Boulez Ensemble/Barenboim: Beethoven, Bartók, and Boulez, 9 September 2019

Pierre Boulez Saal

Beethoven: Sonata for horn and piano in F major, op.17

Bartók: Sonata for two pianos and percussion, Sz 100

Boulez: sur Incises

Radek Baborák (French horn)

Karim Said, Denis Kozhukhin, Michael Wendeberg (piano)

Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabalan, Stephen Fitzpatrick (harp)

Lev Loftus, Dominic Oelze, Pedro Torrejón Gonzáles (percussion)

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

Two-and-a-half years after the opening of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, in a programme climaxing in Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises, the hall’s resident Boulez Ensemble, drawn from members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, returned, neither for the first time, nor, I suspect, for the last, to a work that seems almost to define not only the performing space, not only its memories, but just as much its potentialities. In that, it takes its leave from Boulez’s own method of proliferation, his own pattern of works-in-progress, his own incomparable, endlessly proliferating legacy for all musicians and music-lovers, and indeed for all those interested in reimagination of performing spaces in the line of Boulez’s cherished concept of the salle modulable.

First, however, came two other Bs: Beethoven and Bartok; and a third, that other presiding musical presence of the Boulez Saal: Barenboim. What a joy it was not only to hear Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, op.17, but to hear it in such an enlightened performance, from Radek Baborák and Daniel Barenboim. A horn call as forthright as it was perfectly judged of tone seemed the perfect way to open a new season: rooted not only in the Austro-German musical past, but in Beethoven, a prelude to next year’s anniversary. (And if people do not like that prospect, they should, quite frankly, stop their childish posturing and grow up.) Barenboim’s melting, post-Mozartian response reminded us why he stands as one of the very few great Beethovenians alive (indeed the only one, as conductor). A few first movement exposition smudges, of interest only to carpers, were banished upon the repeat. What mattered was Beethoven’s spirit, revealed in a performance of perfect balance and tempo, the latter flexible, yet never drawing attention to itself in the subtlety of that flexibility. It was, above all, a performance grounded in harmonic understanding, without which all else will be in vain (and more than often is, in contemporary Beethoven performance). The recapitulation brought a fine sense of return, and some magically soft playing, Baborák’s phrasing, here and elsewhere, to die for. A gravely beautiful, properly vocal Poco adagio quasi andante led to a finale that proved, again, quite perfectly judged in its post-Mozartian spirit. Darker passages told, albeit without exaggeration, in an account both poignant and ebullient.

It was a welcome occasion indeed to hear Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion: not only as precursor to sur Incises, but also in relation to Peter Eötvös’s Sonata per sei, heard the previous day at the Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal. The first movement’s opening, imbued with suspense, erupted in well-nigh Boulezian éclat; and again, although quite rightly, differently. This was to be a performance that surprised, even when one ‘knew’: that is to say, it was to be a performance in the emphatic sense, pianists, Michael Wendeberg and Denis Kozhukhin, and percussionists, Dominic Oelze and Lev Loftus, alike revelling in the potentialities of live thinking and communication. Bartók’s music was made strange in the best sense, these fine musicians riding a defiantly untamed tiger and (more than) living to tell the tale. How inevitably. The score unfolded, grew, developed, taking in predecessors such as Beethoven and Bach in a sense extending far beyond the relative banality of ‘influence’. Its spatial element, prophetic for Boulez among others, felt especially immediate in this space. Inevitability – not in the sense of dullness, but a ‘rightness’ that, in retrospect, could not have been other – characterised the slow movement too, percussion processional joined by Wendeberg, then by Kozhukhin, in playing of almost Mozartian perfection (not only the pianists!) Form dramatically revealed itself; so too did the wildest, most compelling of night music. As in the Beethoven sonata, the final movement proved in every sense a finale, almost as fascinating to watch – for instance, how the percussionists, sometimes unexpectedly, shared their load – as to hear. Counterpoint lived and thrilled in a performance that was not remotely safe, and was all the better for that, culminating in a splendidly witty and beguiling close.

