Richard Morrison’s substantial interview with Daniel Barenboim in The Times this week was a journalistic work of art.
In the days when the chance to write a Barenboim interview used to come my way - around half a century ago - I thought him very hard work. For a start, he had almost nothing to say, and what he did say was usually a statement of the obvious. Despairing, sometimes unscrupulous, journalists tended to put words into his mouth and pretend he had actually said them. He was, from boyhood onwards, the finest of performers, but meeting him was invariably a disappointment and something to be avoided.
Writing about a Barenboim performance was much easier. Mozart’s last piano concerto, played with the gentlest, most luminous finesse with Alexander Gibson and the SNO, still sticks in the mind, as also does. very differently, the time he cut his his thumb on a bottle of beer just before playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on the opening Sunday of the Edinburgh Festival, yet performed it imperially, his thumb conspicuously bandaged, improvising new fingerings, again with Gibson as conductor in the Usher Hall.
So, once he had started his conducting career, he gave a ravishing account of Boulez’s Rituel as prelude to The Rite of of Spring at the end of one of Peter Diamand’s Edinburgh festivals. As conductor of Edinburgh Festival Opera - another Diamand caprice - he gave us a Marriage of Figaro gloriously sung, but so mature in its casting that one critic hailed it as Figaro’s Golden Wedding. Joined by Peter Ustinov as director, he later presented a very eccentric Don Giovanni with the violinist Leonard Friedman leading the costumed on-stage band on the roof of Giovanni’s revolving villa.
It was shortly before that performance that I flew to London to discuss the forthcoming production with Ustinov and Barenboim in a busy trattoria in Victoria. Ustinov predictably, did most of the talking, wittily dwelling on Mozart’s stage directions and digressing about Massenet’s Don Quixote, which he had just directed at the Paris Opera, expressively humming its famous cello solo to the delight of the restaurant’s neighbouring customers. From Barenboim came the occasional interjection - some of them, so I fancied, pre-planned - but not much else. Since I’d met him before, I knew what to expect.
During the same period, before conducting the SNO Chorus in a doom-laden account of Brahms’s German Requiem at the Israel Festival, I gave him every opportunity to tell me about his exceptionally dark, Mahler-like interpretation of the work, but little was disclosed. The performance, when it finally took place, said it all - which was much to be preferred to the other way around, but somewhat tantalising all the same.
Even to talk to him about Beethoven - his wunderkind treatment of the Diabelli Variations had been one of his early showpieces in Edinburgh - proved a struggle.
Today, however, everything has changed and Barenboim at 72 has become one of the great musical orators of his time, declaiming with authority about Wagner and Bruckner, about music and politics, about modern conditions in Germany, where he is in command of the Berlin State Opera and Berlin Staatskapelle. and where he recently failed to apply for the vacant conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic because it was not something he needed. His latest piano, which bears his name, was played by him in a recent Schubert cycle in London. His Schubert duets - particularly the late A major Rondo with his compatriot Martha Argerich as partner - provide some of the most revelatory and tender experiences in modern pianism .
He is now so busy that Richard Morrison had to interview him on board the Eurostar - with the most rewarding result. Read it and be enlightened.
13 August 2015
In the days when the chance to write a Barenboim interview used to come my way - around half a century ago - I thought him very hard work. For a start, he had almost nothing to say, and what he did say was usually a statement of the obvious. Despairing, sometimes unscrupulous, journalists tended to put words into his mouth and pretend he had actually said them. He was, from boyhood onwards, the finest of performers, but meeting him was invariably a disappointment and something to be avoided.
Writing about a Barenboim performance was much easier. Mozart’s last piano concerto, played with the gentlest, most luminous finesse with Alexander Gibson and the SNO, still sticks in the mind, as also does. very differently, the time he cut his his thumb on a bottle of beer just before playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on the opening Sunday of the Edinburgh Festival, yet performed it imperially, his thumb conspicuously bandaged, improvising new fingerings, again with Gibson as conductor in the Usher Hall.
So, once he had started his conducting career, he gave a ravishing account of Boulez’s Rituel as prelude to The Rite of of Spring at the end of one of Peter Diamand’s Edinburgh festivals. As conductor of Edinburgh Festival Opera - another Diamand caprice - he gave us a Marriage of Figaro gloriously sung, but so mature in its casting that one critic hailed it as Figaro’s Golden Wedding. Joined by Peter Ustinov as director, he later presented a very eccentric Don Giovanni with the violinist Leonard Friedman leading the costumed on-stage band on the roof of Giovanni’s revolving villa.
It was shortly before that performance that I flew to London to discuss the forthcoming production with Ustinov and Barenboim in a busy trattoria in Victoria. Ustinov predictably, did most of the talking, wittily dwelling on Mozart’s stage directions and digressing about Massenet’s Don Quixote, which he had just directed at the Paris Opera, expressively humming its famous cello solo to the delight of the restaurant’s neighbouring customers. From Barenboim came the occasional interjection - some of them, so I fancied, pre-planned - but not much else. Since I’d met him before, I knew what to expect.
During the same period, before conducting the SNO Chorus in a doom-laden account of Brahms’s German Requiem at the Israel Festival, I gave him every opportunity to tell me about his exceptionally dark, Mahler-like interpretation of the work, but little was disclosed. The performance, when it finally took place, said it all - which was much to be preferred to the other way around, but somewhat tantalising all the same.
Even to talk to him about Beethoven - his wunderkind treatment of the Diabelli Variations had been one of his early showpieces in Edinburgh - proved a struggle.
Today, however, everything has changed and Barenboim at 72 has become one of the great musical orators of his time, declaiming with authority about Wagner and Bruckner, about music and politics, about modern conditions in Germany, where he is in command of the Berlin State Opera and Berlin Staatskapelle. and where he recently failed to apply for the vacant conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic because it was not something he needed. His latest piano, which bears his name, was played by him in a recent Schubert cycle in London. His Schubert duets - particularly the late A major Rondo with his compatriot Martha Argerich as partner - provide some of the most revelatory and tender experiences in modern pianism .
He is now so busy that Richard Morrison had to interview him on board the Eurostar - with the most rewarding result. Read it and be enlightened.
13 August 2015
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