Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Reflexive traditionalists and reflexive radicals may see themselves as sworn enemies, but they are both making the same mistake, applying a universal template to the scores. The crucial thing is to be responsive rather than reductive, to let the work dictate the staging. Andrew Porter has it right when he says, on the topic of producing Verdi, that “one needs to be totally pragmatic.” Nothing should be ruled out, but directors should respect the dramatic trajectory of the music and keep in mind Verdi’s own staging ideas. And let it be remembered that on any given night many people will be seeing the opera for the first time. Gossett notices that operagoers, as a rule, show much less of a spirit of adventure than the audiences for Shakespeare plays and other theater classics. But most playgoers have been exposed to Shakespeare from grade school onward; they know how it’s supposed to go, and are open to different approaches. Those seeing Trovatore for the first time will be intoxicated by the old-fashioned craziness of the plot; they want to see hysteria, bizarre occurrences, a mother accidentally throwing her baby on the fire. On at least some nights, they should have it.

  In the spring of 2001, I went to the old port city of Genoa to see a production of Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc), a lesser but still absorbing work from Verdi’s early years. The staging was by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who, despite his visual flair, struggled to bring the opera to life. I remember the trip less for the performance itself than for scenes I witnessed in the streets outside. The Associazione Nazionale Alpini, an organization of veterans of the Alpine military corps, was holding its annual convention that weekend, and Genoa was thronged with small bands of men of all ages, each group from a different part of Italy. As they marched to and fro, they periodically burst into song, accompanying themselves on beat-up brass instruments. I was struck by the fact that these amateurs were employing essentially the same musical language that runs through the Verdi canon. The raw matter of Traviata and Trovatore was filling the air. Some of the tunes were, in fact, Verdi’s own: at one point I heard the strains of “Va pensiero,” the famous chorus from Nabucco. I tried to cross the avenue to see who was playing it, but I found my path blocked by a large truck, on top of which a woman in Alpine costume was dancing.

  “Va pensiero”—the lamentation of the Hebrews by the waters of Babylon—has a tangled history. According to a long-standing legend, the chorus sparked a patriotic riot at the premiere of Nabucco, with Italian operagoers relating the Hebrews’ plight to their own situation under Austrian rule. That legend was apparently a retroactive invention; the scholar Roger Parker has found no evidence that “Va pensiero” received special attention on opening night. Yet, as Philip Gossett points out, the police had decided to keep an eye on Nabucco, fearing an “inappropriate reaction” to the biblical plot. Even if no overt demonstration occurred, the crowd may have been seething all the same. Over the following decades, “Va pensiero” increasingly dominated the Italian psyche, to the point where it became something like an alternative national anthem. Beyond that, it has become a song of solidarity in foreign lands. When the Metropolitan Opera opened its season in September 2001, eleven days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the chorus began by singing “Va pensiero” in honor of the victims of the attack. The scene was utterly different from the one I had witnessed in Genoa some months before, but the link between music and public was just as strong.

  The greatness of Verdi is a simple thing. Solitary by nature, he found a way of speaking to limitless crowds, and his method was to sink himself completely into his characters. He never composed music for music’s sake; every phrase helps to tell a story. The most astounding scenes in his work are those in which all the voices come together in a visceral mass—like a human wave that could carry anything before it. The voices at the end of Simon Boccanegra, crying out in grief; the voices at the end of Un ballo, overcome by the spiritual magnificence of a dying man; and, of course, the voices of “Va pensiero,” remembering, in a unison line, the destruction of Jerusalem. In the modern world, we seldom find ourselves in the grip of a single emotion, and this is what Verdi restores to us—the sense of belonging.