sur Incises has many roots: most obviously in the solo piano piece, Incises (written originally for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition, with which Maurizio Pollini had a strong association). Boulez’s first intention, as he explained in a 1998 interview, was to ‘transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form.’ Other ghosts reared their head, though, such as Bartók’s Sonata and Stravinsky’s Les Noces. In this context, unsuprisingly, Bartók offered a strong point of departure – opening similarly, yet differently, de profundis – yet, as with so much of Boulez’s music, it was his conception of serialism as open-ended, ever-expanding, that dazzled. The spatial element is, of course, crucial. Here, again, it was greatly assisted by the hall and its acoustic, enabling us not only to hear but truly to feel the interplay between the ensemble as a whole (a giant reinvention of the piano, one might say), solo lines, and differently constituted groups within: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. Here, in the line of Boulez’s – and Barenboim’s – beloved Parsifal, not only did space become time, both became music. The way a trill passed across all three piano keyboards, Wendeberg and Kozhukhin joined by the equally excellent Karim Said, would offer but one case in point. Magic squares sensual, musical, conceptual, above all thrilling played themselves out and reinvented themselves before our eyes and ears (the ‘thinking ear’, as the hall’s motto has it). Whatever the antecendents, it was vividly clear that Boulez’s own proliferating method of generation actually had little in common with either Beethoven or Bartók; likewise his, and Barenboim’s, control of liminal suspense and propulsive release. The work, like the two that had preceded it, passed as if in no time, whetting the appetite for more, much more, in the weeks, months, years to come. This hall and the events within, then, continue as a work-in-progress, very much in Boulez’s sense.

‘Music for the thinking ear’: the opening concert of the Pierre Boulez Saal, 5 March 2017

© Volker Kreidler

 

Boulez – Initiale

Schubert – Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D 965
Mozart – Piano Quartet in E-flat major, KV 493
Berg – Chamber Concerto
Widmann – Fantasie, for solo clarinet
Boulez – sur Incises

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Michael Barenboim (violin)

Yulia Deyneka (viola)

Kian Soltani (cello)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Karim Said (piano)

Boulez Ensemble

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

‘Musik für das denkende Ohr’ is the slogan for Berlin’s new Pierre Boulez Saal, which opened its doors to the public on Saturday 4 March. Why a new hall? The city’s Philharmonie (‘Karajan’s Circus’, or ‘Zirkus Karajani’, as West Berliners dubbed it) remains a monument to architectural, acoustic, and indeed performative modernism. There are no bad seats, whether visually or acoustically; the surrounding of the orchestra, or other performers, by the audience offers quite a different, ‘in the round’ experience from many more ‘traditional’ halls, even the most blessed acoustically, such as Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, let alone the miserable examples with which London has been cursed.  Nevertheless, although Hans Scharoun’s Berlin hall has a smaller, chamber music hall attached, Berlin has had nothing like this. Frank Gehry’s oval design – no stage, merely a centre, again ‘in the round’ – genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible ‘salle modulable’, the possibility of the ‘thinking ear’: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest distance there can be between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is but fourteen metres. There is intimacy, then, but the intimacy, it is hoped of collaborative endeavour.

The conceptual collaboration between Gehry, Daniel Barenboim, and acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota stands very much in the spirit of the artistic collaboration, spanning more than half a century, between Barenboim and Boulez. They performed together for the first time in Berlin, with the Philharmonic, in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, and Barenboim has long proved one of the most ardent champions of his friend’s music. Whilst Boulez’s death continues to be lamented, the conscience of New Music seems almost to be reborn here. In programming philosophy, we see echt-Boulezian selections, connections made. Barenboim’s new ‘Boulez Ensemble’, at least as modulable as the hall, made up of musicians from his Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, both of which Boulez conducted, will present concerts with combinations of contemporary music, Classical music, and classically modernist music – just as Boulez would insist that musicians auditioning for his Ensemble Intercontemporain play one Classical piece, not just contemporary music. The hall will also, most important of all, offer a home to the young musician-students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, whose first cohort, thirty-seven of them, enrolled last autumn.

