Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich - two of the starry young names of the nineteen-sixties when Peter Diamand was running the Edinburgh Festival - are starrier than ever. Each in Diamand’s day was a startlingly precocious Argentine pianist.
Barenboim memorably played Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations at the Usher Hall. Argerich sped like a meteor through Schumann and Prokofiev. Born within a year of each other in Buenos Aires, they are now in their seventies and still in full command of their musical faculties. As conductor of the Berlin Staatsoper, Barenboim brought his Ring cycle to last year’s London proms, showing his abilities to be split to perfection between one side of his career and the other. As director of her own extraordinary festival in Switzerland, Argerich assiduously nurtures new talent alongside her own.
Together, whenever they can, they play piano duets of the highest calibre, and their recent evening of Mozart, Schubert, and Stravinsky in the inspirational surroundings of Berlin’s Philharmonie has been preserved on DVD.
Do not fail to add it to your collection, for it is a triumph of its kind. Mozart’s Sonata in D major, K448, is frolicsome, tender, and adoring. Schubert’s A flat major Variations, D813, sound touchingly sweet, modest, and, like all Schubert’s musical modesties, gloriously inspired (sample, for confirmation, their playing of the great, late A major Rondo on You Tube).
But it is The Rite of Spring, of course, which is the programme’s tour de force. Flamboyantly presented on two pianos, rather than on the single keyboard for which it was originally written, it gains new, sensationally impressionistic colouring in the process, in the same way as Sviatoslav Richter’s playing of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition somehow transcended Ravel’s and other orchestral versions.
Reducing the Rite to piano tone here does not reduce its impact but, if anything, almost increases it. How Barenboim and Argerich manage it is uncanny, and the sight of them side by side in close-up is part of the experience.
14 April 2015
Barenboim memorably played Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations at the Usher Hall. Argerich sped like a meteor through Schumann and Prokofiev. Born within a year of each other in Buenos Aires, they are now in their seventies and still in full command of their musical faculties. As conductor of the Berlin Staatsoper, Barenboim brought his Ring cycle to last year’s London proms, showing his abilities to be split to perfection between one side of his career and the other. As director of her own extraordinary festival in Switzerland, Argerich assiduously nurtures new talent alongside her own.
Together, whenever they can, they play piano duets of the highest calibre, and their recent evening of Mozart, Schubert, and Stravinsky in the inspirational surroundings of Berlin’s Philharmonie has been preserved on DVD.
Do not fail to add it to your collection, for it is a triumph of its kind. Mozart’s Sonata in D major, K448, is frolicsome, tender, and adoring. Schubert’s A flat major Variations, D813, sound touchingly sweet, modest, and, like all Schubert’s musical modesties, gloriously inspired (sample, for confirmation, their playing of the great, late A major Rondo on You Tube).
But it is The Rite of Spring, of course, which is the programme’s tour de force. Flamboyantly presented on two pianos, rather than on the single keyboard for which it was originally written, it gains new, sensationally impressionistic colouring in the process, in the same way as Sviatoslav Richter’s playing of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition somehow transcended Ravel’s and other orchestral versions.
Reducing the Rite to piano tone here does not reduce its impact but, if anything, almost increases it. How Barenboim and Argerich manage it is uncanny, and the sight of them side by side in close-up is part of the experience.
14 April 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a message. I would be very pleased to hear your thoughts and comments.