Batiashvili/BPO/Harding - Schubert, Brahms, and Beethoven, 26 April 2024

Philharmonie

Schubert: Die Zauberharfe, D 644: Overture
Brahms: Violin Concerto in D major, op.77
Beethoven: Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Lisa Batiashvili (violin)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniel Harding (conductor)

Image: Stephan Rabold

The Berlin Philharmonic’s European Concert has since 1991 taken place every year in a different European location ‘of cultural and historical significance’, also marking the anniversary of the orchestra’s foundation on 1 May 1882. This year, the orchestra will travel with Lisa Batiashvili and Daniel Harding, to the amphitheatre at Tsinandali in Georgia, repeating the concert the following day at Tbilisi Opera House. This will be the orchestra’s first tour to Georgia, a candidate member for European Union membership, at which hopeful status we British non-xenophobes can only nod wistfully. Two performances were also scheduled before departure in Berlin, Harding replacing Daniel Barenboim, for whom health problems alas precluded him from conducting.

Schubert’s Zauberharfe Overture, once thought to have been part of his incidental music to Rosamunde, began promisingly, with grand, dramatic opening chords and broad lyricism from characterful wind and cultivated strings (with, unless my ears deceived me, a little portamento). It was a different sound from that which Barenboim would have drawn from the orchestra, a little more ‘period’, even Harnoncourtish, but there is no point in attending a concert wishing it were something else, and I doubt Barenboim would have taken this introduction any slower. For the Allegro vivace, Harding imparted a fine, almost Mendelssohnian sense of release. He drove hard, but it made sense on its own, alternatively Romantic terms, with stylish articulation, the close clearly anticipating the ‘Great’ C major Symphony. Where it fell down for me was in the admittedly difficult transitions, which emerged somewhat stop-start; there was little sense of hearing (and communicating) the piece as a whole. 

The Brahms Violin Concerto immediately offered a more ‘traditional’ sound, depth of the Berlin strings all one could ask for, without forsaking prior virtues. Harding once again showed himself a fine ‘accompanist’, supportive yet doing far more than merely following. He could certainly whip up a storm when required, if occasionally edging into the realm of the rhetorical. Batiashvili’s entry confirmed everything one might have hoped for: dead-centred focus, springing from the orchestra, and asserting her as first among equals. Every note of her part was not only present and correct, but meaningfully so. Harding yielded more than in the Schubert, preparing the way for deepest melancholy in the solo performance. Indeed, the dialectics of Batiashvili’s richly conceived and rewarding reading, arguably Harding’s too, were strongly Beethovenian. Busoni’s cadenza offered a wonderful surprise, beginning with timpani rolls that turned it into a quasi-duet, still more so when strings entered. It was typically fascinating, neither bound by tradition nor out of keeping, more concise than Joachim’s; it made the return of Brahms’s full orchestra all the more poignant, bathed in afterglow. For the slow movement, Berlin woodwind – Albrecht Mayer, Emmanuel Pahud, Wenzel Fuchs – fully lived up to expectations, fruity, post-Mozart Harmoniemusik also offering songful Innigkeit, a slightly backward glance seemingly taken forward by Batiashvili and subsequent interplay. Balance between structure and spontaneity was well judged throughout; there was nothing rhapsodic here, yet in the best, most secure sense it sounded free. Following a smattering of baffling, rather unsettling applause – there had been none following the first movement – initiative was regained in an incisive and joyous account of the finale, lilt and heft emerging naturally as required. It sounded newly minted, having one wonder how Hans von Bülow or anyone else could ever have thought this a ‘concerto against violin’. The inevitable Bach encore, the Andante from the A minor Sonata, BWV 1003, proved anything but superfluous, as calming as it was rigorous. 

