Royal Festival Hall
Piano Sonata in A minor, D
537
Piano Sonata in A major, D
664
Piano
Sonata in A major, D 959
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
The
excitement concerning Daniel Barenboim new piano did not necessarily augur
well. A great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written before this first of
four Schubert recitals. ‘The first new piano since XXXX’ was a common theme: a
claim so misleading as to merit no further discussion. Moreover, whilst there
is certainly no need to scorn possible technological developments, the last
thing we want is for piano recitals to become more like their organ
counterparts, players and audiences more interested in the instrument than in
what is being played and how. I was certainly taken aback by the tone of the
instrument, but not, I am afraid, in a good way. It struck me – and it is, of
course, not always easy or even possible to distinguish between instrument and
performance – as having managed to combine some of the less attractive features
of a not entirely modern Steinway with those of a mid-nineteenth-century Erard.
Barenboim has apparently extolled the virtues of different registers having
more truly different characters: perhaps again, one might think more of
different organ registrations. For me, however, there was far more in the way
of loss in the apparent inability of different ranges of the keyboard to cohere
as a single instrument – and still more so, in their tonal stridency,
especially when playing forte or
louder. There was, I grant, considerable clarity, often strikingly so; but is
that one’s greatest priority for Schubert? I felt a little as I had when
hearing Pierre-Laurent
Aimard playing The Art of Fugue;
it may have been interesting conceptually, but I did not like it very much. I should happily have sacrificed some of that
clarity for the warmth of a Bösendorfer, for me a far more satisfactory
instrument in this and much other repertoire than a Steinway. On the other
hand(s), maybe Barenboim needed to become more accustomed to his instrument; or
maybe I was just reacting negatively to the shock of the new (which, frankly,
did not sound very new at all).
My reaction
to Aimard’s concert, however, had been a reaction to the performance, not to
the instrument. If Barenboim’s performances had been more compelling, less
patchy, I am sure the matter of the instrument, whether for good or for ill,
would have assumed lesser importance. The opening A minor Sonata is a very
difficult work to bring off; Barenboim, greatly to my surprise, did not come
close to doing so. The strange swings of mood, curtailments of phrases, the
necessary efforts to bring the notes together into a coherent whole – perhaps not
unlike the keys on the new or any instrument? – can, in the right hands, make
one think, as so often with Schubert, of Webern. Not here: offhand, I cannot recall
so charmless, almost literalist – albeit with strange interventions from time
to time – performance from Barenboim. There was, one might argue, a laudable
refusal to sentimentalise, to consign Schubert to the dubious clutches of the Biedermeier;
but what was there beyond that? If I contrasted the performance with one I
heard from him a few years ago of Mozart’s great sonata in the same key,
admittedly a far superior work, then the drama, the poise, the beauty, the
anger, all those and many other qualities were not only absent but had no
evident replacements. It was, frankly, an ordeal, rendered all the more so by
the harshness of the instrument.
The ‘little’
A major Sonata, D 664, fared better. Barenboim and his piano seemed better
attuned to moments of hushed intimacy; and, to be fair, the passages in the
higher treble, at whatever level of the dynamic range, showed capacity to
captivate, to draw one in. There was much, however, that was so brusque as to
sound merely perverse. Moreover, it was not really until the third movement that
Barenboim’s greatest inheritance from Furtwängler, his generally striking
ability to hear and to communicate the longest of musical lines, was evident.
Weirdly, I felt as though I had been hearing a pianist more influenced by the
likes of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. How I had longed for Sviotoslav Richter!
Parts of
the late A major Sonata, D 959, impressed, although it was difficult to avoid
the suspicion that Barenboim wished he were playing Beethoven. Heavenly lengths
threatened to seem merely meandering. Technical difficulties were a little too
numerous too. There were moments of high, if not necessarily appropriate, drama,
and splendid contrast – the ending of the first movement, for instance – but
the integrative mastery on display in his recent performance of Schubert’s
‘Great’ C major Symphony was, to my ears, strangely absent. Oddest of all
was the slow movement, in which time seemed to stand still, but not in that
magically ‘suspended’ way that often comes to mind in Schubert. Instead, lines
led nowhere, and the music ground almost to a halt. The final two movements
sounded relatively conventional, but some way short of inspired. It is
certainly not a matter of Barenboim having no feeling for Schubert; I have
heard him give wonderful performances, whether as conductor, collaborative
pianist, or soloist.
For whatever reason, however, tonight was not the night. An audience that had
cheered him to the rafters before he had played a single note begged to differ,
but I was far from the only dissenter. And this is a musician I admire greatly.
