Barenboim’s Three-ring Circus
If you follow me on Twitter, it should be obvious that I didn’t enjoy the last of Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle at the Festival Hall.
My main purpose in going was to hear Schoenberg’s brilliant Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 rather than the piano concerto, which I expected to be lush, mannered and performed as though 30 years of work from musicians like John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood and co counted for nothing. Those fears were realised in the rendition of Beethoven’s third piano concerto, which reminded me powerfully, especially in the first movement cadenza, of Grieg.
The programme announced an “illustrated talk” on the Schoenberg following the break, by which they meant a talk with excerpts from the piece, rather than some kind of even more ghastly PowerPoint presentation.
Barenboim is extremely fond of his own voice, and he’s perhaps the most verbally incontinent maestro since Bernstein, as his Reith Lectures a few years ago and his appearance at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert demonstrate. Here, he patronised an audience he blatantly accused of not knowing the piece by repeating the theme at least 20 times and then showing how it was transformed throughout the piece.
This is potentially an interesting technique, but was ruined by his insistence on treating us like a bunch of musically ignorant fools, which may be true of part of the audience but is certainly not so for all of it. The result for anyone who knows the piece was that it was ruined by an over-emphasis on the theme and by Barenboim’s characterisation of the other material as “irrelevant”.
The performance of the Variations was OK, and lacked the mannerism and inaccuracies of the Beethoven. But then, something almost unbelievably crass happened.
Normally an educated audience will pause before applauding until the conductor has signalled by relaxing his arms that the piece has concluded, not because he doesn’t think the audience knows the piece has finished, but in order to focus the audience’s minds on the music they have just heard. Abbado does this with Mahler, to the extent that he sometimes waits for a minute or more at the end of a symphony – especially the 9th – before allowing the audience to applaud. The effect of this is extraordinary; there is a very special sound made by 2,000 people trying to remain entirely silent.
Barenboim, on the other hand, waited perhaps a second before announcing “that’s it” over his shoulder. The audience, fully in thrall to his cult of personality, stood to applaud, despite the fact that for a majority of them it was the first time they’d ever heard the piece.
Incredibly, it got worse.
Schoenberg’s atonal music is very cerebral even though at its heart is a searing passion. It has a very specific aesthetic that is almost monk-like. It is pure intellectual music. It has no “story” (what musical academics would call a “programme”). It’s like a Samuel Beckett play, or an abstract expressionist painting. It’s at the junction between intellect and aesthetics. This is why I love it.
Barenboim returned to the podium and indicated that he was going to play an encore and, true to form, decided to introduce it with some pseudo intellectualising. He quoted Milan Kundera in Ignorance making fun of Schoenberg for expecting that people would whistle his music in the streets instead of Strauss waltzes. Kundera’s point is that intellectual art remains intellectual art and rarely if ever transitions to popularity. For an example, think of how many people can sing the start of Beethoven’s 5th symphony compared to the number of can sing the start of (or have even heard) the Grosse Fuge or the Missa Solemnis.
Barenboim’s reading of Kundera was so wrong-headed that he then announced that he was going to play “a Strauss Waltz” (in fact he didn’t play a “waltz” but Unter Donner und Blitz, which is a polka). It’s the most crass thing I’ve ever experienced in a concert hall. It’s like pouring hot chocolate sauce over beautifully prepared sashimi.
In another of his great books – perhaps his greatest – The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera rails against kitsch which he memorably defines as “the absolute denial of shit”. Strauss’s world is in utter denial of shit, set as it is atop the lofty, saccharine heights of kitsch. There is no music more opposite to Schoenberg’s works than Strauss. Barenboim’s reading of Kundera is so perverse that the only possible explanation I can think of is that he was deliberately insulting the audience, as if he were saying “look at this shit that you prefer”.
But I’m certain that’s not what he was doing; the public’s affection and adulation is too important to him, which can be clearly seen when he takes the podium for a solo bow, or stands out in front of the orchestra, blatantly courting a standing ovation. Contrast this with Abbado’s self-effacing behaviour on the podium, or with Salonen, or Boulez, or Mackerras, or any number of more modest maestros. Also, consider his bizarre programme at the Proms a couple of years ago where he paired Bartók and Ligeti with, wait for it, Kodály and Enescu (the only link being the composers’ Hungarian nationality), with an encore by Strauss again (which went catastrophically wrong and nearly broke down, if I remember correctly).
Barenboim is not a servant of the music, and is not an intellectual, despite his pretensions. He is a shameless showman who deserves to be treated as such. I don’t think I ever want to hear him make music ever again.
