Stellar music-making and a dash of mischief from Barenboim
Staatskapelle Berlin Royal Albert Hall
When Daniel Barenboim visits the Proms, you can be sure the temperature will rise on every front – musical, emotional and political. He always brings some bigger ambition, some symbolic joining of music to the world.
On this occasion, when he conducted two concerts with the Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra, the underlying theme was the value of a pan-european culture. “We have to fight this terrible tendency to fanaticism and isolationism,” he said from the podium. “Education is the key, through music.”
This speech came after two concerts of absolutely stellar music-making, which made Barenboim’s point eloquently. Here we had a German orchestra, playing what are perhaps the greatest symphonies composed by an Englishman – the First and Second Symphonies by Edward Elgar – composed on the eve of a titanic and tragic war between the two nations.
I’ve rarely heard the surging force of the first movement of the Second Symphony flung out with such magnificent energy, and the sound throughout was refulgent, glowing and crystal-clear.
Sustaining the long melodic line in Germanic romantic music has always been one of Barenboim’s strengths. These performances were a reminder of how important that line is in Elgar’s music, too, above all in the magnificent slow movement of the First Symphony, which in Barenboim’s hands took on a truly Wagnerian amplitude.
But Elgar’s two symphonies weren’t the only glory of the two concerts. There was also a magnificently lithe and lyrical performance of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto from Lisa Batiashvili, which caught the heroic stature of the music without any sense of strain. And there was the latest work from Harrison Birtwistle, Deep Time.
The work was inspired by the vast slowness of geological time, and the way it is occasionally riven by sudden catastrophes. The piece revealed a more human scale, with a melancholy cor anglais solo arousing memories of Birtwistle’s earlier processionals.
So, a deeply serious pair of concerts, but there’s a mischievous streak in Barenboim too. He played Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No1 as an encore, twice. So as well as dominating the Proms’ first weekend, he stole the Last Night’s thunder as well.
Hear these Proms on the BBC iplayer. All Proms are broadcast live on BBC Radio 3