Grosses Festspielhaus
Schubert:
Symphony no.8 in B minor,
D 759, ‘Unfinished’
Tchaikovsky:
Piano Concerto no.1 in
B-flat minor, op.23
Lutosławski:
Concerto for Orchestra
Martha Argerich (piano)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
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| Image: Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli |
Most likely our greatest living Schubert
conductor, Daniel Barenboim lent credence to the claim in this
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performance of the Unfinished, the best I can recall since Bernard
Haitink and the LSO ten years ago – and with the benefit of a far superior hall
and acoustic to the Barbican, let alone the Royal Albert Hall, where Barenboim
and his musicians had given the same programme a couple of nights earlier.
Opening truly de profundis – an orchestra
with a string section of this size truly helps here – and febrile, generative,
it was clear from the outset that this would be special. This, it seemed, was
music that had always been – waiting, Schopenhauer-like, to be voiced. Teeming
with melody, ever grounded in harmony, it was music that both could not wait,
yet must, until the abyss: the onset of the development section. Dark, rich
strings and brings, offset by forest woodwind took us by the hand, grabbed us
by the scruff of the neck: they did what was necessary, as did Schubert. Battle
royal ensued, the intensity such as to have thoughts of Furtwängler well-nigh
inescapable. Intimations of Wagner were doubtless not unrelated. In the recapitulation,
all had been changed – forever. That is what happens when music, when
music-making, matters. We had seen death, but this was no place to be maudlin,
for we had looked it, ‘whatever ‘it’ may be, in the face. The coda’s grave
beauty told us all we needed to know. Balance and progression were felt, experienced in the second movement. Its
debts to Haydn were rendered lovingly clear: rusticity, yes, but also method, a
method that helped render Schubert’s farsighted Romanticism all the more
remarkable and poignant, not least in woodwind solos and string responses. It
was perhaps, though, the transitions that told us most, not least those that
might have seemed ‘mere’ silence on the page. Fernhören, then, as Furtwängler would have put it, but also Fernspielen.
Martha Argerich joined the
orchestra for Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. These players, Barenboim too,
have a lengthy and distinguished track record in Tchaikovsky’s music, which
showed in the assured swagger of the opening, to which those piano chords were the only possible response. The depth of
tone on which Argerich could draw, and did, was as remarkable as ever, likewise
the variety of meaningful articulation. Her soulful skittishness rubbed off on
the woodwind, and vice versa, so much
of what we heard chamber music writ large. Lest all we heard seem a little too
Mendelssohnian, there were Schumannesque reverie, muscle too, and backbone: this
was a piano tigress of surpassing versatility, with double octaves that would
have had Liszt himself sit up. I am no friend of applause between movements,
but could readily have forgiven it here. There was none; instead, a good few
audience members elected to chatter during the pizzicato opening to the second movement.
Insofar as I could tell, it sounded lovely. A fine balance was struck, at any rate,
between subsequent simplicity and complexity (not least but certainly not only
metrical). There was little doubt where the finale was heading, urgent without
a hint of the hard-driven, like the final flow of a mighty river and the human
life gathered on its banks. For this was a performance full of delightful
incident, first to be savoured, then fondly recalled. As an encore, Barenboim
and Argerich treated us to a few minutes of decidedly superior domesticity: the
Schubert A major Rondo, D 951, its lengths above all heavenly, Barenboim’s
closing trill to die for.
A Concerto for Orchestra makes excellent
sense as repertoire for a youth orchestra. The young players certainly seemed
to relish the challenges of Lutosławski’s, in this splendidly vivid
performance. Foreboding was in the air of the opening: foreboding that perhaps
already had a sense of something beyond, a possible destination, Barenboim
hearing and communicating form and possibilities, horizontal and vertical, as
vividly as he had that of the Schubert symphony. Bartók’s spirit was present,
of course; how could it not be? Prokofiev’s too, probably. These, however, were
welcome guests at the feast, unease always present enough to prevent any
folkloric elements from cloying. Scurrying and slide-slipping, the second movement
again brought Prokofiev to mind. Fantasy and obstinacy were held in excellent
balance, such as could only have resulted from playing of considerable
excellence. Barenboim captured to a tee the decidedly post-war mood of the
finale’s passacaglia section: Zimmermann as much as Shostakovich, though that
is not in any straightforward sense to ascribe ‘influence’. Likewise the
toccata, whose fantastical qualities – colour, rhythm, harmony – again brought
Prokofiev to the fore, perhaps above all in a cacophonous passage that might
almost have come from The Fiery Angel,
or Le Pas d’acier. It was Bartók who
emerged most clearly in the closing chorale section, yet with space and clarity
that enabled us to hear difference as well as similarity. If the finale still sounded
a little drawn out to me, that is doubtless my problem; I cannot recall a
performance that made greater sense of it.
