a German composer in her thirties. Actually, he began with a lecture about it—a lecture that lasted fifteen minutes, which is roughly the duration of the piece itself. This might have been taken as an insult to the composer, really: a work that requires such an explanation is almost apologized for, and degraded. A piece rises or falls on its own, without special pleading. The lecture might have been taken as an insult to the audience, too, and a waste of its time. Latecomers, seated in time to hear the piece but not the lecture, were lucky.
But not all that lucky. The piece—called Panorama Ciego, and performed by Barenboim as both pianist and conductor—is a horrorscape. In this, it is like countless other works composed today: bleak, hopeless, ghastly. Whatever the composer intended, the music is the stuff of nightmares, though not compelling nightmares, artistically. This is a sparse piece, consisting of few notes and little inspiration. It is of mild technical interest: but that hardly suffices, no matter how much lecturing the listener is subjected to. It’s funny that in a time of peace and plenty (that is, before September 11) there is so much fashionable despair in new music. One annoying thing about today’s composers is that they consider themselves daring and different; yet—to indulge a generalization—there is a depressing sameness about them, at least as much as exists between, say, any two Renaissance composers.
As for Act I of Die Walküre, it is, in a way, a complete work unto itself (just as Die Walküre as a whole can be nicely separated from The Ring). No wonder orchestras have long liked to use it on concert programs. It requires three singers: a soprano, a tenor, and a bass, who on this evening were Angela Denoke, Peter Seifert, and John Tomlinson. Denoke is a competent singer, but she was wanting in strength and vitality. She was at her best in the score’s quiet, songlike moments. The tenor, Seifert, was the reverse: a little rough and unsteady in the serene passages, quite good in the more heroic ones. His singing in general was strong and relaxed. Impressively, he landed directly on the top of a note, with no sliding up to it, or fishing around for it.
Tomlinson had the least of the roles— Hunding—and he all but stole the show. He is a formidable Wagnerian, as he proved last season in the Metropolitan Opera’s Parsifal. He is both precise and dramatically compelling. His singing is elegant, rounded, and polished. Also, his semi-acting on Carnegie’s stage was just right for opera-in-concert. Last, I cannot forbear mentioning that Tomlinson, at this juncture of his life, looks amazingly like Brahms, in pictures of the composer in his later years. You would think he had come from some look-alike agency—not that there would be much call for Brahms.
Night Three’s starring pair were Waltraud Meier as Isolde and Christian Franz as Tristan. Meier is a much celebrated Wagnerian, Franz little known, at least in this country. Meier started out brilliantly, throwing off fire, giving practically a singing lesson: a lesson in breathing, phrasing, and Isolde electricity. She weakened, though, showing that years of performing this strenuous music have taken their toll. This toll was most evident in mezzo-forte or piano passages. And the middle and lower registers of her voice betrayed her, even as the top remained true.
Franz could barely handle the part of Tristan. We should remember, however, that this is a difficult part to fill, and that any tenor who assays it deserves some measure of appreciation. Franz was, by and large, workmanlike. His intonation was poor, and this may have affected Meier, whose intonation suffered in their love duet—a duet utterly lacking in the ecstasy and rapture it should have. (This was partly the fault of Barenboim, who had a dismayingly lackluster night.)
And I must mention Nadja Michael, who sang Brangäne, Isolde’s faithful aide. Michael boasts an enormous, beautiful mezzo that will soon be sought on the world’s operatic stages. Her sound is a little diffuse, needing a speck of focus, and— believe it or not—she at times deployed too much volume for this house. But the young German—whose lavish physical beauty will do her no harm—had the crowd on its ear.
Visiting Carnegie Hall a couple of weeks later was the pianist Evgeny Kissin, the wunderkind—or former wunderkind—from Russia. This year he hit the big three–oh, which is startling, considering that just yesterday, or so it seems, he was that virtuosic, serious-faced boy in the Young Pioneers scarf.
Kissin is still virtuosic and serious-faced, and his program was of the kind you might have heard from a touring lion in, say, 1928. He began with Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s Toccata in C major, BWV 564, a piece that used to be in many pianists’ repertoire; it was a favorite of Rubinstein and Horowitz, to name only the two most famous. Kissin played the work with great majesty, giving Bach the grand treatment. Kissin can be oddly unexpressive and unfeeling. He is liable to bull his way through a phrase or section, without nuance or enjoyment. Yet he did some effective things in the Bach-Busoni, and he was, as always, fearsomely accurate. And it was a pure and unguilty pleasure to hear this transcription again—a throwback to a different age of concertizing, before the originalist commissars and killjoys came in.
Next on the program was Schumann’s Sonata No. 1, another “old-fashioned” work requiring prodigious technique. To this Kissin brought just the right Romantic temperament. He clearly understood the arc of the piece, unifying the various episodes. He is especially skilled at playing dense passages with clarity. And he can play explosively without banging. The entire performance revealed true maturity and supreme control. I should record that I have been ferociously critical of this pianist in the past—I remember some appalling Beethoven and Brahms, in particular—but there is no denying that this was great playing.
