Berlin  14-02-2010

If one goes by the outstanding reviews from London’s newspaper critics, – notorious for their finicky and miserly reviews -then Barenboim and the Staatskapelle orchestra may well consider this London outing an impressive success.

 In his last appearance in London, two years ago Barenboim played all of the Beethoven’s piano sonatas – back to back in eight concerts – considered by many as London’s classical music event of the decade.

This year Barenboim has even dragged along his Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra and played all of the five Beethoven piano concertos – for which all tickets have been sold out months ago.

Compared to playing a marathon of all the Beethoven sonatas , the Beethoven concertos are less demanding works for the pianist- even when combined with conducting the orchestra at the same time.

However if we remember that Beethoven was himself -above all else a pianist writing for the piano – these works remain very special and personal show pieces.

They are a defining moment in any pianist’s career -  they could be considered the apex of works in the  ‘piano + orchestra’ genre.

The ‘Guardian’ newspaper wrote:

“If the first of Daniel Barenboim’s Festival Hall concerts juxtaposing Beethoven’s five piano concertos with orchestral -music by Schoenberg was ¬memorable, then the second was even more ¬remarkable. The pairing was the string-orchestra version of Verklärte Nacht with the fifth concerto, the Emperor, and both performances were charged with a special, insistent urgency. Barenboim’s approach to ¬conducting has always owed much to Wilhelm Furtwängler, and this surging, sculpted performance of a work that ¬Furtwängler did conduct, though apparently only in its original string sextet form, was a perfect example of that influence. The febrile intensity of Wagner’s ¬Tristan und Isolde seemed to be its starting point, but Barenboim ratcheted that up still further. The strings of the ¬Berlin ¬Staatskapelle are a wonderfully ¬responsive unit, and with their eight double basses arrayed in a line across the back of the platform, the sound was all-enveloping, weighty yet ¬buoyant. In the Emperor, too, the ¬orchestral playing was exceptional, always alert and tinglingly vivid. Barenboim set off with tremendous elan in the ¬opening piano solo, demonstrating that the ¬occasional wrong note wasn’t going to deter him from a performance of ¬bristling immediacy. In fact, the splashes were more than occasional, but that hardly registered when the -performance as a whole had such a sense of rightness and occasion, and when there were passages of such serene, silvered beauty to more than compensate for the untidy corners. Barenboim’s Beethoven, warts and all, you sense, gets its priorities right.”

The music critic of ‘The Telegraph’, Ivan Hewett wrote:

“This was day three of Barenboim and the Staatskapelle’s traversal of all five Beethoven concertos, which brought a fresh challenge. If you’re playing and conducting all five in four nights, there must be one night when you do two in one evening. Barenboim brought as much care to the untangling of Schoenberg’s dense score as he has on previous nights, and the results often had an entrancing beauty. The second movement in particular was suffused with an evening glow which was tender and regretful at once. When it came to the nightmare scenes, the orchestra seemed slower to respond to Barenboim’s urgent gestures, and in the closing pages of the first piece, things actually came adrift. One got the sense that this music, even though now a century old, is still alien territory for them. This was after all an East German orchestra not so long ago, and “decadent modern music” was not welcome there. Beethoven, on the other hand was a hero for the Communist East, and his music is absolutely in the orchestra’s blood. It’s in Barenboim’s too, of course, though there have been moments in the previous two concerts when I doubted if that was still true. But on this occasion Barenboim’s own pianistic brilliance seemed to be restored. The dancing figuration in the first movement of the Second Concerto was electrically exact, and the delicate colouring of the slow movement revealed the poetry lurking there. As for the Fourth, Barenboim found just the right touch for that magical opening. Throughout, all the different aspects of this most subtle of Beethoven’s concertos – gruff humour, brilliance, and pathos – were held in ideal balance. “

Andrew Clark writing in the ‘Financial Times’ wrote;

“Barenboim fielded an orchestra of roughly the same size. It played with a softer edge, a more blended sound – that of a central European ensemble playing modern instruments – but the performance bore the hallmark of greatness, if only because of Barenboim’s willingness to take risks. In his rapt opening bars he opened the audience’s ears; then he let the music fly, not just in his own quasi-improvisatory flourishes at the keyboard but also in the way he and his orchestra explored the music’s expressive contrasts. By generating a lot of flexibility within a given tempo, he created a sense of surprise. However well-worn the music, it never sounded predictable.

 Edward Seckerson of ‘The Independent’ wrote:

“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 Pelleas & Melisande 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.”