Philharmonie
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| Images: (c) Monika Rittershaus |
Beethoven:
Concerto for piano,
violin, cello, and orchestra in C major, op.56
Bruckner:
Symphony no.9
Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin)
Yo-Yo Ma (cello)
West-Eastern-Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)
Twenty years of the
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: can it really be so? Indeed it can, and what an
inspiration – musical, political, humanist – it continues to be. ‘Not in our
wildest dreams,’ Daniel Barenboim writes in the programme, ‘could we have
imagined that 20 years later this orchestra would be travelling the world as a
musical ambassador for cultural understanding.’ Yo-Yo Ma was with the orchestra
from the start; Anne-Sophie Mutter first joined only this year. After a wonderful
performance of the Beethoven Triple Concerto, all three musicians performing as
soloists, Barenboim as conductor too, the latter announced that his colleagues,
to their evident delight, would now be honorary members of the orchestra. It
was, then, a special evening in several ways – yet, as ever, none more so than
the musical, without which the project, born in Weimar in 1999, would long
since have been forgotten. For there was nothing remotely of the routine to
either of these performances, separately and together an event fitting to these
anniversary celebrations, which will now look forward to the future of the
ensemble and its ideals, in a series commemorating the 200th
anniversary of Goethe’s original West-Eastern
Divan, from which the orchestra and more broadly its mission
take their name.
I am not sure that I have heard
the orchestral cello opening to the Beethoven sound quite so full of
expectation, still less so when the rest of the orchestra joined, sending
shivers down the spine. What depth there was to the sound of the string section,
what keenness to the wind. When our piano trio entered, the relationship
between soloists, however starry, and orchestra sounded collegial. Sometimes the
latter would amplify, shadow
in an almost Boulezian sense, the former; on other occasions, the give and
take of Classical chamber music found itself writ large. Throughout this first
movement and beyond, the performance was variegated and dynamic, founded, as
ever with Barenboim, on harmony, be it that of the piano bass, its orchestral
counterpart, or both. If he necessarily stood (and sat) at the centre, there
was no grandstanding, no pretence at superiority; as there should, indeed must,
be in Palestine, there was room for all. Ma’s quicksilver response and careful
listening to that of his fellow musicians was perhaps the most readily visible,
yet without such an attitude from all concerned, all would have come to naught.
A welcome note of old-school glamour from Mutter brought thoughts and memories,
however distorted by sentiment, of the age of Jacques Thibaud. All had roles to
play, none more important than listening.
The slow movement’s opening
cello solo, as eloquent as it was elegant, was cushioned perfectly by the
orchestra. How many years’ experience by now Barenboim must have as ‘accompanist’,
whether at the piano, as conductor – or here, as both. Ma’s honest lyricism –
rapt might suggest here something more self-regarding – was duly responded to
by all concerned, whether soloists or orchestral musicians, wondrous Harmoniemusik proving just the trick. A
finely traced transition took us to a finale imbued anew with a sense of tonal
discovery, however much one may have ‘known’. The release of pent-up energy was
echt-Beethoven; so too was its
humour. Delicacy and drive were combined in a performance whose Beethovenian
nobility was felt just as keenly as the intelligence of its structural command.
Whatever some cultured despisers may tell you, this is not second-rate
Beethoven. Only a second-rate performance could have one think so, and this was
certainly not that.
A string section pretty much doubled
in size, alongside augmented forces all round, returned for Bruckner’s Ninth
Symphony, its opening heir to another, (still) more elemental Beethoven, that
of the Ninth Symphony. And so, the
first movement opened, again expectant, febrile. However, what struck me here
and throughout was Barenboim’s tendency towards highlighting the modernist, the
fragmentary: not at the expense of underlying coherence, but rather in
dialectical relationship to it. This might almost have been Pierre Boulez
conducting; perhaps ironically, there was a stronger sense of incipient Mahler –
a composer to whom Boulez stood closer than the more selective Barenboim has –
to the second thematic group than I can recall hearing previously, the chorale
from the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, rooted and yet rootless,
seemingly already in the making. That said, a Furtwänglerian combination of
flexibility and direction endured, indeed intensified, in the great flow of
this movement and its successors. If Barenboim’s Beethoven has often seemed to
owe much to a compelling synthesis of Furtwängler and Klemperer, here
Furtwängler and Boulez seemed to be the thing. Fascinating – and, crucially
again, compelling. Harmony below, its dissolution above; brass of the Wagnerian
apocalypse; as full an orchestral sound as you could imagine; that and much
more took us to a coda of unutterable defiance. ‘Dem lieben Gott’? Yes and no.
The scherzo proved more overtly
diabolical, in properly disconcerting fashion. Rhythm, melody too (delectably
turned woodwind melodic fragments in particular), emerged from harmony,
threatening to separate, yet quite properly, never managing to do so. This
music may retain strong roots in Schubert, yet it sounded at times uncommonly
distant, without rejection. Relaxation, such as it was, in the trio, was deeply
ambiguous. Dissolution and disintegration of at least one type, often more, was
always a present danger. It should be no surprise to hear Wagner in Barenboim’s
Bruckner, but rarely, if ever, can the third movement have sounded quite so
soaked in Parsifal,
and so fatally determined to escape its narcotic orbit. How? The question is
part theological, part ontological, above all musical. Such, in many ways, was
the drama of this movement and indication of the futility of any attempt to ‘complete’
the symphony; for this was a supremely questing, questioning performance,
plagued by doubt, yet equally certain that it must find a way. Taken to
extremes, not least of tempo, it refuted any case for ‘moderation’, cohering,
yet never too readily. Final repose somehow seemed both absolute and temporary.
There are lessons beyond the ‘merely’ musical in that too.