  12

  ALMOST FAMOUS

  ON THE ROAD WITH THE ST. LAWRENCE QUARTET

  At the beginning of the 1990s, the Emerson String Quartet, well on its way to becoming the most celebrated American chamber group, was auditioning younger ensembles for a training program at the Hartt School of Music, in Connecticut. Piles of performance tapes came in, and the members of the Emerson decided to listen to them while driving between destinations on a European tour. One tape, from a young Toronto quartet, juxtaposed the expected Beethoven with a contemporary Canadian work in which the players were required to yell at the top of their lungs. The screaming began just as the Emersons were negotiating a difficult stretch of Alpine road. “We’d heard this perfectly good Beethoven, and we were saying, ‘Very nice,’ when the screaming started, and we almost lost control of the car,” the violinist Philip Setzer recalled. “We could all have died right then and there. Of course, we had to meet the crazy kids who sent in the tape.”

  By the beginning of the following decade, the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet—Geoff Nuttall, Barry Shiffman, Lesley Robertson, and Marina Hoover—had gained a firm foothold in the world of American chamber music. They were the ensemble-in-residence at Stanford University, and they regularly trained younger quartets themselves. Yet they had not lost their contrarian streak; they had a way of catching audiences off guard. Their playing retained a certain jumpy freedom, as if the dinner-party conversation of chamber music were about to break down into altercation, demonstration, or confession. “They’ve got something,” David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson, told me. “Performers either have something or they don’t, and the St. Lawrence does. I’m not sure what it is. Partly, it’s the ability to play the most familiar music as if it were new and unusual. Everything the quartet does becomes contemporary music. Listening, I forget that I do the same thing for a living.”

  There are at least a hundred full-time professional string quartets in North America, plus an untold number of amateurs. To make a living in this field, you have to be willing to play almost anywhere and at any time. Even a group as famous as the Emerson follows the same exhausting routine: fly into a strange town, rent a car, test out the hall, play the concert, go to the postconcert reception, get a few hours’ sleep, return to the airport, and fly to the next date. The Lawrences have played in international culture capitals, and they have also won the acclaim of Canadian fishing villages, Uruguayan mountain towns, and Kansas City public schools. Perhaps their most unusual appearance was in Vietnam, at the Hanoi Opera House, a replica of the Palais Garnier, in Paris. The wealthier patrons were seated in the auditorium, but a crowd of thousands watched a telecast of the concert outside, many of them leaning on their scooters.

  One of my earliest assignments as a New York music critic was to cover the Lawrences’ New York debut, in 1992, in the Young Concert Artists series at the 92nd Street Y. I was struck by the intelligent passion that the group brought to performances of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet, Alban Berg’s Quartet Opus 3, and Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Although in the subsequent ten years they made quick advances in the music business—signing with the powerhouse agency Columbia Artists Management, Inc., or CAMI; winning a recording contract with EMI—they never returned to New York in a flashy way. So, in the spring of 2001, I decided to follow them on tour for a week or so, to get a sense of what life was like for a gifted but overlooked classical ensemble. In recent years, the Lawrences have moved to the front rank of their profession, appearing regularly at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and they have undergone two changes of personnel, with Shiffman and Hoover ceding their places to Scott St. John and Christopher Costanza. Yet their approach to making music remains essentially the same. If the score asks them to scream, they happily do so.

  When I joined the St. Lawrence Quartet on the road,
the group was scheduled to play two concerts in El Paso, Texas, and one in Joplin, Missouri. There were the usual travel hassles. A sandstorm delayed flights out of Dallas—Fort Worth, and when the members of the quartet got to the hotel, at midnight, the reception desk had no record of their reservations. It was one of those sleepy, lost-in-time places—call it the Vista Grande—where guests can be a confusing novelty. When I arrived, I was handed a cryptic message that said, “Barry: Call Alex.” Still, the vista was grand. You could look out over basketball courts, medical facilities, and pueblo-style suburbs to the brown expanse of the Rio Grande, with Juarez stretching out on the other side.

