Pierre Boulez Saal
Piano Trio in E-flat major,
op.1 no.1
Piano Trio in C minor, op.1
no.3
Piano Trio in G major, op.1
no.2
Piano Trio in D major, op.70
no.1, ‘Ghost’
Michael Barenboim (violin)
Kian Soltani (cello)
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal has
already seen—and heard—a few portents of next year’s Beethoven anniversary. In
September, the first concert of the 2019-20 season opened with Beethoven’s Horn
Sonata, op.17. With Advent Sunday, the festivities began in earnest: the first of
two concerts in which the six
piano trios (plus the ‘Kakadu’ Variations) are performed by Michael
Barenboim, Kian Soltani, and Daniel Barenboim. If subsequent events turn out to
compare well with this, we shall be in for a special year indeed. Where better
to start, to bring light to the long nights of a Berlin winter, than with
Beethoven’s official opus 1? Before that, however, Daniel Barenboim requested—and
naturally received—a minute’s silence for Mariss Jansons, whose death had been
announced but a few hours earlier: ‘ein ganz grosser Musiker und ein wunderbarer
Mensch’. Quite—and very much in keeping with the humanism to be celebrated
throughout the coming year.
The E-flat Trio, first of the
three Beethoven composed for Prince Karl Lichnowsky, opened in bright, alert,
reflectively post-Mozartian fashion: very much an opening not just to the first
movement, not just to the work, not just to the set and concert, but to the
œuvre and year ahead. It was clear from the very outset that this was to be
chamber-music playing of the greatest distinction; much could be garnered even
just from watching the players listen, their give-and-take. Likewise from the
difference heard in the first-movement exposition ‘repeat’: nothing of the
sort, of course, yet nor was it different for the sake of it. Much the same
might be said for the return to the tonic in the recapitulation and its
necessary novelty to remain and conclude in that key: touchingly so, indeed.
Harmony, as in all Beethoven performances worthy of the name, underlay events ‘above’;
there was no need to draw attention to the fact, for it simply—or not so simply—‘was’.
The greatest Western music from the years leading up to 1800—think, for
instance, of Haydn’s London
Symphonies and The Creation—conveys a
sense of a Newtonian musical universe there to be mapped, explored, wondered at;
so did this performance.
Beethoven’s early slow
movements are no easy thing to bring off. It should doubtless come as little
surprise that a performance led, if only as first among equals, by Daniel
Barenboim should succeed in that, fulfilling the ‘Adagio cantabile’s stylistic
and formal demands to perfection, but it is still worth acclaiming. Time and
space, simplicity and ornament: all sounded and felt as they ‘should’. And how
those modulations were handled! Different characters of each instrument, each
instrumentalist registered—Michael Barenboim’s wordless song and Kian Soltani’s
suave profundity as much as Barenboim père’s
incontrovertible identification with the music ‘itself’—yet equally came
together as voices of a single humanity. A buoyant scherzo brought fine balance
between detail and formal dynamism, permitting motivic development freely to
speak, to lead. Its trio followed, voiced with intimacy on a coiled (harmonic)
spring, the trio’s reprise rightly coming—however much one ‘knew’—as a
surprise. Daniel Barenboim clearly knew and communicated what was at stake in the
finale’s opening slurred leaps of a tenth; the fuse was gently, confidently
lit. Full of delightful and, later, truly moving surprises, later imitated and
developed by Michael Barenboim, the twists and turns of this movement managed
to recall, intensify, and sublimate so much of what we had heard previously,
while remaining true to the particular form and function of this, the closing movement.
Wonderful!
The third of the Lichnowsky
trios followed, its C minor home tonality already revealed to be moving away
from Mozart—yet with undoubted reference, for instance to the Piano Sonata, KV 457,
and with Mozartian melodic writing as a counterweight—toward something else,
something more Beethovenian, for want of a better word. How much greater
emotional weight there was to be heard on the reprise of the introduction, not
least in Michael Barenboim’s rich-toned violin phrase; likewise the reprise, insofar
as we may call it that, of the exposition as a whole. For it sounded rather as
if already a first development, preparing the way for second and, in the recapitulation,
third developments to come. The latter sounded fuller of surprises than ever—‘simply’
by playing the notes and everything between and surrounding them. Tragic
vehemence in the coda, Neapolitan harmony and all, proved similarly
Janus-faced. Truths were spoken, or rather sung, with perfect balance between
the aristocratic and popular in the second movement variations. Such a balance,
one felt, was still just about possible; Haydn was after all still very much alive,
even if Mozart were not, at least in a merely corporeal sense. The third
variation’s concerto-like piano, set against pizzicato, beautifully judged
violin and cello, had one on the edge of one’s seat—in a good way. Soltani’s
tragic, seria voice in its successor proved
ineffably effecting. Everything, one felt, was there, was here. The complex neoclassicism—yes, already—of the minuet was
apparent: meaningful, yet never laboured. Space—just enough, nothing excessive—was
afforded for its trio to relax and to develop. Then the C minor tragic daemon
could truly be unleashed for Beethoven’s finale, quite without detriment to lovable
glances sideways and indeed backwards to a vanishing eighteenth century. The ‘Pathétique’
Sonata was just around the corner, yet rightly not quite with us either. That
this was Beethoven, however, no one could have any doubt.
Following the interval, we
heard op.1 no.2, the closest of the three to Haydn—and so it sounded, not least
in the first movement introduction, whose transition to the exposition proper
was revealingly likened by Denis Matthews to that of the ‘Oxford’ Symphony. We
were invited to listen, both to the work’s particularity and to its kinship,
harmonic and motivic development coming together to delineate a path both
familiar and unique. In the slow movement, a wordless vocal ensemble vouchsafed
us truths that words could never tell. Hopeless Romanticism? Perhaps, yet if
so, so what? Daniel Barenboim’s piano told of something so ineffably sublime
that already the way seemed pointed towards the composer’s late works. The
scherzo’s keen sense of Affekt and of
line prepared the way for a trio that justly rejuvenated rather than relaxed.
In Beethoven, no one size fits all. Haydn to the nth degree
characterised the finale’s moto perpetuo,
the simplest musical—tonal-musical—building blocks, scales, diatonic triads,
and so on, imbued with the freshness of discovery.
For the final work on the
programme, we moved to middle-period Beethoven, to the so-called ‘Ghost’ Trio,
op.70 no.1. Striking in context was the similarity of means in its first
movement to the finale of the preceding work. Full maturity of voice, however,
proved just as striking in contrast, rendering performance as much as reception
a very different experience. It was not just that one heard greater ‘Romanticism’,
though one did, but the combination of broader canvas and—shockingly—greater concision,
of contrapuntal and motivic intensity and, at times, density of texture: on the
page, yes, but flying off it too. As Beethoven took his leave from Haydn and
Mozart, he drew still closer to them. The slow movement voiced, perhaps for the
first time, a tragic sadness with roots in Mozart, yet which cast its shadow
long into the nineteenth century and even at times beyond. Soltani and the
Barenboims shaped its course so unerringly that one never noticed the shaping,
the skill and understanding behind, the material necessity. And what extraordinary
material this is: that one felt as if for the first time, its strangeness
confirmed and renewed. The finale brought an aptly direct and elliptical response, its goal before us, yet nevertheless held
in suspense. If sometimes the music sounded close to Brahms in texture and
harmony, that is only because it is indeed. Yet there was none of Brahms’s ‘lateness’,
all the immediacy of middle-period Beethoven: as vigorous as it was euphonious,
as impetuous as it was sublime.
