Gold and velvet and fruitless optics...
A telling start to the season, featuring Antoine Tamestit on viola, and Szeps-Znaider sloshing through Tchaikovsky with the CSO.
Performers:
Ensemble: Chicago Symphony Orchestra (home team)
Conductor: Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider (visiting)
Soloist: Antoine Tamestit (viola)
Program:
Vaughan Williams - Overture to The Wasps
Walton - Viola Concerto
Hindemith - Sonata for Solo Viola, Op. 25 No. 1: Mvt. IV. Rasendes Zeitmass. Wild. Tonschönheit ist Nebensache [Encore]
* * * intermission * * *
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 4
Performance 1: Thursday evening (opening), seated in first row of Terrace Right (behind harp, violins; direct view down row of horns)
Performance 2: Friday afternoon, seated main floor, center, rear, in the dark (right by the door; view of the first couple layers of musicians on the stage)
Purpose/Intent/Questions: Originally, I was glad to grab a ticket to the first performance as part of my season subscription because I am always eager for pieces that feature viola, and the timing worked out such that I could easily be in Chicago regardless of where my holiday1 plans saw me seated. The choice to attend the second performance was entirely for the sake of hearing Tamestit play again. I did not attend with particular ideas in mind, but I do admit that my head was quite full of the approaching Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, each holiday cluttered with its million resident questions and a few dozen extra tacked on by new directions in my life.
How’d it go?
One thing I love about Chicago is that each day in the city feels somehow like a whole new world has been loaded. You might not like all of them, but The Windy City lives and breathes in and out infinite versions of… whatever it is. Having in mind that all of Chicago respawns with every dawn made attending the same performance twice feel like a reasonable use of fleeting time. After all, it surely wouldn’t be the same performance, no matter how much anyone might have wanted for it to be.
The Overture to The Wasps featured perfectly adept playing of a standard interpretation. In a sense, it seemed like a bit of a waste. While Vaughan Williams is considered by many to be “quintessentially English” as a composer, with this work in particular being quintessentially “him,” I couldn’t shake that The Wasps is a ridiculous, funny Greek satire. The music is not all that silly to American ears, yet it has an upbeat, cheeky, jokingly self-important quality that does deliver some level of British humor, if not Ancient Greek. The rest of the program certainly wasn’t a comedy.
For some time after, I’ve caught myself trying to separate, to sort out, how I might have perceived the piece if I had no clue about its origins. Leaving aside questions of fit with regards to the piece’s purpose, content, themes, or emotions, its position at the start of this program created a sensation not unlike being served a sleeve of candy popcorn immediately ahead of a crown roast of lamb, with all the finest accoutrements. Like… why? Who is in on the joke?
There are at least a few reasons why these pieces could be seen as working together, musically and intellectually, that would offer a more generous eye to the program designers than the thought that they were simply following the routine “overture, concerto, symphony” structure and using up a piece of repertoire that had relatively convenient instrumentation—at least in terms of limiting how long of a game of musical chairs would be required before sending Tamestit on stage for his piece.
Ultimately, these wasps didn’t sting or even create any sort of buzz that would help to secure a place for the performance in my memory. The way I hear or read the piece hasn’t changed. I remember listening, but the experience was forgettable. Not the best foot to put forward.
But it’s not unusual for the sandwich to be made by anything but the bread.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to call a musician’s playing “beefy.” I have enough self-respect to mix metaphors. Or: good music lets us digest things we otherwise couldn’t eat.
While I have always been apprehensive about joining the ranks of those who say strange, synesthetically tragic things about a particular musician’s playing, coining descriptions more bizarre than those found in wine reviews, some things cannot be stopped. My time has come. From the first notes, Tamestit’s playing produced an irresistible sensation of watching velvet2 somehow being spun into the air.
Of course, velvet is not spun. Traditionally, the best velvets are made from silk, and the remarkable texture is essentially created by ripping up the work that has been done on a specialized loom. Two distinct pieces of fabric are created by cutting through a body that was formed as one, like in Genesis when the Divine Sovereign splits the first human in two. But the velvet never gets patched back up. The pile (“fuzz”) is held stable by the tightness of warp and weft. We run our hands along and luxuriate in the open wounds of the fabric. The softness is the result of tremendous, meticulous violence against one’s efforts, millions of tiny fingers reaching out for something missing, for the rest of themselves, for what they were once bound to.
