Seen and Heard International
Concert Review
Wagner, Schoenberg, and Beethoven:
Daniel Barenboim, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Verizon Hall, Philadelphia,
11 May 2005 (BJ)
No less eloquent in words than he is through music, Daniel Barenboim
has spoken vividly on more than one occasion about the relationship
between sound and silence. His conception of how one must emerge
from the other was clearly embodied at the start of the program
when he brought the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Philadelphia
in the course of what is presumably his last tour as its music
director.
The opening work was the prelude to Parsifal, which showed
us the orchestra in superb fettle. No one section stands out with
especial impact from the rest, and this is in itself a measure
of how the group has grown in refinement since Barenboim took
over its leadership a decade and a half ago. His predecessor,
Georg Solti, was a charismatic performer who galvanized the CSO
to new peaks of virtuosity, and enhanced its international reputation
with a first-ever European tour in 1971 and many subsequent appearances
and recordings of note. But in his last years nuance came increasingly
to be neglected in favor of sheer power, to the point where the
orchestra seemed to command only two dynamic levels: fortissimo
and mezzo-forte; in Chicago performances under Solti
that I heard around 1990 there was nothing between those dynamic
levels, and certainly nothing below.
Barenboim has changed all that. Instead of just two dynamics,
there is now a seemingly inexhaustible range from the grandest
fff to the tiniest ppp, and with it there is
a greatly expanded and subtly responsive sensitivity to every
shade of artistic expression including the most delicate. The
brass, which formerly seemed to be the only section in the orchestra
that anyone talked about, now takes its place in the ensemble
sound as an equal partner–it has lost none of its strength
and brilliance, even after the retirement of Adolph Herseth, who
for half a century bestrode the far from narrow world of orchestral
principal trumpeters like a colossus. The woodwinds, despite recently
losing the services of the gifted young Brazilian oboist Alex
Klein to one of those hand malfunctions sadly familiar to those
who have followed the careers of pianists Gary Graffman and Leon
Fleisher, are a beautifully integrated and individually polished
body of musicians. The string choir, without calling undue attention
to itself, is magnificently unanimous and resonant, and the percussionists
do brilliantly everything that is demanded of them. Much, indeed,
was demanded in the first half of the program, which concluded
with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.
During this first half, I cannot help feeling, the performances
– visionary and exalted in the Wagner, fluid and iridescent
in the Schoenberg – were better than the music. With regard
to Wagner’s Parsifal, with its melange of portentous
religiosity with moments of Schmutzigkeit, I confess
to a warm sympathy for Spike Hughes, who was taken by his mother
to a performance of the work in his teens, and who reported in
his autobiography: “I fell asleep several times during the
performance of this revolting work, which lasts twice as long
as Holy Week and Lent put together.”
Schoenberg, and the Second Viennese School in general, have meanwhile
stood at the heart of Barenboim’s 20th-century programming,
alongside his commitment to Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter above
all other composers of our own time. These predilections reflect
a predominantly intellectual taste in contemporary music. Though
preferable to certain other conductors’ weakness for cheap
accessibility in their programming choices, it is, I think, a
one-sided taste, which has deprived Barenboim’s audiences
of much that is rewarding in the music of the last hundred years.
Still, his dedication has been honorably unswerving, and it will
have left, in Chicago, a public perhaps better attuned than most
to music as a living art, and, in its orchestra, an ensemble superbly
capable of serving that art.
As to the second half of this magnificent concert, I have only
one cavil to express about the performance of Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony, and that concerns Barenboim’s omission
of several important repeats. For the rest, this was music-making
of an utterly thrilling nature. Tempos, especially in the scherzo,
were on the brisk side, but never excessively so, and there was
about the whole thing a sense of the kind of risk-taking–of
the embrace of danger–that we encounter too rarely in performances
of the classical repertoire, but that is surely central to any
adequate representation of the spirit of Beethoven.
In the relatively modest sphere of the critical profession, I
have always enjoyed going out on a limb. Back in 1970, when Barenboim,
then a stripling of 28, conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
for the first time, I ventured the opinion that, in 50 years'
time, we would be talking about Barenboim in the kind of terms
formerly reserved for Weingartner, Nikisch, and Furtwängler.
As long ago as 1980, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, the late Stanley Sadie, having alluded to
earlier suggestions that Barenboim's music-making was too romantic
in its flexibility, observed: "It became clear that this
readiness of response disclosed an urgent, percipient and thoughtful
musicianship, which as it matured acquired a better sense of perspective;
the frequent comparisons with Furtwängler (whom Barenboim
has long admired) began to seem less extravagant."
By the evidence not just of that statement, but of the performances
we were privileged to hear on this occasion, he seems to have
beaten my speculative deadline by a handy margin. An ovation of
a spontaneous enthusiasm rarely exhibited in staid old Philadelphia
was rewarded with a quicksilver encore in the shape of the scherzo
from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
music. After the music came the words. In an on-stage conversation,
the Kimmel Center’s programming director, Mervon Mehta,
managed as he always does to avoid the trivialization that bedevils
too many interviews. He drew from Barenboim a discourse of combined
warmth, humor, modesty, and passion for human brotherhood and
artistic integrity that left the audience scarcely less moved
and exhilarated than it had been by the concert itself.
Bernard Jacobson