 

© Volker Kreidler

There will be much more to say about the hall itself; much will already have been said by others. I should like to concentrate now on the opening concert itself. It was given twice, the Saturday evening concert in the presence of a host of dignitaries, the German President included; I went the following morning. It may have been a lengthy occasion by the standards of the typical, one might say formulaic, concert; it did not feel as if it were. There is no reason why every concert should last for about two hours with an interval; every opera does not. If a performance of, say, the Diabelli Variations or the Missa solemnis is enough in itself, then there is no reason to add to it. Nor is there any reason to fret about a concert as rich, in very Boulezian terms, in programming possibility as this. Split into three parts, with two intervals, repertoire stretching from Mozart to Jörg Widmann, this encouraged, even did its part to create, that very ‘thinking ear’ of which we had previously been informed: to think and to listen.  

A new hall needs a fanfare. This one had Boulez’s 1987 Initiale, for seven brass instruments (two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, and tuba). The musicians encircled us, or rather played to us, Gabrieli-like, from the balcony, conducted (although I could not see him from where I was seated) by Barenboim. Clarity and warmth combined in near-ideal proportions, both in work and in performance. The experience of Répons seemed to offer musical as well as spatial inspiration – albeit now somewhat miniaturised. Five minutes of music offered an extraordinary expressive range, almost as if a symphonic poem and its narrative, wordless or otherwise, were being distilled – which, in a sense, is just what was happening.  It is not for nothing that ‘form’, understood as something more dynamic than ‘structure’, is contained within the word ‘performance’.

Schubert is to feature strongly in the Boulez Saal’s programming. A Winterreise with Christian Gerhaher, Barenboim at the piano, will launch a cycle of the complete Lieder over several years; Barenboim will also play the complete piano sonatas and conduct the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the complete the symphonies. Here, we heard Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with Anna Prohaska and Jörg Widmann, neatly also offering connections both to Widmann’s own clarinet Fantasie in the third section of the concert and to subsequent Widmann contributions to the season. This was true chamber music, perhaps especially between the two ‘soloists’, Barenboim not exactly reticent but far from dominant. The song opens: ‘When I stand on the highest rock, look down into the deep valley, and sing,’ that final ‘und singe’, quietly ecstatic here, enthusiastically echoed, as if across the valley, by the clarinet. The clarity of both lines – this was certainly not just a matter of the acoustic – did much to aid the Alpine impression: ‘atmosphere’, as Boulez would have been the first to point out, does not necessarily entail a blur. There was real sadness to be heard in the fourth and fifth stanzas, ‘In tiefem Gram verhehr ich mich…,’ until the ‘wunderbarer Macht’ (wondrous power) of song itself won through: a triumph as unmistakeable as it was unexaggerated. Playing to the gallery, figuratively or literally, is not a requirement for the hall of the thinking ear. And what post-Mozartian delight there was to be had in the concluding stanza, Spring arrived, receiving a fitting celebration in Prohaska’s coloratura.

