concertgoing

[calimac]

Last Saturday afternoon I wandered over to Stanford to hear a student quartet - three sophomores and a junior, all of East Asian ethnicity as so many of the music students are - play two of my favorite quartets, Smetana's "From My Life" and Shostakovich's Third (probably the most popular Shostakovich quartet: I've heard it live half a dozen times in the past as-many years). It was an oddly frustrating experience. The students were so good at the purely technical side, and their (borrowed) instruments were so fine, that the stiff awkward earnestness of their interpretation, or more accurately lack of an interpretation, became a flaw rather than just par for the course at a free student concert. In the Shostakovich in particular I missed the witty ironic bounce.

I got the kind of performance I wanted with a vengeance the following afternoon. My editor had phoned up and said that a reviewer had had to cancel out to attend a funeral: the all-Beethoven concert by the Takács Quartet in Berkeley was mine if I wanted it. If I wanted it? This is the group whose recordings of the same music had so dazzled me last year; they played, I said at the time, as if all Hell were on fire. I wouldn't miss a chance to hear them for free for anything.

The concert was at Hertz Hall in Berkeley, a building I knew well in my student days but hadn't been in in thirty years. When I got there I found something else I hadn't seen in thirty years: my old professor, Joseph Kerman, one of the world's leading Beethoven experts, giving the pre-concert talk. When I took a class in the Beethoven symphonies from him in this very hall he was about the age I am today. Now he's nearly eighty, white-haired and much frailer, but still as witty as ever (a quality hard to find in his writings, which are often very formidable) and still as sloppy playing examples on the piano as ever, too.

Venues often offer reviewers two tickets; this time I was only given one. It turned out just before concert time that the neighboring seat had been scarfed up by SFCV's chief editor. It's a little intimidating for a junior reviewer like myself to have your capo sitting next to you and able to judge anything you say, or write afterwards. But I just did what I always do: sat there with all my ears on, trying to make as fair and insightful an assessment as I could. It was finding that my judgments often matched those of respectable critics that convinced me I had the chops to do this in the first place.

I've just remembered that I wrote my first-ever concert review for Prof. Kerman. One of our assignments in the Beethoven class was to attend a performance of the Fourth Symphony by the UC student orchestra (also in this hall) and write it up.

Well, Sunday's string quartet concert was a great performance. Their Op. 59 No. 2 was to die for. Just ... amazing. And as I did with the symphony in the wayback, I wrote it up. And in the course of conversation, I mentioned to the editor that I'd also attended irontongue's choral concert last Friday, she also being a SFCV reviewer. So he asked me to write that one up too. So that's how I have two reviews this week.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Fascinating, as always. Thank you.