  The next day, at around noon, the Lawrences gathered in the lobby. If you had been told that they were musicians, but not of the classical kind, you might have guessed that they were a veteran indie-rock band, some well-traveled cousin to Yo La Tengo. Nuttall, the athletic first violinist, found a YMCA and had been lifting weights. Shiffman, the second violinist, and Robertson, the violist, had been practicing. Hoover, the cellist, was with her husband, Richard Bernstein, and their seven-month-old baby, Benjamin. Hoover often looks harried: traveling with a baby is hard enough, but a baby and a cello together can spell real trouble. Flight attendants have tried to bar her cello from planes, even though she always buys a seat for it. The attendants apparently have a vision of the instrument flying around the cabin and causing a crash. Hoover is the most organized of the Lawrences—she is the one who knows when the next plane leaves—and she has a way of barreling past human annoyances as if they simply were not there.

  Kwang-Wu Kim, the artistic director of El Paso Pro-Musica, was waiting for the quartet in the lobby. He was, in classical-music parlance, the “presenter.” The Lawrences have had all kinds of experiences with presenters: some good, some bad, some indifferent. They have worked with a music-loving radiologist who goes over programming minutiae while on break from the hospital; a philosophy professor who has a seventy-person concert hall in his home; and an eclectic Florida promoter who puts on chamber music one night and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme the next. Presenters who usually have to deal with disorderly pop acts are pleased by their demeanor. One impresario found them refreshing after a run-in with a well-known folk-music personality, who had disappeared from her hotel after noticing that an instance of “improper land management” was visible from her window.

  The Lawrences thought highly of Kwang-Wu Kim. “He’s a genius,” they said to me beforehand. A pianist, professor, and all-around explainer, Kim has degrees in philosophy from Yale and in music from Peabody. He had attracted a Who’s Who of American chamber players to El Paso, and also ventured into the city’s schools, retrieving out-of-tune pianos from janitorial closets and introducing kids to the classics.

  Kim and the Lawrences traded complaints about the unhelpfulness of CAMI. “The people there sent me the wrong programs, and then they told me that they didn’t understand the need for sending copies of the program notes in advance,” Kim said. The Lawrences collectively rolled their eyes: management’s aloofness from their daily lives had been a long-running problem. The subject of audience turnout came up. “We’re not sure if this is going to be our biggest audience of the year,” Kim said. “Somehow, we forgot that this weekend is Passover. Also, Matchbox Twenty is playing tonight at the University of Texas, which means that the students probably won’t show up. And we couldn’t get an article into the local paper. They told us that they were concerned about already giving too much attention to classical music, which is pretty funny, because they don’t pay any attention to classical music at all.”

  More than three hundred people attended the two concerts, most of them well-to-do and middle-aged. At one point, Kim gave a talk, revealing his flair for persuasion. He was a blast of positive energy, flattering the audience with a sense that this series was no less important than the East Coast world from which he came. “I was the laughingstock of the Peabody conservatory when I announced that I was going to El Paso,” he said. “They were horrified. Their basic attitude was ‘Another one bites the dust.’ Well, we need to stop making value judgments about place. There is absolutely no difference in real musical value between a concert in Carnegie Hall and a concert at the Fox Fine Arts Center in El Paso. Music is a universal act of human conversation, and an identical act of conversation is happening in each place. Haydn didn’t write his quartets for New York City, and they are equally at home in El Paso.”

  Some old-school musicians disdain the idea of addressing the audience, but the Lawrences find it natural to talk about what they’re up to. They have a gift for describing musical abstractions in down-to-earth terms. Nuttall warned the El Paso crowd that a contemporary piece—Jonathan Berger’s Miracles and Mud—would appear on the first half of the program. “We like to put the modern work second, just before intermission,” he said. “That way, you can’t come late and miss it, and you can’t leave at intermission and skip it.” There was knowing laughter from the crowd. He explained the idea behind Berger’s work, which has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and played the two recurring folk themes that represent the warring peoples. This demonstration seemed to make Berger’s tangy, Bartókian dissonances more palatable. Three-fourths of the quartet are generally gung-ho for contemporary works; Robertson tends to be skeptical, at least initially. “The viola part is often more interesting in the modern pieces,” she told me, “but sometimes I’m happier droning on one note in a Haydn quartet, because I know exactly where that note belongs, logically and emotionally”

