Intermezzo

Beethovenfest Bonn - Beethoven and more

The Ring is everywhere. You cannot escape the Ring.

Leafy Bonn is the city of Beethoven, whose presence registers discreetly everywhere. The formal side is the bronze monument in the central square and the Beethovenhaus birthplace museum. But while Bonn hasn't yet stooped to Salzburg/Mozart levels of commercialisation, there's also tasteful and presumably officially-sanctioned graffiti, enterprising shop window displays, even marzipan figurines. Still Wagner manages to get a look in too, as he so often does.

Wiener über Paris

Wiener Philharmoniker / Christian Thielemann - Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Paris, 23-28 November

Although London usually hosts at least one (and often three or four) high-quality classical concerts every single night, for some reason it's not on every orchestra's must-visit list.

Take the Vienna Philharmonic's full Beethoven symphony series with Christian Thielemann, recently immortalised on DVD (and also broadcast over the next few weeks on ORF). They travelled from Vienna to Paris last week, with Berlin dates to come - but nothing for us. 

Barenboim teaches London a lesson - Beethoven Concertos 4

Berlin Staatskapelle / Daniel Barenboim - Royal Festival Hall, 1 February 2010

And so Daniel Barenboim's brief London residency ended not with a bang but a lecture. He joked, "I'm not going to talk for long because I don't want you to tell friends tomorrow 'I heard Daniel Barenboim last night' and for them to reply 'Really, what did he say?'." 

In the end, his introduction to Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra took longer than the work itself, with the Berlin Staatskapelle there to illustrate musically the many appearances of the principal B-A-C-H (B flat, A, C, B natural) theme. Barenboim's talk certainly clarified the structural basis of the work, but the impact was dimmed by an ingratiating and even apologetic tone that insinuated it's OK to find Schoenberg's music ugly and difficult.

A shame because the clarity and urgency of the performance itself, when it came, spoke for itself. It was enough to win anyone over. But Barenboim couldn't stop himself apologising for Schoenberg yet again before launching into a Strauss encore, Unter Donner und Blitz. Barenboim's talks are generally illuminating, and I'd been looking forward to this one, but in retrospect I'd have enjoyed the evening more if he'd kept his gob shut.

At least Barenboim didn't feel any need to build up Beethoven by knocking him down. In the third piano concerto he found grace where others find stolidity, heroism where others find pomp. A work that can sound routine and declamatory came alive. A brief rehearsal extract can be heard here (terrible sound quality I'm afraid, but that's the BBC for you).

 

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Barenboim's secret plot revealed - Beethoven Concertos 3

Berlin Staatskapelle / Daniel Barenboim - Royal Festival Hall, 1 February 2010

Although Daniel Barenboim's flying visit to London has been billed as a Beethoven series, it is becoming ever clearer that the support act lies at the heart of his programming decisions. His four Schoenberg selections - tonight the Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16 - trace the composer's journey from high romanticism to serialism in a not-quite chronological but musically intelligent order. The Beethoven concertos have simply been draped around them. In excluding Schoenberg's immediate forebears and descendants from the programmes, Barenboim is allowing the composer's development to speak for itself.

Five Orchestral Pieces lies at the heart of this exercise, at the critical juncture between Schoenberg's early and later styles and at the very limits of tonality. The structural integrity of Barenboim's reading made it accessible and his meticulous eye for detail and balance brought its rich and complex textures alive. Scoreless, as he has been for the entire series, Barenboim seemed to inhabit the work as much as conduct it.

Two of Beethoven's concertos flanked it. No.2, the earliest of the bunch, is in many respects the least interesting - certainly the least purely 'Beethovien'. But an extraordinary, extended and harmonically daring first movement cadenza (presumably Barenboim's own) convincingly hitched its classical simplicity to the world of the later Beethoven, capping a bright, exhilirating performance.

No.4 ended the evening. Despite a similar level of technical difficulty, here Barenboim was much more clearly in control than he had been with the previous evening's Emperor Concerto. The odd finger slip disappeared into the texture of the piece, played by Barenboim with a heroic swagger that emphasised its similarities of form to the later work. The Berlin Staatskapelle were here at their peak, their enthusiasm for the dancing rhythms and flourishes so infectious that the standing ovation seemed an inevitable reaction to the performance and not, for once, just its guiding personality.

 

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Barenboim's second coming - Beethoven Concertos 2

Berlin Staatskapelle / Daniel Barenboim - Royal Festival Hall, 31 January 2010

 

The second of Daniel Barenboim's four Beethoven concerts at the Royal Festival Hall was capped with a near-unanimous standing ovation. But what exactly was it acknowledging? Probably Barenboim's quasi-superstar status as much as the performance itself, but the fact is that the former enabled the latter - a brave, bold and often risky assault on the daunting Emperor Concerto that no other performer on earth could have got away with.