Harding’s Beethoven had much to commend it, albeit without scaling the heights of Barenboim’s. The Fifth Symphony is an extraordinarily difficult work to bring off; in my concert-going experience, only Barenboim has truly captured its spirit as well as letter, though Harding was certainly not disadvantaged by other comparisons. Indeed, the first movement came close to exemplary, urgent without mannerism, born of evident trust in the score and ability to bring it off the page. Rhetoric grew out of motivic drive and cohesion, rather than being imposed upon them. I never cease, save in the worst of performances, to be amazed by its concision; this was no exception. Split violins helped too, as they had earlier and would later. The second movement made for a flowing, highly contrasted processional, although just occasionally, at least for me, that fondness for rhetoric got the better of it. Otherwise, it unfolded with commendable inevitability and a keen ear for detail. Playing was throughout magnificent, not least splendidly ‘present’ cellos and double basses, which continued into the scherzo and trio. Here, especially in the scherzo, and even more so in the transition to the finale, I missed a sense of something deeper, or what the music might mean, with due regard to those whose aesthetics insist vainly that it does not. The trio’s counterpoint fairly flew off the strings, and the scherzo’s reprise was ghostly enough. A musicianly account of the finale grew out of what had gone before; it was well paced, balanced, and articulated. There was little doubt in my mind that Harding achieved what he wanted to, yet the sublime exultancy of light vanquishing darkness for me never really registered. Now more than ever, this seems to be a message only Barenboim – and his impossible yet ever-more-necessary West-Eastern Divan – can offer.

Batiashvili/BPO/Petrenko - Brahms, Szymanowski, and Strauss, 15 February 2024

Philharmonie

Brahms: Tragic Overture in D minor, op.81
Symanowski: Violin Concerto no.1, op.35
Strauss: Symphonia Domestica, op.53

Lisa Batiashvili (violin)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Image: Lena Laine

For me, the highlight of this concert from the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko was the performance of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, for which they were joined by the equally outstanding violinist Lisa Batiashvili. Almost any few bars – the sound and the direction it took – would have been enough to justify attendance; it was not, though, necessary to choose. Its opening, a fairyland in which orchestral children of Mendelssohn and Debussy took flight to the emergent strains of a silken violin line spun with longing and languor presaged what was to come, such interactions, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral the stuff on which dreams were made on—at quite a temperature. Whatever its twists and turns, there was no doubting the musical line and one’s compulsion to follow it. Metamorphoses magical, martial, and more proved gorgeously beyond good and evil in their phantasmagoria, form created before our ears. It seemed both old and new, all the while played as to the manner born, balances both perfectly projected yet constantly shifting. Fantasy became reality, or perhaps vice versa. 

Brahms’s Tragic Overture preceded it. Here I was somewhat more uncertain. It was tremendously played, of course, though perhaps driven a little hard at the beginning. (Such matters are mostly a matter of taste, yet even fate need not be quite so remorseless.) There was certainly contrast to come, not least in a charming, surprising echo of Schubert in onward tread before Brahms’s Beethovenian inheritance reasserted itself. What I never quite grasped was how the tragic pageant hung together. 

In the second half came Strauss’s Symphonia domestica. Of all Strauss’s tone poems, even Aus Italien, it is the one I know least well. Indeed, I am not sure I can claim to know it in an emphatic sense at all; I do not think I had been to a live performance before this. I was therefore hoping for some sort of ‘eureka’ moment, or at least a shift in my response to a work that has somewhat baffled me on previous hearings. Alas, it was not to be on this occasion—and that is not necessarily any reflection on the performance.  There were times, especially earlier on, when I thought it was. It is not often that Strauss is bested for great washes of orchestral sound, yet after Szymanowski he was; precision and clarity in the opening were therefore all the more valuable by way of contrast. The composer’s antiromanticism was here strongly to the fore, as it was when the music, more strongly than I can recall, presaged the operatic Strauss of a decade or more hence: Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, even Intermezzo—which, in terms of subject matter, makes sense. Darker passages proved as ambiguous as the music at its more playful; the Mendelssohn quotation might almost have been filtered by Reger, save that it would surely have been the other way around. The sheer strangeness of Strauss’s tonal journey registered, though ultimately I am not sure I followed it, nor the work’s form (as opposed to mere structure) more generally. The ‘finale’ at times sounded intriguingly close to the enigmatic exuberance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, written at more or less the same time, yet an element of failing, as it were, to conclude here seemed less part of the narrative than, well, an inability to conclude. I am doubtless missing something and have little doubt Mahler would have relished the Berliners’ virtuoso handling of Strauss’s counterpoint. (He conducted the  Viennese premiere in 1904.) Sometimes, though, one must wait until a piece comes knocking on the door—which, judging by the reaction accorded this performance, it already had for most of my fellow concert-goers.

