It was, at first glance, an ordinary week in the life of an American orchestra. In late March, the Detroit Symphony gave three performances with the veteran conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste and a younger but well-travelled violinist, Augustin Hadelich. The program followed a familiar template: an opener (Sibelius’s “Pohjola’s Daughter”), a concerto (Britten’s Violin Concerto), and a symphony (Beethoven’s Seventh). Music critics, myself included, often object to this business-as-usual approach. Yet, having spent a couple of days with the orchestra, I wouldn’t call the proceedings routine. Detroit is no ordinary city; it is recovering from a grim past and undergoing a startling transformation. The orchestra, likewise, is rebounding: a bitter strike in 2010 and 2011 had many observers wondering whether it could survive. And Hadelich is a singularly gifted, characterful musician who has a flair for bringing older music into the present tense.
I met Hadelich for dinner before his first performance of the Britten, which took place the next morning, with a second one slated for that evening. The schedule was challenging for him, not so much technically as emotionally. “This is a great concerto—not a conventional virtuoso piece,” he told me. “The feelings in it are rather dark and complex. It was written at the end of the Spanish Civil War, as a kind of lament. I would say it is evening music—not something you want to wake up and play! So tomorrow will use up all my adrenaline. But I also like the idea of living and breathing Britten’s music all day, really exploring it.”
Hadelich, who turns thirty-four this month, is of German parentage but was raised on a farm in Tuscany. When he was a teen-ager, he suffered severe burns in a fire, but after a long recovery he was able to resume playing. He has lived in New York since attending Juilliard, and speaks elegant, lightly accented English. I first heard him at Marlboro Music, the summer gathering in Vermont, in 2008, when he was one of many young musicians receiving guidance from Marlboro’s elders. In the past decade, he has entered the upper echelon of the violin world; he has made a vital, intensely musical recording of Paganini’s Caprices, a peak of the repertory, for the Warner Classics label. Yet he still spends much of the year travelling to orchestras across America, revisiting cities where he received early attention: San Diego, Milwaukee, Madison, Fort Worth. “Some of my friends in Europe, or even in New York, are still quite snobby and don’t know how really good these orchestras are,” he said.
For Hadelich, touring is a rather monastic existence. “Ninety per cent of the time, I’m thinking about the performance, about Britten,” he said. “It’s almost as if I were pretending I’m not in a different city. If I’m not at the rehearsal, I’m at the hotel, practicing and going over notes from past performances. Whenever I play a piece, I make notes about what worked and what I might do differently.” What to eat, and when to eat, are important questions. “If it’s a morning concert, I eat the night before, making sure to get a lot of carbohydrates,” he said, gesturing toward his meal, a plate of spaghetti. “If it’s an evening concert, I have a big lunch. I need food in my system, but it’s not good if I’ve eaten right before I walk onstage.”
When Hadelich first came on the scene, he was noted for his pinpoint brilliance and for his sweet, cultured, almost old-fashioned tone. It was as if a Golden Age violinist had jumped out of the grooves of a 78-r.p.m. record. In recent years, he has been emphasizing more modern fare: the brooding concertos of Britten and Shostakovich; the avant-virtuoso works of György Ligeti and Thomas Adès. Hadelich told me, “I do not want to be—you say ‘pigeonholed,’ yes? If I have success in a certain city with Beethoven or Sibelius, and I am invited back, I might say, ‘What about Britten?’ Detroit is quite adventurous, and there was no problem with this. Plus”—he gave a knowing smile—“there is Beethoven on the program if anyone is afraid of Britten.”
Orchestra Hall, the Detroit Symphony’s home, is in the Midtown neighborhood, on Woodward Avenue. The hall was built for the orchestra in 1919, and has exceptional acoustics—a near-ideal balance of clarity and warmth. The ensemble had to abandon the hall at the end of the thirties, for financial reasons, at which point the building experienced a second heyday, as the Paradise Theatre, a famous jazz venue. By the seventies, the hall was on the verge of being demolished when Detroit Symphony musicians led a campaign to save and renovate it. In 1989, when the orchestra moved back in, the Cass Corridor, as the immediate area is known, was run-down, depopulated, and crime-ridden. The orchestra now finds itself at the heart of a bustling hipster enclave, with a Whole Foods across the street and a pour-over coffee place up the block.