Fistfuls of misplaced notes rendered the bravura opening recognisable only by rhythm; pedal abuse couldn't quite smooth over jagged runs and gap-toothed arpeggios; a memory lapse at the start of the final movement almost brought the whole thing crashing to a halt.  But who cared whether Barenboim could play all the right notes in the right order in a performance this rivetingly alive?

Here and there the Berlin Staatskapelle dutifully reproduced a few carefully-tutored corners pencilled into their scores. Strings dropped to a whisper or swelled to a neatly arced crescendo, just so. But mostly they, like Barenboim, were flying by the seat of their pants, flexing with his unpredictable rubato, snapping crisply to his abrupt tempo shifts. Intuitive though their mutual understanding was, it sometimes seemed the orchestra were hanging on in there in spite of Barenboim's presence rather than because of it. Playing and conducting at the same time is not easy, demonstrably so in this case. Barenboim's struggle was heroic and it rescaled this titanic and sometimes bombastic work down to human dimensions.

The first half's precisely weighted and balanced Verklärte Nacht was a well-judged counterpoise. The programming for this series may look simple, but it's anything but thrown together. Carefully spun-out phrases and neatly bound forms made sense of the work's wilder details. Nothing was arbitrary. The responsive Berlin Staatskapelle strings offered colour and substance to Barenboim's clear and compellling narrative.If it wasn't quite as transporting an experience as the previous night's Pelléas, that's probably in the nature of the work itself.

standing ovation:

 

on your box soon? One of two TV cameras:

Barenboim's back in town - Beethoven Concertos 1

Berlin Staatskapelle / Daniel Barenboim - Royal Festival Hall, 29 January 2010

It's telling that, in contrast to normal billing etiquette, the conductor/soloist's name appears above (and in some cases, without) the orchestra's for this series of four concerts. Yes, Daniel Barenboim is back in town, and those guys hanging around behind him are his home orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle.

In his last appearance in London, two years ago, he of course summited that pianistic Everest, all of Beethoven's piano sonatas, back to back (I was there for all them). The press are clearly still sore at having missed out on 'the classical music event of the decade' (not one of the critics managed all eight concerts, whose legend-worthy status only emerged halfway through the series). So they've been desperately pimping this year's Barenboimathon, the five Beethoven piano concertos, despite the fact that tickets sold out months ago and anyone lucky enough to have one hardly needs any further persuading.

But there's no denying that compared to the sonatas, this year's task is of more Ben Nevis-like proportions. Less virtuosic, less physically demanding and most would say artistically lesser works, they are nevertheless a challenge, particularly when combined with conducting the orchestra. Barenboim could have completed his programmes with anything, but with capacity audiences, press tonguebaths, Radio 3 broadcasts and a rumoured 'making of' BBC documentary in the works he has bravely and delightfully decided a dose of Schoenberg is what the atonality-averse British public needs.

But it was Beethoven he chose to begin with, and though he's not performing the concertos in publication order, he started with No.1. Seated at a lidless grand, his back to the audience, his increasingly minimal conducting style was reduced to few airy arm-waves in between the keyboard passages. But it was clear from the cohesion of the orchestra that the concerto had been well-rehearsed, with a few extreme dynamic shifts impeccably and unanimously executed, and Barenboim's teasing rubato readily accommodated. Much of the physical direction in fact came from the orchestra's gesticulating concertmaster. The modestly-sized orchestra seemed to respond to Barenboim on a more intuitive, chamber-like level, conversing in purely musical terms.

Barenboim's hands-on Beethoven expertise, gained as soloist, chamber musician and conductor, is unrivalled. One of the greatest revelations afforded by his sonata series was his considered contextual placing of each sonata within the composer's body of work as a whole. He showed the sonatas not just as self-contained pieces, but in relation to each other.

That same approach was immediately apparent in the first concerto, played with a throwaway formal clarity that belied its classical roots, not quite Mozartian, though with no more than a hint of the romantic freedoms Beethoven was yet to take. Even the abrupt harmonic gear changes had a propriety which suggested playful experiment more than iconoclasm. I didn't recognise the first movement's cadenza, which leads me to believe it might be Barenboim's own - he certainly played it with a precision he couldn't always achieve in the scored sections.

The greater achievement of the evening though was the second half's Pelléas et Mélisande, labelled a tone poem but in reality a voiceless opera. Barenboim's beloved Schoenberg, here in his unscary post-Brahmsian chromaticist clothes, was displayed as a storyteller of powerful yet economical means. The massively enlarged orchestra, almost bursting off the stage, provided a dense, bottomless thicket of sound, through which the keening winds and muted brass wove. Barenboim's heavy deliberate tread, filigreed with telling detail, underlined the inexorability of the lovers' fate. The Berlin Staatskapelle, not the tidiest of players but certainly amongst the most committed and purely musical, responded as one.