Batiashvili/Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Saint-Saëns, 12 November 2019

Philharmonie

Violin Concerto no.3 in B minor, op.61

Symphony no.3 in C minor, op.78, ‘Organ’

Lisa Batiashvili (violin)

Christian Schmitt (organ) 

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

In preparation for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s new production of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, directed by Damián Szifron and conducted by Daniel Barenboim, of which more in due course, Berlin is hearing more of the composer’s œuvre than might generally be expected. I shall be reporting not only from the opera but also from a chamber concert at the Apollo Saal for piano and harmonium. In the meantime, here were two orchestral works, also conducted by Barenboim.

For the first—to my mind, the most successful—of the works, the Third Violin Concerto, Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin were joined by Lisa Batiashvili, whose performance proved to be nothing less than outstanding. A heightened sense of expectancy from orchestra—not least ominous timpani—and soloist alike had the first movement off to an excellent start, its promise fully repaid. Not only did Batiashvili offer as darkly focused a line as one could wish for, the way in which it was spun made one eager for more. The darkness of key—for various reasons, B minor is not so common for strings—registered from all concerned, brass as much as strings. There was plenty of Mendelssohnian light too, though, added to which I heard an intriguing sense, born perhaps of common Mendelssohnian roots, a common key, and the conductor’s identity, of affinity with Elgar.

The slow movement came very much as response: contrast, yes, but necessary rather than arbitrary. The violin’s lovely siciliano duetting with woodwind could hardly fail to delight with such all-round excellence of playing. Not that it was all sweetness and light: there were beautiful, meaningful shadows cast too, yet within appropriate bounds. Above all, it sang. There was, moreover, a fine sense of difference, of particularity, of key, both in work and performance. There may be no harmonic shocks here, but there were plenty of harmonic surprises, so long as one listened. Batiashvili’s closing harmonics proved both of this world—Saint-Saëns is not really a composer for transcendence—and yet suggestive, not unlike Berlioz in L’Enfance du Christ, of a childhood longing for something beyond.

A passionate violin cry managed to cut through even the noisiest of coughing and chatter to silence—eventually—the audience for the finale. Stylish and propulsive, this was a finale in more than name, Barenboim’s often unremarked excellence as an accompanist—how could it be otherwise, given his decades of experience at the piano?—as crucial as the soloist’s musicianship. All concerned seem to relish its post-Mendelssohnian loveliness. Was there also a hint of the operatic world, of kinship with Berlioz and even, as presentiment, Puccini, however coincidental? There was, wisely, no straining at non-existent depth, this fine performance emerging all the better for it, taking the concerto for what it is rather than for what someone else might prefer it to be.