Less than a decade ago, the Detroit musicians seemed implacably at odds with the management, which had proposed a thirty-per-cent pay cut. The upbeat temperament of Leonard Slatkin, who has been the orchestra’s music director since 2008, helped heal these internal wounds. He will step down at the end of this season; the search for a successor is ongoing. After the labor crisis, musicians and management found common ground in a mission to reconnect with the city. They anointed themselves the “most accessible orchestra on the planet,” and have gone some ways toward justifying that superlative. Tickets are cheaper than at other orchestras; my press seat, on the left orchestra aisle, would have cost twenty-five dollars. Neighborhood concerts reach into underserved communities. Most strikingly, the Detroit offers free Webcasts of its concerts—an initiative that seems obvious but that few other orchestras have tried. (The Berlin Philharmonic has its Digital Concert Hall service, but access costs a hundred and forty-nine euros a year.) Anne Parsons, the Detroit’s president and C.E.O., told me, “We’ve gone from three thousand viewers on average to around seventy-five hundred—in one case, thirty-five thousand. It’s brought great young musicians to us—they can see what we’re doing. I was sure that, by now, everyone else would be doing it. I’ve stopped wondering and haven’t looked back.”
Erik Rönmark, the orchestra’s general manager and vice-president, has helped to forge its artistic vision. He is a Swedish-born saxophonist who co-founded the ensemble New Music Detroit. He has pressed for more new music and for a stronger representation of female and nonwhite composers and conductors. The 2018-19 season includes twelve living composers, five of them women; two major symphonic pieces, John Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean” and Andrew Norman’s “Play,” are featured. There is no lack of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler, but Detroit’s commitment to new music places it in the vanguard, well ahead of its wealthier counterparts in Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Detroit’s resurgence has yet to do much for its arts journalism: I was the only critic in attendance at these concerts. Mark Stryker, the longtime classical and jazz critic of the Detroit Free Press, took a buyout last year, and no one else regularly reviews classical events. This is a sad state of affairs, since the orchestra’s work deserves to be chronicled. More than thirty musicians have joined the ensemble since the strike, regenerating its sound. Wei Yu, the principal cellist, formerly of the New York Philharmonic, filled the hall with mournful beauty at the start of the Sibelius. The Beethoven, under Saraste’s decisive direction, had a gritty punch.
The main event was, however, Hadelich’s performance of the Britten concerto. Dressed in black with an upturned collar, the violinist looked a bit like a young officer in a period film, about to go off to war. The solo part is ferociously demanding, but not necessarily in a way that conveys fireworks to the audience. “For some reason, Britten decided to throw in every extended technique he could think of,” Hadelich told me. “Double-stops everywhere, double-stop harmonics, lots of octaves, left-hand pizzicato. Parts of the second movement are only borderline playable. At the end of the piece, he seems to want you to stay on the G string even when the line goes extremely high.”
Over three performances—I saw the first two in the hall, the last on the Webcast—Hadelich plumbed the work’s difficulties and ambiguities, finding subtly different solutions each time. At the morning show, Saraste kept to a fairly strict tempo, limiting Hadelich’s ability to tug at Britten’s free-floating lines; yet the second movement had an anxious, sweaty force. That evening, a more languid atmosphere prevailed in the orchestra, allowing Hadelich to savor the Spanish rhythms that course through the score. To judge from the Webcast, the final rendition was the most polished in the series, but each had its virtues. Hadelich said, “I’m aiming at consistency in technical terms, but, when the music calls for you to be free and rhapsodic, it can’t be the same each night.”
At all three performances, the ending of the Britten had a darkly enchanting effect. Over thirty-three slow bars, Hadelich and the orchestra attempt to find their way to a hopeful closing chord of D major. Hadelich eventually lands on F-sharp, the clinching note of the D-major triad, but, by the time the orchestra has joined him there, he seems to have lost faith in that note, and keeps falling back to F-natural. Ultimately, he trills between the two notes while winds and brass hold the bare fifth D-A. All fade to silence. It is impossible not to think about the fact that Britten finished the concerto in the summer of 1939, as the world trembled on the edge of catastrophe.
For an encore, Hadelich performed the Sarabande from Bach’s D-minor Partita. “After such an ending, you couldn’t play, say, Paganini,” he later told me. “The Sarabande is one of the saddest pieces I know, and there is the connection with the key of D.” In this pairing, Bach supplies the resolution that Britten withholds: for now, the major key remains out of reach. ♦
