Mutter/Ma/WEDO/Barenboim - Beethoven and Bruckner, 23 October 2019

Philharmonie

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 200^th 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.

Berlin Festtage (1) - Ma/Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim: Dvořák and Elgar, 23 March 2016

 

 

Philharmonie

Dvořák – Cello Concerto in B minor, op.104

Elgar – Symphony no.2 in E-flat major, op.63

 Yo-Yo Ma (cello)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

My visit to this year’s Festtage was somewhat curtailed; given the earliness of Easter, I was unable to get away earlier. (Yes, I know that sympathy will be a little limited.) I was very sorry to miss a Mahler concert from Daniel Barenboim, the Vienna Philharmonic, and Jonas Kaufmann. In any case, this concert, my doubts concerning one of the works notwithstanding, offered ample compensation. Indeed, although I am no more convinced by Dvořák’s Cello Concerto as a work than I was before, the excellence of the performance from Yo-Yo Ma, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and Barenboim matched that of Elgar’s Second Symphony in the second half. I could not help but think it a pity they had not played Elgar’s Cello Concerto instead, or, for that matter, some Haydn, but never mind.

 

It was, of course, a pleasure in itself to hear Ma: believe it or not, my first opportunity in the flesh; it was an equal pleasure to hear the Staatskapelle’s fabled sound, to my ears preferable to that of the city’s still-more-celebrated orchestra, at least nowadays, in this music. In the introduction to the concerto’s first movement, the orchestra sounded darkly brooding, as if the instantiation of a dark German (or, insofar as it might be different, Bohemian) wood. Barenboim, Dvořák’s digressions (even here!) notwithstanding, gave us a sense that, with a pinch or two of salt, we might discern some roots in Beethoven. Hushed expectancy was combined with exultant lyricism. There could, moreover, be no doubting the extension of that lyricism with Ma’s entry, likewise no doubting that we were in the company of a great cellist. It was perhaps the moments of quiet ecstasy beautifully cushioned by the strings, sometimes duetting with equally outstanding woodwind, that were most touching, but Ma’s ardent Romanticism, always focused, never blowsy or grandstanding, was just as impressive. Gorgeous horn calls, straight out of Tannhäuser, were as great a pleasure as anything else. There was a splendid sense of give-and-take, at times almost as if Ma and Barenboim were making chamber music.

 

The second movement had a passionate songfulness about it that looked forward to Elgar, and yet retained, not least through the offices of the Staatskapelle’s woodwind, a truly vernal quality. Not that the grander moments were underchanged, of course; indeed, soloist and orchestra alike relished the interplay. And what a beautifully variegated palette it was from which Ma painted. Barenboim, meanwhile, clearly relished those occasional moments of Tristan-like chromaticism. (If only they had more meaning!) Brahms was an ever-present influence too, of course, still more so in the finale, even given Lisztian excess on the triangle. Barenboim seemed especially keen to draw out other Lisztian elements too, much to the work’s advantage, although even he could not really impart much coherence to this movement. The nobility of Ma’s solo line could not be gainsaid; I doubt anyone would have tried.

 

The performance of the Elgar Symphony was, I think, the greatest of any Elgar symphony, perhaps even any work by Elgar, I have heard. Forget the insularity of ‘English music’; this was music, and great music at that. From the outset, we not only heard ‘Edward Elgar, Modernist’ to quote the title of the study by my Royal Holloway colleague, J.P.E. Harper-Scott; Elgar, modernist, even radical, was thrust to the fore of our consciousness whether we liked it or no. (Perhaps that was why a significant number of the audience left; I should like to think so. Sadly, I suspect that it was spießig incomprehension of Elgar tout court.) Barenboim took the movement, at least to begin with, at an ‘authentically’ Elgarian lick: no sentimentality here, or indeed elsewhere. Even here, however, this was an Elgar with Straussian knowledge, harmonic as well as colouristic, insofar as the two may be separated. And then, how he – Barenboim, that is, but also, Elgar – yielded, the music sounding, despite its meter, as if it were something approaching a slow waltz. We all know about Edward Elgar, German; too few of us remember Edward Elgar, Tchaikovskian. There was flexibility aplenty then, but directed flexibility. Aspirant climaxes underlined that composer and conductor alike knew their Wagner. Dark moments of phantasmagorical mystery sounded far more enigmatic than anything in a certain set of Variations. Given Barenboim’s Brahmsian credentials, I was struck by how un-Brahmsian it all sounded. This sounded nothing like the Elgar of Adrian Boult? It perhaps sounded, if you can imagine such a thing, more like a Frau ohne Schatten Fantasy that actually worked. If Strauss were not so surprising a composer to come to mind, Szymanowski was – and sounded all the more welcome for it. (Has Barenboim conducted his music? If not, he should.)

 

The second movement offered a similar – yet different – holding together of the material, despite its sometimes extreme disintegrative tendencies, compositional and performative. In that sense, I thought of late Beethoven. There was certainly no taking an easy road here. Roots in German Romanticism needed no underlining; rather Elgar and such roots appeared to renew their vows in a vision that sounded well-nigh Schoenbergian. (If only Barenboim’s great friend, Pierre Boulez, could have heard this performance, maybe he would have given Elgar a second thought. Or maybe not.) And yet, that side, those sides, were of course not all; climaxes at which a melody could sing, even perhaps momentarily triumph, spoke of Brahms and Schumann, not Mahler or Schoenberg. Well, sort of anyway; they really spoke of Elgar. It was, nevertheless, the liminal passages, not entirely un-Mahlerian, that seemed to lie at the heart of this extraordinary interpretation (i.e., Barenboim) and performance (i.e., the Staatskapelle Berlin).

Elgar’s scherzo opened as if it were a darker, perhaps more complex (!), Till Eulenspiegel. Outwardly, that is, for Elgar is not a composer to share Strauss’s materialism. It soon, of course, developed into something quite different, and crucially, continued to develop: this was a symphony, no doubt about it, Mendelssohn perhaps, subjected to and liberated by a modernist nightmare. Militarism, if we can call it that, sounded as the indictment it surely is – I doubt any of us, thank God, possesses the troubled imagination to conjure up an ‘Edward Elgar, Blairite’ – but there was nothing programmatic about what we heard. The finale seemed to offer the prospect of something good-natured, even Haydn-like. But triumph was long denied; this was an arduous path, just as it must be. Harmony, as always with Barenboim’s greatest performances, drove what we heard, made it possible. I suspect that his detractors, whether in Beethoven or here, have little understanding of that. Who cares? One does not need to be able to name the chords and their progressions to feel their import. What one needs is a receptive ear and the willingness to listen.