Concert Review: Evgeny Kissin @ Carnegie Hall, May 4, 2013

What is the magic – what is the spell, the art - that invites an audience to clap ceaselessly, continuing long after an artist has indicated a desire to conclude the programme, begging for another encore, and another, and another? Is it solely the effect of the concert, is it the audience's historical connection to the artist, is it simply the choreography of the bows, the reluctance of the artist contrasting with those who dash out on stage at the appropriate moment to ensure the opportunity to play an encore or two? The organizers of Evgeny Kissin's brilliant Friday-night recital at Carnegie Hall, clearly knew what to expect: the concert was scheduled for 7pm, leaving ample time after the two-hour programme for the enraptured audience to request more, and more, and more.

From the moment I tried to get tickets for this concert, I sensed something special in the air. I had become Kissin's fan after seeing his encore from his famous BBC proms recital on youtube, Beethoven's Rage Over A Lost Penny. (I had been searching for a video answer to the question, “What is a song that makes you laugh?”) As we all know, youtube's quality of sound is certainly missing splendour, but the videos offers front-row seats, and give the contours of the music very well nonetheless. In Kissin's fingers, the delightful humour of the piece in all its drama – the making of a mountain from a molehill, and again a molehill from a mountain – sparkled with sincerity and life. In early March, I looked up his upcoming concerts, found this recital, and was baffled by Carnegie's quixotic message instead of ticket prices: "Limited Availability, Please Call CarnegieCharge.” I called CarnegieCharge, learning that tickets had sold out immediately upon their release in August. My chance to attend would mean lining up on the day of the concert, when a number of “public availability” tickets would go on sale at the box office for $10 each. The box office opens at 11:00am; the time to arrive is a free-for-all.

What stardust drives people to line up at 5:30am, to wait in line for 5 ½ hours, beyond the wish for certainty to hear their artist of choice? I too arrived early, at 9:30am, the first time I have stood in line for tickets since my student days. I chatted with my neighbour, a very nice Russian Carnegie Hall tour guide, and we took turns saving the other's spot in line, while I stood in the nearby sunshine to warm up, while she went to get us hot tea. The line wasn't long, but the stack of tickets was shorter. The 5:30am people received them, as did everyone up through the 8am crowd. The remaining thirty-odd people were out of luck. 

... Except me. - ! By some oxymoronic fluke of fate ... I continued to wait in line for the ticket window after my neighbours had already given up and gone home, to inquire about when stage seats become available, so that I would know for next time – whereupon the salesperson looked up tonight's seating availability and found exactly one free stage seat. Of course I bought it! (Clearly, it was meant for me! I was quite jubilant.)

I was excited for my seat's youtube-like closeness, as well as to, ahem, share the stage with Evgeny Kissin! - yet I was happy when it mysteriously turned out that my ticket was actually for a balcony seat, and on the left side too. It feels a bit like I'm dreaming, to recount that; I cannot yet explain how, with solely one ticket's availability, its location could have been non-unique. But no matter, the sound in my part of the balcony was ideal, exquisite. Perhaps I had the perfect nearness to the beautiful arcing of the ceiling, which gently invited my eyes to wander along it to the gilded columns of the stage, in complementary repose.

I was surrounded by Russian-speakers, most of them old enough to have witnessed the exceptional rise of Kissin's career, and who speak of Genya (or modernly, Zhenya) the nickname by which he is affectionately known, very much as one of their own, almost as a young family member. The level of perfume in my row may have been more than I am accustomed to, but it did not eclipse the palpable anticipation. When Kissin sat down to play his first encore, my neighbour confided to me excitedly, “Last time he play five!” Tonight, he began with Melodie from Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck-Sgambati), almost too simple after the powerful Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody preceding it, but a poignant farewell to the dedicatee of the concert, Kissin's father Igor, who had passed away nearly a year ago, honoured by a picture and the dedication in the programme booklet.

