Barenboim delivers an exotically perfumed orgy
Daniel Barenboim has always been adamant that his West-eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of students drawn from across the terrible Arab-israeli divide, has no political aim: its purpose is solely to unite young people in the making of music.
By commissioning a work from David Robert Coleman, the Britishgerman composer, entitled Looking for Palestine, to a text by the Arabamerican Najla Said, one might have thought he was finally entering the fray. What transpired, however, was hardly likely to send anyone rushing to the barricades.
Composed for a soprano soloist subject to occasional outbursts of speech and accompanied by a large orchestra with an obbligato for the Arabic lute or oud, this is a 20-minute cantata focused on an individual’s confusion of cultural identity, expressing bewilderment and anxiety rather than anger or blame.
Coleman writes in the arcanely modernist idiom of his late master Pierre Boulez – wide intervals, no tonality, extremes of pitch, no regular metrical pulse – and the effect is mint-cool and aesthetically distanced. It made little impact. Perhaps the score would deliver more in a less daunting environment: despite the perfectly poised singing of Elsa Dreisig, the words and their import evaporated in the Albert Hall’s cavernous auditorium. This is one of those occasions where music seems to obfuscate a text rather than illuminate it.
The concert had begun with what should have been an encore – the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, played rather stolidly without much in the way of glamour, swagger or rubato. But there was nothing four-square about what followed – a superlative performance of the same composer’s Violin Concerto, played with wonderful delicacy and sensitivity by Lisa Batiashvili. Barenboim himself was visibly wowed by a virtuosity passing through a silvery shimmer of sound in the slow movement to a red-blooded, freewheeling exuberance in the finale.
The orchestra had its turn in the spotlight for Scriabin’s Poème de l’extase. Charged with masonic gobbledegook, this is a piece of high pretension that probably doesn’t stand up to close intellectual analysis. Yet it enchants and seduces: “Nonsense, yes,” as Lady Jane puts it in Patience, “but oh! what precious nonsense”. Under Barenboim’s warm and lithe baton, it sounded febrile, tumescent and glowing, as a solo trumpet (brilliantly played here) offered a siren call to an exotically perfumed and kaleidoscopically coloured orgy that the orchestra delivered with thrilling sensuous abandon.