Berlin 07-02-2010
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.
[reprinted with kind permission of ‘Intermezzo’ -http://intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/2010/01/daniel-barenboim-berlin-staatskapelle-beethoven-1.html
