I never really thought very much about age until I hit the “three-quarters mark” of 75 in July of 2021. By that time I had invested fourteen years in writing regularly about the nature of music and the relationship between performance and marks on paper. Over the course of what is now closer to fifteen years, I have never given very much thought to the significance of age, whether it applies to composers or performers. Mind you, there are composers whose work often reflects explicitly on aging, Richard Strauss being one of the most familiar of them. However, perhaps because of my intellectual background in abstract mathematics, I find myself drawing upon biography only when discussing a relatively small number of composers and an even smaller number of performers.
Violinist María Dueñas (photograph probably taken in her teens, from an October 3, 2019 article on this site)
This morning I brought that context to bear while reading an article by Joshua Kosman entitled “Young musicians keep showing up on concert stages. It’s not clear they’re ready,” which was uploaded to the San Francisco Chronicle Web site yesterday and will probably not appear on a printed page prior to this coming Sunday’s “pink section” Datebook. That title serves as a thesis statement, which is defended through three “case studies.” The first of these is the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, followed by the Spanish violinist María Dueñas, who made her debut with the San Francisco Symphony at the age of sixteen in 2019. The final “case” was Alma Deutscher, who composed a full-length Cinderella opera at the age of ten (subsequently expanding and strengthening her work) and conducted its Bay Area premiere by Opera San José this past October.
As I worked my way through the article, I found myself consulting my own impressions of both Mäkelä and Dueñas. (I neither experienced nor read about the Cinderella performance.) Where Dueñas was concerned, I did, indeed, mention her age in my first paragraph. However, I was less interested in her age and more focused on her partnership with her conductor, Marek Janowski; and my primary concern was the risk that the performance would invoke (as I put it) “a here-we-go-again reaction” from “listeners that could probably play back Mendelssohn’s score in their sleep.” The good news was that both conductor and soloist appreciated that risk and managed to convey what I called “a perspective of underlying tension” that brought stimulating freshness to the performance. This was clearly a joint effort, whose compelling results probably involved Janowski willing to respect and realize Dueñas’ point of view, thus spanning the separation between their respective ages.
Mäkelä, on the other hand, was about a decade younger than his concerto soloist, the violinist Vilde Frang. My guess is that he was less interested in her youth than in how the two of them could agree on how to perform Alban Berg’s violin concerto, providing a compelling account of both the narrative behind the dedication (“To the memory of an angel”) and the many technical challenges for both soloist and ensemble in the score. The result was that I came away with a more informed appreciation of the rich complexity of the score than I had managed to grasp through any previous concert performances or recordings. In other words I had invested so many cerebral cycles in negotiating the act of listening that I had none to spare for matters of age!
The same could be said of the rest of the program that Mäkelä had prepared. This began with Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú negro,” which Mäkelä had performed with many other ensembles in the past. This was an SFS premiere offering that made for a highly imaginative listening experience. The program then concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 93 (tenth) symphony in E minor.
This was a “first contact” experience for me, having previously listened to this work only through recordings. Those familiar with the Shostakovich canon probably know his disposition for repetition as a source of tension. This figured significantly in his “rhetorical toolbox;” and Mäkelä knew how to deliver that rhetoric without succumbing to tedium. As was the case with the Berg concerto, that delivery left me with little attention to devote to the conductor’s age.
The crux of Kosman’s argument seems to hinge on the danger of “mistaking skill for understanding, especially when that skill is so wildly out of proportion to age.” On the basis of how I documented the performances by both Dueñas and Mäkelä, I would not accuse either of them of lacking understanding. Indeed, where the concertos were concerned, what was most important was the ability to establish a shared understanding. I would argue that this capacity for sharing signifies far more than what any calendar tells us about the performers.
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