The programme notes aptly noted the 50-year span of tonight's recital: Haydn Sonata no.49 in Eb major, Beethoven Sonata no.32 (Op.111) in C minor, 4 Schubert Impromptus, and the Liszt 12^th Hungarian Rhapsody. Even though I may well have been the only violinist in Carnegie tonight, I have heard this quintessential piano repertoire many times, for I grew up playing the piano too, and love its gems dearly. (Not seeing any familiar fellow “highly-strung” players tonight, would never happen to me at, say, a Frank Peter Zimmerman concert, for I've been living in New York for a long time now. Perhaps these absent violinists accounted for the surprisingly many empty seats, which I can only imagine were bought in August before patrons had finalized conflicting plans this 3^rd of May. Someone ought to tell them about the 5:30am people. And about how much they missed out!

The Schubert Impromptus, like the Gluck Melodie, work beautifully as an homage, and stood most gracefully on this programme. To my ear, they give a balm to loss, an understanding but a hope, they console without reference, communicate of life worth living, even with tears. Kissin played them truly exquisitely; their souls lived and lit the hall with extraordinary grace. 

The Haydn Sonata, a late work, was perfect, characteristically witty yet upright, beautiful but never indulgent. Perhaps because I was least familiar with this Sonata, I occasionally wished for a shade more improvisatory nature, a little more time between phrases, to make me guess what might be next. Had Kissin decided to apply his great compositional talent and improvise on the themes in a completely different direction, I could well have been fooled, and I think Haydn would have enjoyed it! Sadly, as I learned from youtube interviews, Kissin stopped composing already in his teenage years, perhaps overwhelmed by all the great already existing repertoire, the shadow of history too strong. His early pieces, however, clearly show his great inventiveness, and ability to speak wittily and interestingly in his own musical language. One can only hope he'll pick it up again someday soon.

The Op.111 is the last piano sonata Beethoven wrote. It treads the finest of lines between the feelings of almost, almost touching the stars, and falling in an endless precipice. The greatest extremes, and everything connecting them, of Beethoven's most mature temperament are embodied here. One theme that constantly permeates is the faith and philosophy written in his Heiligenstadt testament: emerging from the depths of despair, and contemplation of suicide, a reaffirmation of faith in life, hope, and joy. In Kissin's interpretation, and I feel it is greatly to his credit, I did not know how the story of the sonata would end. The variations lingered in their sunny moments, but just as much might have remained forever lost in their searching and inconsolable ones.

How does a performer – never mind the composer – maintain self-preservation, in light of the constant close proximity to these deepest of emotions? One pianist friend of mine has said that feeling everything in these most profound works would require being carried out on a stretcher after the performance. There is certainly an element of pure concentration on execution that happens with repeated practice and performance, but nevertheless, our job as performers is to communicate the humanity of the piece to the truest and fullest degree we can, which means feeling it all. Thus I will always be moved, weeping internally, when I play Bach's Ciaccona. With Kissin, one has the feeling that he never holds back – and in fact, it is this sincerity that drew me so strongly to his playing in the first place. What struck me in particular was how present, contemporary and relevant his interpretive language is. He spoke guilelessly, as himself, to us. Especially in the Op.111, I had the feeling that Beethoven's life is here now, that Phillip Glass exists in the just barely tonally-directed variations, that there is no boundary between today, and inflections from two hundred years ago. Time in all its cliché stood still. And that is true artistry, to savour the proverbial moment, to let us feel this moment most intensely, most vibrantly, most alive.

After this immense two-hour programme, I was impressed at Kissin's energy to play a second encore (Liszt's Transcendental Etude #10 in F minor), and, upon ceaseless clapping, a third: Liszt's transcription of Schubert's The Trout, both of which I enjoyed very much. (I had not heard the Trout transcription before, and found the rhythmic changes between it and Schubert song and quintet interesting, if odd.) It was the perfect mood to end on, and yet the audience kept clapping, well after I'd stopped, certain it had crossed the point of bad manners. Perhaps they were egging him on due to expectancies fuelled by his great generosity previously - his Carnegie record appears to be twelve encores in 2007 - for even the NY Times review lists him as having played a “mere” three encores. 