Barenboim has a long history with the ‘Organ’ Symphony, having recorded it a good number of years ago in Chicago. Here he conducted it from memory—and it showed, given with all the care and first-hand acquaintance Barenboim would offer Beethoven or Schubert. Hand on heart, I cannot say it is a work that entirely convinces me, but it has plenty of interest; indeed, not unlike Liszt, to whom he clearly owes much here and to whose memory the work is dedicated, Saint-Saëns can be of considerable interest in his (relative) failures too. The performance, though—to a certain extent, listening too—is in many respects an opportunity to put the case for the defence. Barenboim and his orchestra certainly did that, from a perfectly judged opening string crescendo and diminuendo—expectancy once more—to the showmanship and resonance of the close. A rapt quality to the second section of the first movement—the second movement of four, if you prefer to consider its form more traditionally—once again brought Elgar, even Mahler, to mind; for what a string section this is! Barenboim often did little, but one could tell that the orchestra was doing what he required. By letting the music speak so ‘naturally’—whatever hard work that may mask—Barenboim and his players assented to the truth voiced in the composer’s memoir, École buissonnière: ‘Music is something beyond a source of sensuous pleasure and keenly-felt emotion ... He who does not derive absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not truly fond of music.’

Harmony, then, afforded its ‘own’ pleasure; yet when Barenboim actively conducted the music, taking it by the scruff of its neck, it might almost have been Wagner. For the second of Saint-Saëns’s prescribed two movements opened with all the urgency of a new dramatic act, the Presto part of that opening section reminding us, as so often with Barenboim and this orchestra, that clarity and litheness need entail no sacrifice to depth of tone. If you are trading one for the other, you should probably find another trade. The organ chords (Christian Schmitt) and piano arpeggios of the movement’s second section certainly had impact, although—and this has nothing to do with the quality of the performance—I could not help but reflect how Liszt would have been excoriated, had he written anything quite so vulgar. Counterpoint, at any rate, proved clear and directed, and the sound was quite magnificent.

Prom 43: Batiashvili/Dreisig/WEDO/Barenboim - Tchaikovsky, Coleman, and Scriabin, 14 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

 
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin, op.24: Polonaise
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, op.35
David Robert Coleman: Looking for Palestine (2017-18)
Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy, op.54

Elsa Dreisig (soprano)

Lisa Batiashvili (violin)

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Can music lie? Conversely, can it tell the truth? Are those meaningless questions, confusions of category? Most of us, I think, would agree that music can mislead and that it can also lay claim to truth content. It was certainly a relief to spend a couple of hours away from the lies that infest our political and ‘media’ life, to experience the truthfulness of great musicianship.

 

A late addition to the printed programme was the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin. It made for just as splendid an overture as it might have done an encore. Daniel Barenboim has a splendid history with this opera and with Tchaikovsky more generally. With his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra too I heard perhaps the best live performance I have yet to experience of the Sixth Symphony. Moreover, the first time I heard the orchestra live, at the LRB’s Edward Said Memorial Concert in 2004, the Fifth was on the programme. Here heard – almost saw – the swagger of St Petersburg: for once with an unashamedly large, generous orchestra. There was seductive intimacy too: those stolen glances, aural and almost visual, telling us much. And those cellos…

 

The Violin Concerto took off, so it seemed, from where the Polonaise had left us: stylistically, even developmentally, there was much in common, yet also of course much to distinguish. Barenboim provided an almost Beethovenian sense of purpose to take us up to Lisa Batiashvili’s entry. Her tone struck me throughout as akin to a fine red Burgundy: rich yet never too full-bodied, cultivated, always hitting the spot – and the dead centre of the notes, single – or double-stopped, without so much as a hint of the clinical. Rubato was perfectly judged as a tool of expression, as were Barenboim’s variations of tempo. The cadenza might have been written, as well as performed, ‘in real time’, such was the sense, however illusory, of spontaneity. Freshness of woodwind solos was just as striking, each and every one of them revealing a star in the best, collegiate sense. Likewise in the Canzonetta, in which Batiashvili’s duetting with them proved the magical highlight of highlights, and the finale. Even in a performance such as this, I cannot say that Tchaikovsky’s invention, or lack thereof, quite convinces. There is surely a good deal of note-spinning. It came closer than I can recall, though, and this was exquisite spinning of notes, with all the character of a great finale.