Barenboim has been associated with the music of Mozart for as long as he has been a performing musician. For many of us, his piano concertos (whether with the English Chamber Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic) can hardly be bettered. It was fitting, then, to round off this first part of the concert with Mozart’s E-flat major Piano Quartet, with Michael Barenboim (violin), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Kian Soltani (cello). I am yet to be entirely convinced by Barenboim senior’s new piano, much as I applaud the initiative; this was not the occasion on which I was to be won over. At times, although I do not wish to exaggerate, his uncontested leading role passed over into heavy-handedness. Nevertheless, at its best the first movement offered a fine balance between ebullience and tenderness, muscularity excluding neither relaxation nor, most importantly, dialogue. A typical Barenboim strength was to be heard in the dynamism of form I remarked upon in Initiale; Mozart’s music developed, motivically and harmonically, the one engendering the other. The balance between simplicity and complexity was well achieved in the slow movement, harmonic surprised registering with a delight that comes of knowing them well. The quiet dignity of the score, supported by extraordinary musical richness as soon as one exercised that ‘thinking ear’, was affirmed. Perhaps the finale was taken a little hastily: more Allegro than Allegretto? Such matters are, however, tricky in Mozart. It had, at any rate, the character of a finale, even if Barenboim sometimes proved a little too dominant again. The extroversion of the close was nothing less than delightful.

 

© Peter Adamik

The second section was given over to Berg’s Chamber Concerto. Barenboim conducted, his son played the violin solo, with Karim Said as solo pianist. (It was difficult not to think of this as a reinvention of the classic recording with Boulez, Barenboim, and Pinchas Zukerman.) Even with the intervention of an interval, one could hardly resist, even if one wished to do so, hearing Berg with Mozartian ears: protean, teeming with invention and expression. Boulez’s late recording with Mitusko Uchida and Christian Tetzlaff, cunningly, revealingly coupled with Mozart’s own Gran Partita, KV 361, came to mind. Thirteen instruments: how very un-Schoenbergian! The two soloists only combine in the final movement, the first being the pianist’s territory. Said offered clarity and sweep – just as Boulez, or Berg, might have wanted, or so one could fancy. Conductor, ensemble, and hall seemed to combine to afford a relationship between such clarity and complexity that came to the very heart of the work and its ever-shifting balances. Barenboim had its measure as few conductors, Boulez excepted, can ever have done, more than once playing up, or so it seemed, anticipations of Lulu.  

Musical process was audibly at work throughout, just as much in the central Adagio as in that opening theme and variations. Michael Barenboim’s playing gave us tenderness and fury, sometimes well-nigh spontaneous. Still more so did that of the Boulez Ensemble, its climaxes fearsome, de profundis. Berg’s music emerged as it should: labyrinthine yet purposeful. The thread was never lost, not even for a split second. Furious, again, and still more febrile, the finale, piano and violin now combined, proved endless generative in its working through of musical material. Constructivism was shown to be in itself expressive, not somehow, sentimentally, opposed to expression. (Again, Boulez would surely have approved.) The re-entry of the orchestral ensemble seemed truly to set in motion the idea of a finale, endlessly developmental and yet unquestionable in its conclusion.

Widmann returned to give a spell-binding account of his early (1993) Fantasie for solo clarinet. Like the brass players for Initiale, he played down to us from the balcony, in a performance that incited, might even be thought of as incantatory.  Musical line was as clear, as direct, as anything we had heard before, extended techniques very much at its service rather than heard for the first time. The performance seemed almost to exemplify the wishes expressed both by Boulez and by Barenboim that new music (newish, in this case) be performed as if it were classical (and vice versa).

Meanwhile, three pianos, three sets of percussion instruments, and three harps awaited their respective performers (Karim Said, Denis Koshukhin, Michael Wendeberg; Lev Loftus, Pedro Torrejón González, Dominic Oelze; Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabaln, Stephen Fitzpatrick) for Boulez’s sur Incises. Like many of Boulez’s works, sur Incises has its seeds in an earlier work. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a strong association). Boulez’s initial intention, as he explained in an interview of 1998, was to:

 

… transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. … Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially in the modern age – take for example Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.

 

Then, however, the siren call of Stravinsky and especially Les Noces suggested another path. As Boulez would remark more recently, in 2010, ‘This is the reason why I ended up with three pianos - incidentally three pianists are part of our ensemble [Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise three percussionists in the ensemble, and subsequently, the idea of adding three harps occurred to him, an idea rendered more attractive by his use of the instrument in Répons.