Regardless, it had been a wonderful evening. He bowed in his unique manner, waiting a long time before a full but sudden bow: slowly, to the house, and then to his stage audience, and then – he exited as politely as was possible without fulfilling the desire for a fourth encore. 

His fans will just have to try to make it to Carnegie again for his concert this Sunday, May 19 at 3pm, with the MET orchestra. That concert has also long been sold out. Anyone have an extra ticket?

Reflections on Being a Star

John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; Carnegie Hall, Oct. 22, 2012 S.E.M. Orchestra

2012 is a stellar year for John Cage performances, his centennial sparkling with a veritable myriad of concerts in his honour. The largest scale of these, at least in terms of performers, is the production of Atlas Eclipticalis in its most expansive version, which took place in historically star-studded Carnegie Hall, on Monday Oct.22, 2012. The “Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble”, which premiered this version twenty years ago, played it as part of their "Beyond Cage" festival, to its maximum duration of 100 minutes, with its maximum instrumentation of 86 musicians, simultaneously with Winter Music in a two-piano version, as per the signature optional directions of Cage.

This concert witnessed a veritable conglomeration of New York City new music freelancers, including players from Argento, Absolute Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Talea, FLUX Quartet, Composer's Concordance, Either/Or, 20-21, Yarn|Wire, Signal Ensemble, Talujon, Loadbang, American Composer's Orchetsra, ACJW, Ensemble Moto Perpetuo, Guidonian Hand, North/South Music, The Knights, Ljova, and - the list goes on. As one of the performers, I enjoyed the opportunity to interact with so many of my colleague-friends all at the same time.
I also enjoyed the reaction of many of my non-musician invitee-friends, who before the concert said, "Wow, that sounds intriguing", and after expressed, "What an amazing experience!" Old new music is still fresh, even if its rays of light take longer to reach us now.

www.johncage.info tells us that Atlas Eclipticalis was composed as follows: “Cage used the Atlas Eclipticalis 1950.0 (an atlas of the stars published in 1958 by Antonín Becvár (1901-1965), a Czech astronomer), superimposing musical staves over the star-charts in this atlas. Brightness of the stars is being translated into the size of the notes in the composition.”
The score consists of 344 pages of music, which are divided up among the 86 musicians, hence we each play 4 pages, at 25 minutes a page. The dots on the page, are organized into clusters connected by lines, according to chance processes. There is a nice link to pictures of all of this here: http://greg.org/archive/2012/06/25/john_cage_antonin_becvar_and_leonard_bernstein_walk_into_a_bar.html

We play the notes in each cluster in whichever order we wish, following instructions for each cluster as to how many notes shall be as short as possible, and how many shall have “some duration”. The only parameter around “some duration” is that each cluster should be completed more or less according to its positioning on the staff, as the piece is spatially notated, meaning that each line of staff is to last for the length of one cycle of the conductor's, or clock's, arms – which in our version is five minutes (there are 5 lines of staff per page). Petr Kotik, founder and conductor of S.E.M., and the driving force behind this performance, did his yogic work well, conducting the twenty cycles like a Tai Chi exercise. Slow movement, especially for such a long time is not easy. The audience was privy only to the movement of his arms, which started above his head, and continued slowly in a circle, liked the hands on a clock. Occasionally, time stood still, as the score allows for; perhaps once or twice it backtracked slightly. We players could of course see his serious yet humourful (might one say, universal?) expression.