Viola, done right, sounds more like velvet than any other instrument I’ve heard. And Tamestit, in his half hour on stage, reupholstered quite a bit.
Why spinning? Well, he gave it to us one note at a time: a metered, mature story that accepts itself fully, trusts itself fully, doesn’t have to stumble over too many words to explain its own worth.
That encore, though.
Aside from the delight of hearing Tamestit’s playing, he is also a joy to watch. One of the great questions in the arts is the extent to which any given performer is sincere in his expressions, whether his emotions are real or he simply knows how to act. I’m old enough to have seen where in the hat the magician stashes the rabbit, and if Tamestit is merely a good actor on top of being a tremendous musician… he’s a damn good, professional actor and having that level of skill in two fields is almost as impressive as genuine humility before the music.
In the brief moments of the concerto when he was permitted to relax his shoulders, Tamestit tended to turn and face members of the orchestra, lip-syncing other instruments’ parts, bouncing on his feet, riding on the sound, thoroughly engaged in the conversation, actively listening rather than merely waiting for his turn to speak once more. In his actions, he was a sort of supplementary conductor—a semiconductor, while still showing respectful deference to Szeps-Znaider’s efforts.
And I don’t think we could have asked for or even conceived of something better for the playing of this piece.
Quite a professional, he took some of his time on the stage to pay respects to the City, the hall, and the symphony, as was perfectly fitting for his Big Onion debut. Perhaps even greater was his choice of an encore, a radically intense piece he adequately introduced by assuring the audience it was not actually by Jimi Hendrix. Viola is routinely, annoyingly, and mostly unfairly the butt of many music jokes and has long played second fiddle to the second violins. Opting for a piece that demonstrates contrast with the concerto was the right thing to do, not just for himself but for the reputation of the instrument he has committed his life to. I can’t say whether he swapped out his bow for one in need of some TLC before the encore, or if the fact that both audiences got to see him literally shredding was merely the result of how seriously he took the composer’s commands to be furious and wild, to play with abandon. But for an audience that included people familiar enough with the symphony to receive mail at their seats, who prior to the show admitted they had “never heard of a viola concerto,” Tamestit offered both spectacle and spectacular playing that won’t soon be forgotten.
Outside of Tamestit’s playing, I found myself impressed by (in both cases, on Thursday night) just a couple of moments. Just a couple of moments is more than enough for me.
During the concerto, I was quite taken by how the orchestra played with Tamestit. In passages that progress through parallel phrases, it’s often the case where members of the orchestra will utter their turns with a lack of authority, creating the sense that the soloist is bravely shouting what is being whispered by people cowered in a corner. That suits some pieces, but I am convinced that this is certainly not one of them. I think because of Tamestit’s apparent collegiality with the orchestra, nobody was afraid to speak her piece, even knowing that he would repeat it with embellishment and fervor soon after. Rather than self-absorbed appropriation, it felt like a teacher highlighting a bit of brilliance emerging from the heaps of mostly useless ink in a stack of student papers, or like the chazzan repeating the Amidah so that those who perhaps cannot read all of the words for themselves can accept all of the words for themselves, not out of a sense that the prayer of any individual congregant was in some way lacking, but in that it was so good and beautiful and true that even those who cannot produce it for themselves should still be welcomed to participate.
Beyond Tamestit’s influence, I was absolutely melted into the experience of a few perfect bars: the sublime beauty of one instrument seamlessly melding into another, grace notes given by one section onto the voice of another.
This should happen in a number of places across the repertoire, but ensembles often fail to rise to the occasion. In Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, there’s a lyrical ascent of the strings in the development of the first movement, during which the touchpoints felt like witnessing some penumbra of creation, the split second of two entities merging into one. Like a golden kiss on the forehead of each note as it went off into the big wide world, like stray rays of sunlight turning the mist of a summer storm into glittering gems suspended in air, like the crown of a pomegranate being sewn in place. If we ever witness it, that is a privilege.
