Even more than I’ve missed seeing movies in theatres during the pandemic, I’ve missed concerts; though I attend them only rarely, they’re among the most memorable events of my year. That’s why, as soon as I got word of an event called “Beethoven for One,” a series of live musical performances to celebrate the composer’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, which were designed to meet New York City’s required precautions, I signed up. The program, held at the cultural space 1014 (formerly known as the Goethe-Institut), a grand converted town house on Fifth Avenue, ran from November 8th to the 15th, and involved performances of Beethoven’s string quartets—ten minutes at a time—for one person, couple, or household (I attended with my wife). The anticipated pleasure turned out to be a shock: what I expected was a heartfelt yet minor substitute for the usual concert-hall experience; what I got was an overwhelming new kind of concert, in some ways superior to the old one.
Arriving at the specified fifteen minutes before our sign-up time, my wife and I were greeted by a receptionist in the otherwise empty lobby; we were required to wear masks, use hand sanitizer, and sign a health form (with our phone number, for contact tracing). A few minutes later, another spectator came down the staircase and we were sent upstairs to a waiting room, across a wide hallway from the closed doors of the concert space, where other listeners were about to start their ten-minute concert. The usher informed us that we’d be able to listen to those ten minutes of music, too, albeit at a distance and through the closed doors. That overhearing provided the day’s first glorious musical jolt: the quartet played the first movement of Beethoven’s quartet, Op. 59, No. 1, which, even in muffled form, rang out both resonantly and spikily, as if its harmonies had been swapped out for abrasive dissonances.
At the movement’s end, a family of four was guided out of the concert space and we were led into it—a small, ornately wood-panelled library-like space, with leaded windows, that’s about the size of a large living room. The musicians (eight took part in the performances throughout the week; the quartet we saw featured the violinists Emily Smith and Michelle Ross, the violist Melissa Reardon, and the cellist Jia Kim, the organizer of the series) were arrayed in two rows, about twelve to sixteen feet from us, and they, too, were wearing masks. Kim introduced the piece we were about to hear—the second movement of the same quartet, which she described lovingly as a musical “conversation” between the four instruments—and that sense of a conversation emerged from the start.
The movement opens with a brief cello solo, and the grain of the instrument was so pronounced, in that tight and reverberant space, that it seemed like a texture palpable to the hand. As the other instruments entered, it became clear that the quartet’s musical ideas befit the setting: where, so often, in a large hall or even a recording, the blend of a quartet comes to the fore, here each voice was distinct. The musicians emphasized the diversity within the piece’s unity, and heightened the dramatic silences that separated phrases, the abrupt shifts of tone, and—above all—the mighty intensity of the climaxes. The players veered between suavely beautiful sounds and furiously slashing ones; when the music got loud, it did so with a hectic energy that ricocheted like shots off the wood panels. The Beethoven whom this unnamed string quartet imagined and delivered was no distant forebear but a radical contemporary whose daring originality remained undiminished.
I’ve heard Beethoven performed in large and famous concert halls by some of the great quartets of the era (including the Juilliard, the Emerson, and the Takács); none came close to delivering the jagged immediacy and breathtaking intimacy of Saturday afternoon’s quartet. The difference is in the coalescence of interpretation and setting. Performing in Carnegie Hall is like performing a play on Broadway; it demands an elaborate technique, a big-time craft, to put a quartet’s sound over and up to the balcony in a huge hall. By contrast, the “Beethoven for One” quartet’s playing felt more like a movie performance: in the small, domestic-sized room and with the camera-like intimacy of our seating arrangement, the greatness of these not-yet-famous musicians was revealed and exalted in closeup, in a way that might not have been as immediately apparent in a larger setting. (There’s a reason that it’s called chamber music—a small space is an ideal frame for the music’s visceral power.)
What’s more, the private aspect of the concert—the direct and exclusive mutual connection between musicians and listeners, undiluted by any wider audience—inspired awe and reverence without ritual. If the formality and the reserve, the pomp and the ceremony of the concert world is off-putting to many would-be concertgoers, the sort of invigorating experience that my wife and I had on Saturday could serve as a template for shaking preconceptions regarding classical music (both music of the past and newly composed music). For me, “Beethoven for One” stands as an ideal and a corrective to the usual run of classical concerts, even after they’re able to resume.