The second half of the recital was given over to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Kissin occasionally slapped at the keyboard, and pounded, as he is wont to do, and he was a little headlong, interpretively. But there were some hair-raising moments here, and Kissin was again in command. The aura of throwback continued with such encores as Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Liszt’s Rigoletto Paraphrase (the latter of which contained some of the most limpid passagework you will ever hear on the piano). The audience roared as they might have for Liszt himself, and the young man deserved it.
One of the Met’s new productions this season is Luisa Miller, an example of “middle Verdi” (or “second-period Verdi,” if you like). Met capo James Levine conducts this music with great affection and devotion, making the best possible case for it (even if that case isn’t quite good enough). Under his baton, the overture—one of the more admirable features of Luisa Miller— was taut, brisk, and well-defined. It was an overture of tense and bloody power, prefiguring a tense and bloody story. In the title role was Marina Mescheriakova, a soprano of pleasant if undistinguished voice. She has sufficient power for the part, and she can handle the coloratura adequately. Diction, however, was a problem.
Nikolai Putilin, who sang Luisa’s father, is a sturdy Russian baritone, in the tradition of such baritones (and basses). His intonation was absent—he was perpetually flat on upper notes—but his all-around professionalism compensated. Hao Jiang Tian, as the Count, showed off a juicy bass, and another bass, Phillip Ens, as Wurm, was positively splendid: smooth-voiced and arresting. Ens is a Canadian—somewhat reminiscent of the baritone Thomas Hampson—who should enjoy a big career. The much praised mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, as Federica, was a disappointment: prosaic, unconvincing, and musically and technically indifferent.
The inarguable star, singing gloriously, was the tenor Neil Shicoff. For at least twenty-five years he has been singing this way, and he still looks remarkably youthful, lucky guy. He was actually believable as Luisa’s tragic young suitor, Rodolfo. His singing was ringing and heroic, well-formed and focused. He strained just a little, but never to the point of ugliness. The part is heavy: high-lying and punishing. Has Shicoff now shifted to these heavier roles? And if he has, can he do Luisa’s Rodolfo and still be fresh and agile for Bohème’s? The big moment of the night is the aria “Quando le sere al placido,” which Shicoff performed resplendently—reminding one that, in the age of Pavarotti and Domingo, one must not forget Shicoff, a tenor of versatility, consistency, and excellence.
In early November, Anne-Sophie Mutter took up residence in Carnegie Hall for three concerts with the Camerata Salzburg. The first two were all-Mozart, consisting of the five violin concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante (for violin and viola). The Camerata Salzburg appeared as one of those riderless horses—a chamber orchestra without conductor. Whatever the reason—and this riderlessness is a top candidate—the group was sloppy and adrift.
Mutter herself was not exactly a model of musical discipline either. She is an uneven violinist, and the concert I attended showed her at what is probably her worst. In the Concerto No. 4 in D, she was rushed and inexact—or then, she was overly languid or self-indulgent (and still inexact). The opening Allegro had little definition. The Andante was, for the most part, lovely, and extremely Romantic—almost impermissibly so. The Rondeau had some character—but tempo (or rather, tempos) again fluctuated disconcertingly.
It was more of the same in the beloved Concerto No. 3 in G. (The pieces were not played in numerical order.) As for the Sinfonia Concertante—performed with the violist Yuri Bashmet—it was a disaster of technical ineptitude and musical misconception. It was uncoordinated, unthinking, and unworthy of Mozart. The playing did not meet professional standards, to say nothing of world-class ones. Mutter is undoubtedly a looker—a fact exploited relentlessly in the marketing of her—but on some occasions she simply fails to live up to the musical claims perpetually made for her.
On more solid footing was the twenty-year-old American violinist Sarah Chang, in her engagement with the New York Philharmonic and its soon-to-be-leaving music director, Kurt Masur. Their concerto was the Berg, one of the staples of the twentieth-century repertory (and a piece that Anne-Sophie Mutter happens to be capable of playing superbly). Chang gave the concerto a sensitive reading, strongly supported—even led—by Masur, whose understanding of this score is solid. The young lady’s sound is at times indistinct and rather weak, but her technique is plentiful, and she traversed the Berg with a modernism both fiery and cool, angular and lyrical. I have mentioned before that we are awash in fine young violinists, whatever our deficiencies in other areas: Chang is one such violinist.
After intermission, Masur and the orchestra did the Bruckner Ninth Symphony, that composer’s last testament, and one of the best—most moving—of all symphonies. It is almost enough to say here that Masur grasps the architecture of the piece, and that the orchestra executed both blazingly and profoundly. Masur is simply one of the most faithful and most effective Bruckner conductors we have, and he brought out from this work its passion, playfulness, sweet sorrow, joy, and spiritual vitality. The horn section—and the brass generally—outdid themselves. Other sections were hardly less impressive. The symphony ended in its peace of E major, the struggle having passed.