Vengerov at the Philharmonic, via NYT

Frankly, I wasn’t sure I would ever hear Maxim Vengerov play again. I was afraid the great Russian violinist was through. I knew he had suffered some injury, and I also heard rumors about a loss of interest in the violin. Or a loss of heart. Or something. Moreover, he had turned to conducting. That wasn’t rumor but fact.

The loss of Maxim Vengerov to the violin world would be … I don’t know, something like the loss of Tiger Woods to the golf world (which has just about happened).

But there he was on Thursday night, onstage with the New York Philharmonic, violin in hand. He was going to play an awfully hard piece, too: the Tchaikovsky Concerto. On the podium was a Chinese conductor, Long Yu. Or should I say “Yu Long”? (His family name is Yu.)

As the orchestra played the opening section, there was a startling error: a premature entrance. Unless my eyes deceived me, Maestro Yu looked up, startled (same as I was in the audience). This is very rare from a top orchestra, and in such a common piece.

When Vengerov started to play, my heart sank. He wasn’t anywhere near himself. He was stiff and halting. His intonation was poor. He and the orchestra were woefully out of coordination, and it was the violinist’s fault. No one could have kept up with his weirdness.

At one point, there was a train wreck in the orchestra—not Vengerov’s fault, although he had put weirdness and uncertainty in the air. I thought the orchestra was going to have to stop altogether and resume somewhere. To sit in your seat and witness all this was agonizing.

There were hints of the old Vengerov: the big, fat Russian sound; the fire, the charisma. But it seemed his fingers couldn’t do what his brain and heart wanted to do. They were sausages, they didn’t work.

Between the first and second movements, I said bitterly to the friend next to me, “Put a fork in him. He’s done, done as dinner.” I was sorry he had ever come back, really. I was sorry to be in attendance (for I adore Vengerov so).

The second movement was okay. Vengerov got through it, with a modicum of honor. I was terribly nervous for him. I’ll say it again: It was painful to sit there. And I had no hope for the last movement: It was too hard—too fast, too tricky. Vengerov would just fake and bull his way through it.

As it transpired, the third movement was shocking: Not only did Vengerov get through it, he played it very well. Damn well. I grinned from ear to ear. I was almost giddy with relief. Vengerov was not done. He could still play. The old charisma and electricity were there, and so were the fingers, pretty much.

Sometimes we say, “I feel like I’ve been through a war.” So it was with this Tchaik Concerto. I don’t know about Vengerov, the orchestra, or the conductor, but I was drained.

It looked like there would be an encore, and I said to my friend, “It’ll be a slow movement from a Bach suite, and it won’t be in tune.” Vengerov had a remark for the audience: “There is no Russian music for solo violin, so I will play Bach!” I recalled Vengerov playing an unaccompanied work by Shchedrin in Carnegie Hall.

Anyway, the encore was the Sarabande from the D-minor partita—and it was in tune. It was just slightly careful, almost academic—not really Vengerov—but it was still good, and, again, I was relieved, and gratified.

After intermission, there was a symphony on the program: the Shostakovich Fifth. I thought there was no way Yu could conduct it decently, based on the Tchaikovsky. I would have bet dollars to doughnuts the Shostakovich would stink.

There was my second shock of the night: The Shostakovich was very, very good. It was incisive, bracing, smart—and very idiomatic. Very Soviet. You could smell the fear and the tension almost the whole way through.

And the solo horn playing was exemplary. It was by Richard Deane, and it was absolutely first-rate—a clinic.

I have three complaints, one of them tiny, one of them minor, and one of them more substantial. 1) Maestro Yu’s ending of the second movement was interesting but contrived. 2) He favored fast tempos throughout, and some of those tempos might have crossed the line, a hair, into too fast. 3) The final movement was undifferentiated. It was fast, loud, and unremitting, all the way home. The music would have had greater impact with more variation in dynamics, tempo, and so on.

But still: This was an excellent performance of the Shostakovich Fifth. For the most part, Yu did not interpret it. He just conducted it, the way Shostakovich wrote it. The music chilled, smote, uplifted, and seared. There is so much ambiguity, or ambivalence, in this symphony. Are the last pages triumphant, defiant, what? And that slow movement: Is there anything lovelier or more haunting in all of music?

I look forward to hearing Maestro Yu again. And I would like to close this post with three footnotes.

1) A few years ago, Yu was here in New York, when some thug attacked him on the street. The thug ran off. And Yu chased him down and hit him back. Bravo, maestro. Do it again, if you have to. (For a write-up of the incident, go here.)

2) Some violinists recoil when I say this, but, in my observation, violin playing is a young man’s game. (Maxim Vengerov is now forty, by the way.) Yes, yes, Heifetz and Milstein played well in later years. But rare, I think, is the violinist who plays truly well beyond early middle age. It may have to do with the cramped quarters in which they work. I mean, in which their hands and fingers work. Anyway, this is a contentious subject, and I’ll return to it later (or not).

3) It used to be that I remarked on concerts that were spoiled by hearing aids—wayward, piercing, painful, deafening, maddening hearing aids. Honestly, I’m now tempted to remark on concerts that are not spoiled by such hearing aids. It’s like hearing a dog not barking. I hear a hearing aid not going off, and I am amazed and relieved.

There was a hearing aid on and off at Thursday night’s concert. It was like a laser through your head. Can anything be done about this menace?

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