Star-gazing is a meditative enterprise. Re-creating the dots of light is no less so. While the instructions provided by Cage stop short of specifying “attempt to sound as you might imagine the stars do”, the analogous parallel between light and sound is woven inherently into the score, and appears as such in the sound. The task of performing the dots on the page, with specific instructions, yet with freedom with respect to their timing and length and balance, over the course of 100 minutes, also sets the stage for a zen-like focussedly unfocussed state of being.We started sounding really good by the third page. Our egos had disappeared – each dot was no longer a solo in Carnegie Hall, but a twinkling with the others in the orchestra; we'd gone from being stars to connecting the – galaxies.

When I had a few minutes of rest, about an hour into the piece, I found myself staring at the floor of the stage. For some reason, I have always liked the particular colour of Carnegie's stage – a light, almost tan bare-hardwood. It makes me feel at home, and with the stage lights, it seems cheerful. But something appeared to me tonight: Carnegie's stage is a star-map in itself, marked by galaxies - hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of cello endpin holes, stabbed into history by the world's most famous, most revered, most renowned cellists. Jacqueline du Pré, Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, generations of Berliner Philharmoniker and Cleveland Orchestras – well, the current stage is not so old (1995), but old enough to have seen every major orchestra in the world multiple times, and all the soloists too. Sometimes the cello sections sits at stage left, where I was, and sometimes they sit further inland; for contemporary works they could sit anywhere, and for large-scale youth orchestras and other non-Carnegie-Hall-presents groups, they also might be squeezed in anywhere. The stage is layered in endpinpoints, in months, as stars are layered in light-years. How often can we busy New Yorkers take a moment out of our hectic schedules, to contemplate such things, to star-gaze? A worthwhile reflection.

Needless to say, we were warmed up for the post-intermission piece, John Marclay's Shuffle – of which we gave a spunky and humourous rendition, and which, at 10 minutes, felt much too short.

Concert Review: Budapest Festival Orchestra with András Schiff at Carnegie

The problematic part of writing a review, is that the problematic parts might take much longer to explain than the non-problematic parts. (As a result, I will structure the remainder of the review in pyramid style (or inverted-pyramid, if one prefers that terminology), as opposed to this outset and rather than chronologically, with the peak up top, to emphasize the overriding highly enjoyable evening.)