 

David Robert Coleman’s Looking for Palestine sets passages from Najla Said’s – that is Edward’s daughter’s – one-woman play Palestine. First she bears witness to the vicious Israeli onslaught upon Lebanon in 2006 – vigorously supported, you may remember, by Tony Blair and New Labour. ‘You can spend your life being a humanist, a pacifist … treating them the same way you wish to be treated BUT when you are being attacked, when bombs are falling … your life is in danger and you are scared, it is so easy to look up at the sky and scream at the top of your lungs’. Later, in New York City, she discovers a group protesting for Palestinian rights – her rights – without being able to contribute: ‘ME, I am this Palestinian walking by them all with my mouth slightly open, because I want to do, say, give, something, SOMETHING, and I’m thinking how I can’t, and shouldn’t at that what WOULD I do, say? And I’m thinking that words are so powerful, Palestine … Palestine … that word … that word … that word …’

 

Words are indeed powerful, as is music; so too is their combination. Here, the oud sets up the musical setting – and, in a sense, the words to come too. Its intervals, in the solo introduction, seem generative, leading to more non-verbal speech – or is it? is that to render things too easy, to sentimentalise? – from the fine WEDO brass section. As well as the oud, piano, harps, percussion seem to incite the rest of the orchestra – perhaps to look for Palestine too. The soprano’s introduction in turn – ‘And though I have never returned to Palestine, Palestine always returns to me. Tuesday, July eleventh, I am in Beirut.’ – incites both action and remembrance. (Remembrance, we may reflect, is sometimes all we have, for better or worse.) Coleman’s setting here, Elsa Dreisig complemented, perhaps even questioned by, electronics, came closer to Nono than anything I had yet heard Barenboim conduct. It would be quite a thing were he to take up those particular cudgels now from his erstwhile friend and colleague, Claudio Abbado. Like Nono, Coleman, in the three short ‘scenes’ that follow, evinces a keen sense of that ineffable thing we call ‘vocal style’. It may or may not correspond to anything we have heard before; yet, even if we cannot explain it, we know it – at least in a fine performance, which this certainly seemed to be. There was, perhaps, also a sense of post-Bergian writing for voice and orchestra – certainly harmony – as the first scene went on. Amplified speech at the opening of the second came across as reimagined recitative. Was there a bit of the easy film score towards its close? Perhaps, but one might well argue that the words suggest such an approach.

 

An amplified ‘stage whisper’, in the introduction to the third scene – ‘I think’ – called into question even the identity Said/Dreisig had established for herself, post 9/11, as an ‘Arab bridging the gap between two worlds that don’t understand each other’. Ligetian scurrying and swarming, a whip that – if only to me – evoked Alberich in Nibelheim, traffic whistles: all this and more went to suggest the aural urban landscape of Manhattan, even what Nono would have called his ‘provocation’. Was the final, vaguely ‘Arabic’ vocal line a sign or an indictment of Orientalism? That such a question, clearly presented, was left hanging was perhaps the most telling aspect of all.

 

Finally, at least on the programme, came Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. Barenboim and his orchestra proved once again very much in their element. Work and performance opened somewhere between Wagner and Debussy, and immediately headed somewhere beyond them – whatever one thinks of that particular ‘beyond’. Yes, I thought, he ‘gets’ Scriabin. An urgent, undeniably hot-house performance, founded on rhythmic progression and above all on the progression of harmonic rhythm, seemed in just the right sense to ‘go with the flow’, or better, to ride the crest of these strange, even gaudy aural waves. Until languor set in, that is, and how, Michael Barenboim’s sweet toned violin solos very much the icing on that particular cake. Overloading with metaphors seems inevitable here, even in stylistic keeping. Immediacy of colour, initial Tannhäuser-like frustration of climax, trumpets and brass more general with old-fashioned ‘Russian’ vibrato, all led us up to a series of final climaxes which may or may not be ludicrous – but which are surely what Scriabin ‘meant’.

 

After that, the unforced nobility of a generous ‘Nimrod’ spoke more clearly and, yes, more truthfully than any words could. Now it was over to us, but would Elgar’s countrymen listen?