Boulez’s conception of serialism as ever-expanding, open-ended, was the overriding experience of this performance, conducted by Barenboim. The spatial element sounded more crucial than ever: we hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. A startling aspect of those latter formations, all the more so in this telling acoustic, was to hear passages transferring spatially across, say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano: played, as it were, by Barenboim, the pianist-conductor. I have long thought here of Boulez playing with something akin to a musical magical square, three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always adding up to the required total, even if we do not know what that should be: a magical extension of Webern, one might say.

Then there were the beguiling sonorities: the sumptuous quality of Boulez’s harmonies, fully captured here, harks back to and yet surely extends those of Debuusy. Kinetic, rhythmic energy brought every more strongly to mind Stravinsky and Bartók; indeed, that distancing from the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seemed present in some of the piano writing, contagious, as it were, for the other instrumentalists. Barenboim seemed especially adept at signalling moments of transformation; one might think of Boulez’s own conception, adumbrated in his lectures to the Collège de France, of the musical ‘signal’. Rising clamour, typically Boulezian frenzy, would subside, at least partially, dialectically: confounding, yet making unanswerable sense. Form, we were again reminded, lives, acquires meaning, in performance, especially one so outstanding in quality as this. (What collaborative virtuosity was on show, and yet never for its own sake!) Nevertheless, however much we might have wished this universe to continue expanding forever, its material in perpetual proliferation, the conclusion once again proved decisive – at least until the next time. The ear had thought; the mind had listened.

(An edited version of this article appeared first in VAN Magazine, focusing less on the performances, more on the idea and reality of the hall and its programming. Please click here to read that. Apologies for the inconsistencies of formatting in this case: I seemed unable to get it to work, however much I tried...)

Karim Said - Schoenberg, Webern, Gerhard, Cage, Wolpe, Boulez, 9 June 2013

Purcell Room

Schoenberg – Piano Pieces, op.33a and op.33b

Webern – Variations, op.27
Gerhard – Three Impromptus, op.8
Cage – The Perilous Night
Wolpe – Three Pieces for Youngsters
Boulez – Notations

 

This third and final recital in Karim Said’s Purcell Room series, part of the broader Southbank Centre festival, ‘The Rest is Noise’, made me wish I had been able to attend the previous instalments. Each recital had centred around Schoenberg’s piano music; this mostly looked forward. That Said had given due thought to the works concerned was clear from the introductory discussion with Sara Mohr-Pietsch: a welcome change from the dreadful platitudes such introductions often bring. The proof of the aural pudding was in the listening, though, and it was very good indeed.

 

I do not think I have heard either of the Schoenberg op.33 Pieces in recital before (save, years ago, when I played them myself, which does not really count). Said immediately revealed a fine ear for sonority, making excellent use of his Steinway, and line, including rhythm: a parameter which one still hears the ignorant deride in music of the Second Viennese School. Ghosts of Vienna danced – and remembered. The very different characters of the two pieces was evident, and yet, the second was certainly in context made to follow on from the first, Schoenberg’s writing seeming poised between the expressionism of the op.11 Pieces and the somewhat more neo-Classical world of the Piano Concerto.

 

Webern’s Variations brought a more analytical, though certainly not dry, approach. My sole reservation would be that the work perhaps opened a little stiffly, but if that were the case, this remained an accomplished, indeed beautiful performance. There was certainly joy in the pianism of the second variation. Real sense was made of dynamic contrasts as well as the phrasing: all those sighs! Said, we had learned earlier, had studied a score with performing instructions by the composer – presumably, though he did not say, those given to Peter Stadlen. The experience seemed to have offered him the opportunity to penetrate deep beneath the surface in a highly committed performance.

