Germany Brahms and Schubert: Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), West-Japanese Divan Orchestra / Daniel Barenboim (conductor). Waldbühne Berlin, 9.8.2024. (MB)
Brahms – Violin Concerto in D main, Op.77
Schubert – Symphony No.9 in C main, ‘Nice’, D 944
That it got here near a miracle that this live performance befell in any respect won’t be information to anybody. The West-Japanese Divan Orchestra continues to supply hope, gentle, and crucially listening. It has for me ever since I first heard the gamers in a London memorial live performance for Edward Mentioned, performed (partly from the piano) 20 years in the past, virtually to the day, by co-founder Daniel Barenboim. As Barenboim and Mentioned made clear, it was not straightforwardly a political venture; an orchestra was by no means going to deliver justice to the world or to a part of it. It may, nonetheless, present a method to pay attention to at least one one other in extraordinarily tough – some may need thought, inconceivable – circumstances. That it has now been doing for 25 years. I used to be unable to attend the anniversary live performance right here in Berlin in April, however it helped nonetheless to know that it was happening – and I used to be ready the earlier September to listen to them come collectively as soon as once more to play the three ultimate symphonies of Mozart, performed as (virtually) all the time by Barenboim. It was not a live performance I reviewed, however the ultra-Klemperian efficiency of the E-flat Symphony was the best I’ve ever heard. It compelled one above all to pay attention.
And so, it was a privilege as soon as once more to see, in addition to to listen to, these musicians assemble to carry out Brahms and Schubert with long-term collaborator Anne-Sophie Mutter. Berlin’s Waldbühne is a wierd venue. It was my first go to; earlier plans having been confounded. And it’s actually definitely worth the go to for the ‘expertise’, even when it rains for a part of it, necessitating a sea of umbrellas and the remaining. Within the forest, as its identify suggests, the huge amphitheatre provides no shelter for anybody however the performers; it provides little shelter both, save for the determinedly uninquisitive (by no means underestimate them!) from its Nazi origins and idea. Handel’s Hercules and Eberhard Wolfgang Möller’s Frankenburger Würfelspiel featured right here in 1936, in addition to the Olympic Video games’s gymnastics competitors. Nonetheless, boiling issues down merely to alleged origins is as un-historical as it’s un-musical. Barenboim has by no means been a musician to resort to such pseudo-archaeology, and nor ought to we be. Historical past is, or must be, as a lot about dialogue, about listening, as music.
The main drawback in saying a lot regarding the performances is the required amplification such an unlimited open-air theatre requires. I say that to not complain; if you don’t want to hear an amplified efficiency, don’t attend one. I say it fairly to elucidate why my remarks on the performances might be transient and considerably generalised and can take second place to the ‘occasion’ itself, reflecting the character of the event and my expertise of it. Insofar as I may inform, given the character and penalties of amplification – that ‘insofar’ must be taken as learn or heard for the remaining – Mutter gave a superb efficiency: broad, unmannered, tonally centred all through. Once in a while, she led, however like these round her, she listened; her understanding with the gamers, in addition to Barenboim, drawing on an excellent larger wealth of expertise, was palpable. Barenboim ensured, typically while doing apparently little – he has all the time recognized when to not conduct, in addition to when to take action – that not solely the proportions had been there, however that they had been completely based on concord: one other humanistic, in addition to musical, lesson. The Divan’s strings, as so typically of a larger measurement than one would hear with a ‘regular’ symphony orchestra, produced not solely superb tone, however a real sense of how (comparatively) massed musicians can come collectively to show a lot greater than the sum of their components — once they pay attention, and act on that listening. So too did the remainder of the orchestra, the oboe and different wind solos within the sluggish motion beautiful, but additionally one way or the other symbolic of how particular person voices might proceed to sound and matter when a part of that larger complete.
Barenboim has lengthy been an impressive interpreter of Schubert on the whole, and the ‘Nice’ C main Symphony particularly. A efficiency I heard him give on the Philharmonie, with the Vienna Philharmonic, was with out query the best I had heard, drawing as a lot as his Beethoven on the Furtwänglerian sources of his musicianship. Right here that lineage remained essential, however it was joined – as certainly as has a lot of his symphonic Beethoven over the previous fifteen years or so – by a reunion with one other highly effective affect on his profession, albeit barely later, the aforementioned Otto Klemperer. As with Klemperer, if there might be one thing implacable to the enjoying right here, that didn’t preclude the extra mercurial, not to mention the extra human; it was half and parcel of the identical dialectical conception. And Furtwängler’s famed long-distance listening to or listening (Fernhören, he referred to as it) was simply as obvious, from starting to finish.
Barenboim had no truck with at present modern, frankly idiotic concepts regarding the opening tempo; he trusted the rating, listened to it, and aided his musicians to do likewise. Right here, deep – effectively, not so deep, however one may fancy it was after dusk – within the German forest, horns and different wind took on a magical high quality of their very own, spirits already presaging, like quicksilver strings, the peerlessly chosen and performed encore, the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Evening’s Dream music. The Andante con moto’s size felt really ‘heavenly’, to reprise Schumann’s celebrated description of Schubert’s ‘lengths’: not a second too lengthy, however simply lengthy sufficient. Such Goldilocks proportions characterised the symphony as a complete and in its myriad interrelations, not least between trio and scherzo materials, all with admirable, infectious Schwung. The meteor-like finale thrilled, erupted, and never least, recalling Brahms, glad simply because it ought to. I could not have heard the music fairly as in a live performance corridor, however I used to be drawn in to take heed to it as such.
The orchestra has launched the next assertion, which I don’t want to edit or to paraphrase. As in a musical efficiency, the textual content, while not the whole lot, has intrinsic worth:
‘As we witness and mourn tens of hundreds of lives destroyed and communities shattered whereas political braveness stays absent, we, the musicians of the West-Japanese Divan Orchestra, are horrified and deeply saddened by the acute escalation of violence within the Center East, which continues to accentuate every day. The profound humanistic dedication of Maestro Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian mental Edward Mentioned stands on the core of our orchestra. In and thru our music we search to mannequin a lifetime of mutual recognition between equals. We name on the native and the worldwide communities and their leaders to cease procrastinating and put an finish to the cycle of violence by effecting a everlasting cease-fire, making certain the protected return of all hostages and unlawfully held detainees. It’s crucial to work towards a long-lasting peaceable decision grounded in equality.’
It could not have achieved so with out Barenboim or Mentioned; certainly, it might not have come into existence with out them. However nor would phrases from their founders have had the import they do with out these musicians, and with out the numerous others, musicians and in any other case, who’ve labored with them. Such a press release doesn’t simply ‘occur’; it requires work, reflection, listening, empathy: as do music and its efficiency, at the very least to be worthwhile. I see no cause so as to add to or additional to touch upon the orchestra’s phrases. The world, nonetheless, must pay attention: not sooner or later sooner or later, close to or far, however now. And, like Barenboim, Mentioned, and the Divan, it must act.
Mark Berry