In trying to comprehend–the incomprehensible–why I was so taken with these moments on Thursday night, I thought of the subtle and discreet ways of loving whose fingerprints we often only notice in retrospect. Coming from a family who, for generations, despite their multilingualism could afford only the singular love language of survival, and myself growing up replete with privileges that have enabled me to be loving in a myriad of ways, I often have to remind myself that my mother does love me–even if I might have, as a child, felt like it was a poorly drawn stick-figure sort of love, compared to what I was able to witness and experience in the dazzling technicolor world of… well, being born with citizenship, to two parents holding the same citizenship, to say the least of it.
The kiss on my forehead is early, broad, deep literacy. The love note in my lunch box is that the lunch box always had more than enough homemade food in it, even if other kids thought it was “weird.” The big tender hug is that no matter how long it takes, how heinous the turmoil, there is still an openness to try again and to meet each other in whatever pidgin we can concoct between the hyperaffection that is so inalienable in me and the wariness around hope that is still so ingrained in her.
Sometimes you don’t even notice that someone else is singing in a way that makes you sound better. In some cases, in some senses, that’s the ideal. Even with professional musicians, it can be quite rare to happen across those brief moments of deep ecstasy we collectively invest so much of our lives in the pursuit of.
That said, I almost fell asleep during the symphony on Friday afternoon. I had hoped that the experience might be a bit better from another angle, but golly… no.
Surrounding the beautiful bits of Thursday night, I noticed that the symphony was playing slowly without any notable benefit. There’s a trend, if not a policy, in many places that a piece should be played “as quickly as it can be played perfectly,” whatever that means. If we’re talking about waiting for a shy child to sing Ma Nishtanah at the Seder for the first time, by all means, it takes as long as it takes. But a symphony is something that needs to move with elements to its personality that extend beyond conscientiousness. The emotional life of quarter notes is robust and complex. And it’s elsewise been my experience with the CSO that the musicians understand this and are not afraid of putting energy and flavor into their playing.
But this guy, flailing on the podium. Well.
I’ve often defended conductors by referencing the reality that most of their major work is done prior to performance, in developing an interpretation independently and then negotiating that reading with the ensemble in question. It can be a rigorous, heated, playful, contentious, consequential process, sometimes thoroughly cerebral, sometimes replete with spirituality, often entirely out of sight and out of mind for many audience members. And then a good conductor, gifted with use of a good professional orchestra who have come to an agreement about the music, faces the question of what to do rather than sit on her hands after the beat drops.
There is the possibility to actually moderate tempi and dynamics—even the best players can get too excited, fall into muscle memory that doesn’t reflect the overall vision for the performance, or toot their horns a little too loudly for other voices to creatively coexist with. This is a great area for both vapid gesticulations and patronizing micromanagement. Then there’s the question of that other variable: the pesky audience, whether in the flesh or on the internet. How well do they know any of the pieces on offer? When the conductor gestures towards the clarinet, is that not as much for the sake of directing the audience’s attention as it is to summon the instrument’s voice? And what will they think of the conductor if he doesn’t dance and make pained faces throughout the performance… will they believe that he does not have a special connection with the music that qualifies him for the role in a more esoteric way than any actual earthly training could? Much is said about the need for the conductor to transfer the emotion, the vibe to the players, as if instrumentalists are automatons whose mechanical movements only transfigure into music when their host snarls appropriately.
On all of these counts, I found Szeps-Znaider to be, at turns, both irritating and perplexing. There were a handful of moments where I felt compelled to conduct him, holding back the gesture of stop and let them play.
His gestures were, to my perception, murky, muddy, and inconsistent. The drama didn’t seem to add anything good. Both the tempi and the dynamics felt incredibly off.
Of course, the best justification for this would be a difference in our understanding of each piece, followed by the difference in where our ears were located during the execution thereof. As for mine, they were attached to my head, which contains my brain. I know well enough to both self-correct and give some leeway to my listening when I’m sitting right on top of one edge of the orchestra, but I also know that even if a chimera manages to have the head of a lion, a lion it is not.