  Nuttall then talked about Haydn’s “Quinten,” or “Fifths,” Quartet, which opened the concert. “I have most of the hard licks,” he said. “I’d happily play Haydn all the time, but the others get bored with repeating the same simple figures.” He did a run of notes in his sweet-toned, Heifetz-like style. When he plays, he has a habit of kicking one leg back and half getting out of his chair. His hair tends to change length and color; in El Paso, it was cropped short, with blond highlights. “He looks like some dude from the beach,” a man at the back of the room whispered. Nuttall’s looks are a plus when he is addressing youngsters in educational programs, but the Pro-Musica regulars were a little suspicious. Still, his way of explicating details seemed to win them over. “In the final movement,” he went on, “Haydn does this thing to the solo line which is actually pretty cool. He puts in this weird fingering so you end up having to slide from one note to another, and suddenly you’re playing in Gypsy style—portamento. It’s as if Haydn were telling conservatory-trained violinists to forget their training and loosen up.”

  Nuttall is the St. Lawrence’s “secret weapon,” as the rest of the group admits. An opera maven and pop-music fan, he executes his solo lines with an airy, vocal freedom, revealing a vibrant personality that is lacking in many better-known soloists. “He has a way of generating intensity in all of us, with his revved-up excitement at whatever he’s playing,” Hoover told me. Something about him harks back to the unregulated virtuosos of a century ago; his phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound almost improvised. “They play with un-self-conscious joy,” says the composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose work The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, for quartet and klezmer clarinet, is a St. Lawrence specialty. “They can excite people who show up at chamber-music concerts by a fluke. I saw this happen with a group of Argentine soccer players.”

  The St. Lawrence’s spontaneity had a bracing effect on Tchaikovsky’s Third Quartet, which was the centerpiece of the El Paso concerts. Tchaikovsky and Schumann are two composers whom the Lawrences have investigated thoroughly; they had recorded two Schumann quartets for EMI, and were preparing to release a disc of Tchaikovsky. Both composers have been accused of writing unidiomatic chamber music, but the Tchaikovsky roared to life. In rehearsal, the players concentrated on cl
arifying its three-against-two cross-rhythms. In performance, they threw everything back up in the air, flirting with disaster in the opening movement. In the funeral-march Andante, Nuttall’s solos sobbed in the middle distance, sounding like 78-rpm records of turn-of-the-century divas; Shiffman’s obsessive, one-note patterns gnawed at the fabric of the harmony. The finale played a bit like a drunken wake.

  Cocktail-party chatter is the last thing you might want to engage in after such a performance, but the postconcert reception is a fact of life on the chamber circuit, and the Lawrences go at it gamely. The El Paso crowd turned out to be more interesting than most. The players were buttonholed in the lobby by the Reverend Paul Green, who congratulated them on raising the cultural temper of the town, and by J. O. Stewart, Jr., who underwrote the concert. Stewart was an impressive man with a hawk-like face and a handsome pair of cowboy boots; he had recently sold his company, El Paso Disposal, for $140 million. “I worked in the trash business for thirty years,” he said, “so I may be a trashy guy, but that was a fine concert, and I liked the new thing, too. Maybe I can get used to that stuff. Like I always say, you can only play with one tennis racquet at a time.”

  There was a late-night dinner at the home of Charles and Ellen Lacy, in the hills above El Paso. Nuttall, who lived in Texas when he was a child, stayed the longest, drinking wine with a group of reformed good old boys. “I like those guys,” he said, as we drove back to the Vista Grande. “They know how to kick back. They’re not stuffy, even though they have some weird-ass politics. But I wish there had been a few more young people. Where were the University of Texas students? At Matchbox Twenty, I guess. Kind of kills me that there’s ten thousand people seeing them and a hundred people seeing us. I don’t see why the difference should be that dramatic. I mean, Rob Thomas is a good singer and all, but w’re—we’ve got the deeper songs.”