Royal Festival Hall, London
Childhood friends Barenboim and Argerich conjured unforgettable magic, while Lisa Batiashvili was an electrifying soloist later in the week
The leader handed his violin to a colleague for safekeeping and pulled his chair up to the piano, ready to act as page-turner. Someone brought on a second stool and some music. By now the capacity audience at the Royal Festival Hall, on their feet applauding Martha Argerich’s transparent, muscular, lithe account of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, realised what was about to happen. This humdrum shifting of furniture would precede an exceptional musical moment, the sort that gives you reason to stay alive.
Daniel Barenboim, who had just conducted Argerich as soloist with his orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, had abandoned the podium for one of his favourite activities: a piano duet with his colleague and frequent duo partner, Argerich herself. Childhood friends, born a year apart in Buenos Aires, they rank as two of the world’s golden musicians as well as incomparable pianists. One is everywhere all the time, sorting out the world, talking, arguing, writing, debating, smiling, snarling, playing the piano and, mostly, conducting, usually from memory. The other, almost a recluse, is prone to cancellations, her performances rare and treasured, her pre-concert nerves and evident shyness part of her DNA, hidden behind long tresses, even if her playing has unmatched authority, boldness and brilliance.
To see them performing chamber music for what felt like three thousand close friends in the Royal Festival Hall, including their fellow musicians in the orchestra who looked on with fondness and awe, was to switch from public to private. They played Schubert’s Rondo in A, a masterpiece of his huge piano duet output. He has a way of making time stand still, or at least making it feel as if his music’s “heavenly length” (Schumann’s consummate phrase) is in no hurry to reach its destination, just an ideal way to pass a companionable afternoon in Biedermeier Vienna. Schubert wrote the Rondo in June 1828. By November he was dead.
Barenboim, touchingly protective of Argerich – you could see him asking more than once if she was all right – took the upper part. When only his right hand was required, he leant close to his partner, left hand resting on the back of Argerich’s piano stool in easy intimacy. The magic they conjured had nothing to do with perfection, whatever that is. Smudges and odd missed notes, at this level of musicianship, are as unimportant as a stray hair or speck of dust. Barenboim brings out the best in her, she in him.
Their Beethoven, heedless of period performance preoccupations but crisp, agile, with hushed accompaniments, especially in the opening, revelled in detail, never losing sense of the whole and displaying, above all, the work’s invention. No one trumps Beethoven in transforming simple ingredients – repeated notes, scales, an almost cliched military trumpet call – into prized originality. The final Rondo, potentially tiresome, was at once impulsive and witty.
In the first of this pair of Southbank concerts, the Staatskapelle regained the spotlight for Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a troubling, bumptious tone poem in six sections which can outstay its welcome. With a solo violinist (and brave page-turner) of the quality ofWolfram Brandl, together with outstanding, rich-toned strings and resilient ensemble throughout, it became far more persuasive.
This puzzling work seethes, almost suppurates, with detail. The bigger picture, of the swaggering hero, is far less interesting than the virtuosity of the orchestration. It may not win your sympathy but it inspires astonishment. Barenboim, not incapable of the odd moment of swagger himself, embraced the score full-on, in often playful exuberance. At times he observed Strauss’s own instructions to conductors (the composer was also a maestro), which included keeping his left hand in his waistcoat pocket, from which “it should only emerge to restrain or make some minor gesture”. At others Barenboim was like an uncaged beast, enacting a range of mimetic gestures, from waving away wild dogs to shaking a rug and smoothing sand. He strides across the podium, clicks his heels, bends as if to dive into the orchestra, who carry on either regardless, willing, petrified or, most likely, all three. And people think classical music concerts are dull.
The whooping horns and voluptuous, jubilant brass brought to mind the world of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, a similar mix of the comic and the almost grotesquely human. At the end, ever the showman, Barenboim played grandmother’s footsteps with the person bringing on his bouquet, wanting to invite each section of the orchestra to take a deserved bow and reeling round lest the flower-carrier steal this moment of team praise for his Berliners. Strauss’s score, we should not forget, in its rhythmic and harmonic volatility, is hideously tricky to play, even for an ensemble of this order. Finally Barenboim accepted the big bunch of flowers and fought with it until eventually he pulled free a yellow-white rose, turning himself into a Rosenkavalier and presenting it to Brandl, his smiling leader.
On Tuesday there was more theatre, as ever with Barenboim; unpredictable and of another kind. Lisa Batiashvili was the ferocious soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, intense in the first movement, luminous and heartfelt in the second, scintillating in the quickfire finale. It was a faultless performance, enthralling and electrifying. The revelation was how this proud German orchestra suddenly became Russian in timbre: in the slow movement, the woodwind – clarinet and bassoon especially – took on a more reedy, musty sound associated with a different, eastern European school of playing. In the tender Canzonetta, with its quietly sobbing accompaniment, Batiashivili played as if singing an aria. We were in the melancholy landscape of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, premiered in 1879, a year after the violin concerto.
Elgar has always meant a great deal to Barenboim. The Berlin Staatskapelle residency ended with his Symphony No 2 in E flat, which they have already recorded together. Lurching and surging, the opening movement exploded into life with nervy anger and little of the serene grandeur we mistakenly expect from Elgar. The third-movement Rondo, especially, took on a febrile, urgent mood, with drunken syncopations and maniacal energy. The world-weary sadness of the ending prompted a deep, appreciative rather than excitable response.
Then a man came on with a microphone for more unexpected action. Barenboim was presented with the medal of the Elgar Society. He has received quite a few medals, he said, but this was one that meant an enormous amount. His career – or at least his public profile, especially in this country – began when he conducted his wife, Jacqueline du Pré, in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Fittingly, Christopher Nupen, who made films of the couple, including the Elgar and the famous Trout Quintet performance of the young Danny, Jackie and musician friends in their gilded youth, was in the Festival Hall audience. Barenboim does not often speak about his late wife. He knew this was the moment. Some of us, right now, are thinking of one of the great Elgarians, he said, adding: “She would have been 70 this year.” No encore was needed.
Barenboim will be back for the BBC Proms, where the Elgar bug is spreading. TheDream of Gerontius is being performed by none other than the Vienna Philharmonic, under the baton of… Simon Rattle. If he works hard, Rattle may earn an Elgar Society medal too, but he has a little catching up to do.
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