Zankel Hall; Carnegie Hall, NY; October 23, 2007
Text and music shared equal billing Tuesday evening at Carnegie Hall’s subterranean Zankel Hall, as music by Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass performed by the Takács Quartet found itself interspersed with readings from Philip Roth’s recent novella Everyman, performed by Academy Award–winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. The second half of the program featured Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, “Death and the Maiden,” prefaced by Hoffman’s offstage (or perhaps pre-recorded) recitation of the brief Matthias Claudius poem that Schubert took for inspiration.
The programmatic conceit for the evening was a simple one: music without inherent context is lent it by a text, with each art form being thus strengthened by, inspiring reflection on, and influencing audience interpretation of the other. The Philip Glass selection for the evening, his String Quartet No. 2, “Company,” provided a handy model, having been originally written for a reading of Samuel Beckett’s Company, whose nameless protagonist, a metafictional narrator, finds himself alone “on his back in the dark,” and seeks, unsuccessfully, to find a way out of his isolation without introducing other characters. With each failure, a movement of the Glass Quartet was performed (in the dark), permitting audience reflection on the music, text, or both. In that performance, the non-linear models of both writer and composer were ideally matched.
If Beckett’s Company took despair as the subject of its ruminations, Roth’s Everyman, whose narrator is also unnamed, deals directly with death, with traditional chronological narration interlaced with memory. Death is the stated theme for Schubert’s Quartet. Pärt’s work, always spiritual in nature when not religious, is easily at home in a funereal setting. And for the Glass work, already stamped with Beckett, lying on one’s back in the dark is not such a far cry from the grave. As to the three intercalary texts, Hoffman took Roth’s protagonist from his father’s funeral, to his father’s burial, to a postmortem conversation with a decidedly un-Shakespearian gravedigger.
Hoffman, one of the most talented actors of his generation, shines on screen, but absolutely electrifies on stage—and in a subdued, egoless manner that serves his material rather than himself. On Tuesday, Hoffman struck the right balance between a reading and a performance that captured characterization without breaking the actor’s steady, unhurried momentum that was well suited to Roth’s evocative but pitiless prose. The Takács Quartet, renowned for its interpretation of Romantic repertoire, seemed hesitant to commit to interpreting the music of 20th-century masters. While performances of Glass’s String Quartet and Pärt’s Fratres showed a rich range of color, a measured delivery—by turns dreary and oddly buoyant—revealed that the players had bought into the false notion that “minimal” music plays itself. Takács fared better with Pärt’s Summa, playing in their upper registers, masking the identity of their instruments and allowing the canon to unfold.
Takács played Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” with impassioned conviction. A bold but nuanced Allegro soared into the celebrated Andante, which was taken as a legato glide, hypnotic and heedless. The Scherzo whirled fearlessly into the final Presto, which, driven by the players with cruel precision, unison, and utter abandon to its finale, brought the hall to its feet.
Ben Finane