 

Roberto Gerhard’s 1950 Impomptus offered, both in work and performance, an intriguing and convincing injection of Iberian rhythms in their encounter between Schoenbergian and post-Granados soundworlds. (Gerhard studied with both Schoenberg and Granados.) Said proved an excellent advocate, playing the pieces as if they were repertoire works, Debussy also more than once coming to mind in passages of intensity and languor. Above all, however, there was life: this was music as colourful as anything in, say, Images. Moreover, one could undoubtedly hear the composer’s twelve-note workings, testimony to the pianist’s understanding and communication.

 

For John Cage’s The Perilous Night (1944), the piano was transformed into an Eastern percussion ensemble, the composer having employed the prepared instrument in his work as dance accompanist at the Cornish School. To my ears, rhythm rather than pitch ruled, although the latter was not entirely irrelevant. Whether the very business of preparing the piano were intended as performance, it certainly came across as such. Intriguingly, a degree of rhythmic kinship emerged with Boulez’s Notations, be it by ‘chance’ or otherwise, though the latter pieces are of course far more varied, Cage being both less terse and more repetitive.

 

The harmony of Stefan Wolpe’s Three Pieces for Youngsters imparted a sense of returning home after Cage’s experimentalism. (Whatever one might go to Cage for, it is certainly not harmony.) Wolpe’s chiselled miniatures were not entirely unlike Webern’s own Kinderstück, op. posth., though more reflective and without its almost Scarlatti-like hypertension. There were hints of Berg, too, not least in the harmony of the third. Teachers really ought to offer these pieces to children – and adults should relish them on their own accord. Or rather, that might happen, if only someone would publish them.

 

Finally, Boulez’s Notations. Said displayed clarity and purpose in his delineation of their character and expressive power. The second offered éclats in abundance, whilst Debussyan languor – insofar as that be possible in pieces of twelve-bar duration! – could be heard in its successor. Boulez’s suggestion of improvisation – ‘Doux et improvisé’ – was communicated in the fifth, though rigour, never didactic but rather enabling, was always the order of the day. The suggestion of bass drum in the left hand of the ninth, apparently communicated personally by the composer to Said, came across highly convincingly, putting me in mind of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6 (cleverly chosen by Said as an encore). ‘Mécanique et très sec,’ is Boulez’s marking for the tenth, and that is how it sounded, offering the strongest of contrasts. Quiet scintillation characterised the eleventh, before the return of Messiaenesque tendencies, already accounced in the ‘hieratic’ seventh, in the imaginary (secret?) theatre of Boulez’s final Notation. I very much hope that Said will go on to essay Boulez’s other works for piano, the 2005 une page d’éphémeride included.

Prom 49: M.Barenboim/Said/Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim - Mendelssohn and Berg, 21 August 2009

Royal Albert Hall

Mendelssohn – Octet
Berg – Chamber Concerto

Michael Barenboim (violin)
Karim Said (piano)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

The Prom earlier this evening had been very good, especially the performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. However, this chamber Prom, with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, was better still, in many respects outstanding.

Mendelssohn’s Octet is, of course, straightforwardly chamber music, so Daniel Barenboim was not on hand to conduct. However, the players seemed to heed Mendelssohn’s instruction that it ‘must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style.’ I was surprised how quickly my ears adjusted to chamber scale in the expanses of the Royal Albert Hall; in fact, it is often orchestral works of more modest proportions that fare least well here. The performance clearly led by returning, sweet-toned Guy Braunstein, this was nevertheless an opportunity, well taken, for all eight players to shine. Impressive cello playing not only underpinned the harmony but propelled the rhythms too. There was a winning richness to the inner viola writing too. There was an aching, though never exaggerated, Schubertian quality to the lovely first subject of the first movement, especially when that echt-Mendelssohnian moment of developmental exhaustion had been reached, announcing arrival and intensification. This movement really put a smile on my face, though the ensuing applause did not. (The BBC needs to sort this out once and for all. There is no ‘debate’ to be had concerning applause between movements and pointing to the practice of audiences in entirely different historical contexts is disingenuous.)