In tonight's concert at Carnegie Hall, by the Budapest Festival Orchestra with conductor  Iván Fischer and piano soloist András Schiff, the highlight for me, or the part which I found myself responding to with an unconditional "yes", was the first piece after intermission, Béla Bartók's luminescent third piano concerto. As Jack Sullivan explains in Carnegie's extensive and excellently organized programme notes, this piece was one of the great masterpieces Bartók wrote in the final years of his life, along with the Concerto for Orchestra, the Sonata for Solo Violin, and the unfinished viola concerto. Its characteristically Bartókian Hungarianness is suffused at times with moments of near Bach-chorale-like treatments of tonality, a sort of revisiting of the youthful Bartók who sprang from a tradition of tonality, at the same time leaving the question, What now? (The piano gives comments to this question, in Hungarian.) It is a beautiful, melodious, and exciting concerto, and Schiff played it gorgeously - it is clearly dear to his heart, and it was evident that he knows it inside out, evident from more than just his playing it by memory - I felt I could immediately understand it, as though I could speak Hungarian, even though this was my first time hearing the concerto live.
I would have liked to hear this piece directly before intermission, when the atmosphere to give a well-deserved standing ovation could be present, and the bravos could spill into the buzz at intermission. Nonetheless, the programming of the evening was interesting precisely for its non-standard format: overture - piano concerto, intermission, piano concerto -symphony. The double-concerto made the evening a workout for Schiff! (And, if one considers that, by playing the Bartók's first piano concerto, and then his third piano concerto, he'd by default also played a second concerto, it might be tempting to count three ... )
Bartók's first piano concerto was written twenty years before the third, and is entirely more percussive and primal - the programme notes mention "barbarism" and "cataclysm". Bartók wrote it for his own tours, at a time when he was still strong enough to play it. Despite the coolness of its classical concerto form, the percussive material's explosive verve leaves a sudden and immediate impression, less broad than that of the overarching third concerto. It is also played less than the third, and Schiff used the music for it (detracting nothing from his effective and impressive performance), employing a page-turner whose skin-baring formal black attire matched that of the orchestra's other women, perhaps a signature of the group's look.
The evening's first piece was Schubert's overture to "Die Zauberharfe". The orchestra's seating was an interesting touch: a row of basses brought up the rear behind the winds, who dispersed across the back of the stage. A solo quartet of strings and winds stood before Fischer, and the second violins were opposite the firsts, allowing for play with antiphony. The overture was a good length for taking in novelty, and appreciating the resultant clarity in sound, of the thought and energy that went into these decisions, along with the adjustments the orchestra members had to make to be comfortable playing far from one another, only rarely at the cost of togetherness.
The final piece, however, Schubert's songful and "most Mozartean" fifth symphony (written in 1816 when he was just nineteen), is, while almost unbearably touching, also fraught with the elements that make Schubert potentially deadly to performers. It is full of nuance, and it extends. It plays with major and minor in the subtlest but most pregnant of ways - is one to laugh, or to cry? - in some passages almost every note is fate's weighty hinge to either a joyful flight or a vale of tears. To slough over this is to miss the point, no matter how many hinges there are -  it's as though glossing over a teenager's emotionality with "never mind, his hormones will sort themselves out eventually". The second movement began to acquire this feeling, having too much idle forward direction; by contrast, the third lacked the feeling of its given tempo, Allegro Molto. I found my mind wandering away from the music and to the philosophical question, "Is 'Allegro Molto' a structural element in the symphony, and thus explicable in structural terms, or is it a state-of-being of the performers, and as such possibly intangible"? The players were clearly putting a great deal of energy into the movement, as was evident in the sound, which was vibrant though too rough for my taste, but still the music struck me as slow and dull. As if to confirm my impression, my seat-neighbour, clearly a newcomer to classical concerts (engaging in flash-photography during the performance before being advised that it's not allowed), left at the end of the movement. It strikes me that, for Allegro Molto to sound as such in character, in this movement it may need to be executed as "Presto", in the sense that it needs to be felt in 1, rather than 3, or even better, in 4-bar phrases. This is not a stretch given that Beethoven had by 1816 composed many scherzos, in place of the obligatory menuet movement, that are usually played (and indicated) at such tempos. Why is this movement not titled "scherzo"? Perhaps it is not meant to be a joke, its import serious as a menuet, though the tempo no longer danceable. The fourth movement is an "Allegro Vivace", and here Fischer picked up the pace again, though indulging in excessive and odd rubatos when transitioning between sections. I wondered if it had anything to do with the seating of the orchestra and the difficulties in communicating imposed on the players by the seating- the basses and cellos scattered at strategic places throughout the rest of the strings, for a more homogenized blend. Indeed, their togetherness as sections, in this expanded chamber-music setting, was impressive.
Fischer delighted the audience when, giving in to the three curtain-calls, he asked (in Hungarian) whether the orchestra should play Bartók or Schubert as an encore. The audience calling out alternately, he put it to a vote, which gave quite a bit more noise to Bartók than the Schubert, but enough to Schubert that they played both anyway. The Schubert was first and very short - a German dance - which one?? - and most clearly performed in Hungarian: the first beats were greatly emphasized with both dynamics and rhythm, no longer as a rubato, in which time is taken as a liberty, but as a decided change in style, which aberration the second violins, in continuous eighth-notes, amazingly adjusted to seamlessly. Schubert did live in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the connection may make intellectual sense, though it was certainly a stretch musically.
The last two Romanian Folk Dances of Bartók rounded out the evening, with the extra players for it tumbling onto the stage as it had already begun - and a magnificent, spirited ending it became.