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I’d like to say I’m finally catching up on sleep after NCMF, but I’m writing this in a jet-lagged haze from Austria. After a few days in England, I’m visiting my daughter, Alessandra, who is studying viola in Vienna. We went to see Mahler 1 on Saturday at the Musikverein and the concert was sold out. It is unusual to be somewhere where classical music is the cultural default. Convenience stores have life-size cardboard cut-outs of Mozart, there is a brick-and-mortar classical CD store downtown (yes, compact disks, remember those?), and the city cemetery boasts the final resting places for Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Johann Strauss II. Of course, Beethoven is here too, and at his request, Schubert right there next to his hero. Mozart is also here somewhere but the exact location is lost to time.

I used this trip as an opportunity to drop off Alessandra’s newly-acquired viola d’amore, bought in Philadelphia. In a satisfying cosmic alignment, it was made in Vienna in 1801 by Michael Ignaz Stadlmann, considered the finest from a long line of Viennese luthiers. Alessandra will be back in the States in December to give this instrument a test drive on the NCMF Winter Baroque concert on December 22^nd. (More on that in a later post – save the date!)

According to an Austrian study in 2007 (admittedly, a bit outdated), 29% of people in Vienna attend classical concerts regularly.  There are more orchestras in town than one can count, including “The Vegetable Orchestra” (Das erste Wiener Gemüseorchester) which performs exclusively on instruments made entirely from fresh vegetables. The roster of artists lists ten musicians and one cook, which makes sense when you think about it.

All this culture somehow makes me want to lower the shades and curl up under a blanket with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and binge-watch Battlestar Galactica. But it also got me thinking about concerts – not ones I’ve played, but ones I have attended. Here are the top five that jumped out at me, in no particular order.

‍Brentano String Quartet at New York University
The first time I heard Webern’s “Five Pieces for string quartet” was with the Brentano Quartet at NYU. Like overhearing the fully-formed language of some alien race, these gnomic utterances left me suddenly aware of a completely new way that music could sound.

They also performed Beethoven’s Opus 18, Number 4 in C Minor. A standard work used to introduce students to quartet playing, they made this old chestnut sound as fresh as if the ink were still wet on the page. Decades later, the Brentano continues to be, in my opinion, an American national treasure, and one of the greatest ensembles ever to grace a concert stage.

‍Tokyo String Quartet at Carnegie Hall
The Tokyo quartet gave their final concert with first violinist Peter Oundjian in 1995 in Carnegie. The four players were a tightly knit unit and also friends and it was heartbreaking for them to lose Oundjian due to focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. At the time, I was studying with the Tokyo’s violist, Kazu Isomura, and felt a deep personal bond with the group. They performed the Ravel Quartet beautifully, and then, as an encore, did the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s late quartet, Opus 130. One of the tenderest of Beethoven’s masterful slow movements, these four great artists played their hearts out as tears streamed down their faces.

‍Gerry Walther at Davies Symphony Hall
When I was studying in the chamber music program in San Francisco, the principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony (who went on to join the Takács quartet) was Geraldine Walther, a class-act, for sure. I bought super-cheap student tickets to see her do Walton concerto and sat at the very top of Davies, back to the wall, but could hear her beautiful golden viola as clear as day. The next night, I splurged and got tickets in the front row directly at her feet. Up close, she played with a rough, gritty tone, right by the bridge, almost crunching the notes out. This was necessary in order to fill a hall of that size and to project to the students up in nose-bleed territory. It was a valuable lesson in tone-making.

‍Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center
Returning to New York after school, I always rushed to buy tickets when I heard that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948 – 1997), the great master of qawwali, was coming to town. Qawwali is Sufi mystical music and wondrous things happened at his concerts. Nusrat, the greatest practitioner of the art, could send a room of thousands into a state of ecstatic reverie. The tension in the audience was palpable as members of his troupe came out and started singing. After about ten minutes, a mountain of a man limped on stage and a huge cheer erupted from the audience. The concert went on for hours, but you didn’t want it to end. People went into trances, standing up, dancing and twirling in circles, running up to the stage and throwing money at Nusrat.

In Sufism, the love between a man and a woman is seen as a manifestation of love for god. Consequently, their devotional music has a powerful aphrodisiac quality. One doesn’t generally associate sexual energy with religious music but, I tell you, the temperature went up noticeably in that room when Nusrat started to sing. Tully Hall was unrecognizable that night.

‍Bylsma playing solo Bach
It isn’t one specific concert I remember hearing baroque cellist Anner Bylsma (1934 – 2019) play solo Bach as much as the cumulative wonder at hearing him play it many times. Each performance was completely different from the previous time I’d heard him play based on – what? - time of day, location, what he had for dinner, the azimuth of Saturn compared to Venus? His performances had a rude life about them, tapping into the spirit of Baroque improvisation. This quirky Dutch man treated these six suites not as fussy museum pieces but music to get up and dance to while wearing hobnailed boots covered in cow manure.  

‍BONUS: Harpist in a piazza in San Gimignano
I’d planned on limiting this to just five but can’t resist one more. As a student, I spent a semester in Florence, Italy where I purchased a racing bicycle, the first large expense I’d ever made. It cost what seemed a small fortune back then: £550,000 Italian Lira (around $450). One weekend, I biked 60 miles from Florence to San Gimignano, checked in, and went foraging for food. Boxed pizza in hand, I settled in a small piazza and sat for hours listening to a street-musician harpist, the music echoing off thousand-year-old stone walls. It was the right music in the right place at the right time and I’ll always treasure that feeling of happiness and contentment.

I’d love to hear some of your own favorite musical experiences. Email directly back to this post and it will get to me (eventually). Maybe I’ll put some into a dedicated post. It could be a fiddler in a pub, or a jazz pianist tucked away in a corner of a restaurant, or seeing The Ring at Bayreuth. I’ve never been to a stadium show but it must be thrilling to be swept up with thousands of people. Any “Swifties” in Newburyport?

David Yang, Artistic Director