In the ensuing Andante, I fancied that I heard that very same melancholy Mendelssohn in a letter of 1838 ascribed to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Each of the eight parts made a valued and crucial contribution to a movement further characterised by pulsating tension and sweet lyricism (Schubert again). There was a longing that convinced, for it was never excessively romanticised. The celebrated scherzo was just as it should be: elfin and fantastical – though, quite rightly, not in the sense familiar from the Berlioz symphony heard earlier in the evening. It was feather-light, yet imbued with a strong rhythmic sense: again, just as it should be. I very much liked the way the finale was treated as a fugal continuation of the scherzo’s figuration, albeit with a degree of greater vigour. The players proved themselves virtuosic, yet always at the service of the music. Here was a real sense of music being tossed between the players and returned with interest: a gift, or perhaps dividend, for one and all. They revelled in musical invention as impressive as that of Haydn himself.

To combine the Mendelssohn Octet with Berg’s Chamber Concerto was an excellent way to involve a large number of the Divan players in (quasi-)chamber music. First it had been the strings’ turn, now the wind – plus Michael Barenboim and Karim Said. This is a work in which Barenboim père has a distinguished record, having recorded the work not just once but twice under Pierre Boulez. Such experience could only reap benefits when switching to the role of conductor, and so it proved. It was interesting, moreover, to note how much this proved to be chamber music; often the conductor was confident enough in his players simply to set the framework within which they would perform, though there were times when, quite rightly, the piece was very much conducted. The first movement scherzo and variations opened with a splendid sense of following on, intensification even, as we heard first piano, then violin (thereafter silent until the Adagio), then wind. Suddenly the work was in full flow, the Bergian labyrinth revealed, and what a labyrinth this is! Said seemed very much to have the measure of Berg’s ambivalent – or should that be dialectical – style, his position between late Romanticism and modernity. There was some truly magnificent trombone playing: proof that a fine player of a relatively unusual chamber instrument has nothing whatsoever to fear from comparison with what are likely to be more seasoned colleagues. The pair of clarinets took one back to Wozzeck and forward to Lulu, in a highly dramatic, rhythmically charged reading to which Daniel Barenboim’s operatic experience must have contributed. Fine piccolo playing suggested a homage to Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony; indeed, I do not think I have heard the lineage so clearly traced in this fiftieth-birthday tribute to Berg’s beloved teacher. (And surely the Schoenberg is a work these players now should tackle!)

The violin entry in the second movement announced Michael Barenboim’s late Romantic lyricism, with attendant sinuous quick vibrato. Berg’s sonority of violin and wind immediately summoned to mind the chorale to come from the violin concerto, though sometimes violent trombone interjections aptly reminded one that this is a very different piece. Here the intensity of the performance was such that I often forget that this was not ‘full’ orchestral music, pointing to a paradox, or rather dialectical outcome, that chamber performance might reap orchestral rewards, or vice versa. The wind band once again helped to evoke the shadow and/or inspiration of Schoenberg, this time in the guise of the Wind Quintet, op.26, and the Suite, op.29 (pre-emptively in the latter case). In the final movement, we could at last hear the two soloists together: this made me wish Berg had composed a sonata for violin and piano. Barenboim fils tackled the tricky harmonics – and tricky everything-else – with great aplomb, expressive as well as virtuosic, and there were interesting hints of Debussy from Said. Daniel Barenboim ensured that the ghostly shadows of Mahler’s dance rhythms shone through. (He really ought to conduct Lulu!) All players then led us once more into the labyrinth, if indeed we had ever escaped – not that we should wish to... These young, extraordinary talented musicians made one realise the myriad of possibilities Berg presents and alerted us to the decisions he then makes. Everything becomes inevitable, but only in retrospect; or, as Hegel so memorably put it, the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk. But spread its wings it did, and spread their wings these musicians did. This was Berg performance of the highest order.