Barring something as direct as a bassoonist gagging on her reed, or something as established as a recorded orchestral tradition of a certain piece whose interpretation has lasted through the years, for better and for worse it is often difficult to tell whether a particular musical idea should be attributed to an instrumentalist or to the conductor. Indeed, for better and for worse the conductor serves to absorb the blame for the collective experience and divvy up at least some of the praise. But it’s far easier for me to believe that the CSO can perform a brilliant Tchai 4 than that Szeps-Znaider, who continues to perform as a violin soloist and only assumed his first music director role around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, can conduct one from memory.
Trying to conduct without the score without both the assurance that you understand every inch of the pages you refuse to look at, and the reasonable trust that the orchestra will deliver what came into consensus during rehearsals is like–is like something I won’t provide a metaphor for because it would feel too mean. At best it’s juvenile, at worst it’s egotistical. In a certain segment of the Jewish world, we all know someone who definitely has the whole Torah memorized. We might even trust what’s in their heads more readily than what’s found in translated editions. But when we do kriat haTorah, even that person reads directly from the scroll, albeit with more fluency and beauty than most. It’s a matter of respect for the text and a commitment to as much fidelity to the tradition as possible. Perhaps a score is not as sacrosanct as actual religious work, but many musicians feel that it is. I want to listen to someone conduct without a score the same way I want a drunk guy at a dive bar to flirt with me. (Don’t.) It’s considered by some to be a mark of competence for a conductor to erect the building without the blueprints, but it’s quite rare that someone can succeed without compromising the structural integrity of a work of substantial length. In those cases, it tends to be limited to a small [portion of the conductor’s] repertoire. Even a prophet can only digest so many scrolls. Humility on the musical front is not just sexy, but deeply effective.
That said, I would be happy to see Szeps-Znaider perform again, perhaps with his own ensemble who he should have had considerably more time to develop proper rapport with. Room for improvement is, in ways, more exciting than a waft of perfection.
(Of course, I wouldn’t spend as much on a ticket to see S-Z as I would to see the CSO under a conductor I trust, or Tamestit in any circumstances.)
A side benefit of coming back for seconds was getting a better sense of the different culture of each performance time. In Chicago, it’s pretty consistent for the Thursday night crowd to applaud in ways that traditionalists would find appalling, i.e. after the first movement, or after each movement, rather than only after complete pieces. In contrast, while the Friday afternoon crowd holds their cheers (and perhaps jeers) until the “appropriate” time, they tend to exhibit more of the small “undignified” behaviors that quickly pile up to pollute the soundscape, including crinkling the noisiest snacks in the world during the playing, and making a production of exiting the terrace in the middle of the second movement.
That’s the sort of season I hope that this one will be: one where I fiendishly center my questions and my thinking, wrapping the music around the invisible spindle of whatever idea I am working through, while staying open to whatever gifts emerge. What’s in my head, what’s in my heart, should matter to me. I’ve ignored it for many years. Plus maintenant.
This energy of pursuit does not surprise me. I have been the same way with my Torah study, sitting through the same shiur multiple times, hoping it could jimmy open the shell of a bolus of thought I’d been beating against the sides of my skull. Surely, this is part of what first made the world of the beit midrash such a place of comfort for me. I never felt anything other than an immutable birthright to dive nose-first into the multiverse of Torah, to turn it and turn it, to immerse myself to the point of transcendence.
Surely, it’s often much easier to lose yourself in music than in Talmud. But finding yourself in any of it requires a different sort of vulnerability that doesn’t always look super posh.
And as sloppy as some conductors might be–I’d take them over the sloppy rabbis, any day or night.
I’ve gone back and forth on the question of whether or not to point out Who Is A Jew when I mention composers and performers, in light of the obvious fact that this publication is dealing with aspects of my own Jewishness. In pieces where I’m engaging with Jewish thought or religion more broadly, or the larger sociopolitical history of classical music, there are times it will surely make sense. In show notes, I suppose I might just want to dissuade people from thinking that cultural simpatico is playing an outsized role in how I report my feelings. This performance makes a pretty strong case for my willingness to offer musical mussar to other members of the tribe and defend the dignity of the gentile greats. Aside from times when it’s relevant, I might also point it out when it’s just… sort of weird.
References to the schmatta business are likely to quite routinely adorn these writings; I will try my best to pin down the specific meaning of such embellishments for the unclothed emperors amongst us.