Sunday, October 28th, 2007 – Barenboim and friends – Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin
Last Sunday, at the unlikely hour of 11 AM, I drove to the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden. Not only was it an unusual hour to be going there, it was also for an unaccustomed performance. In a theatre to which we are used to going in the evening for marvelous (oh, well, not always…) opera mega-productions, this was to be an intimate morning of chamber music.
This was the first concert in a series of Barenboim and guests Sunday matinées. Let me start grumbling outright. I think this is a misnomer. The cycle, in this case at least, should be called Daniel Barenboim and protégés. I do not mean to criticize, on the contrary. Daniel Barenboim is certainly a great promoter of young and brilliant musicians, his superb creation, the East West Divan Orchestra, being a case in point. And he certainly knows how to discover not only great talent, but also great looks. The musicians he conducts or plays with occupy the stage with such ease and charm that you could mistake them for Hollywood versions of themselves. That was immediately obvious when pretty brunette violist Yulia Deyneka and lovely blonde violinist Petra Schwieger, both barely out of their teens, preceded the third string player, cellist Claudius Popp and their mentor onto the stage. Popp is also extremely young although not as striking as his female partners.
The program started out with a sweet and contemplative performance of Mozart’s E flat major piano quartet. The two quartets are practically mini piano concertos (the mini refers only to the number of instruments). Although I have played the G minor ad nauseam, I have always been in awe of the E flat major, in spite of its being actually less challenging technically. But musically, it is so much more subtle and transparent, that it is actually much harder to play. Barenboim was of course perfect, using neither a too “pianoforty” nor too grand a sound, with just the right combination of delicacy, weight and pedal to make Mozart sound , well – like Mozart! As he would do throughout the performance, he kept a tight control on his younger partners, practically conducting from the keyboard and reminding me of Menahem Pressler and his priceless bushy eyebrow conducting of his younger colleagues in the “new” (and soon to disband, alas!) Beaux Arts. The string players responded well, in good symbiosis with the piano, and though not quite authoritative, it was a very satisfying interpretation.
I was prepared to loathe the next piece on the program, Elliot Carter’s cello sonata, as my previous sampling of this composer’s music, a piano quintet, had really gotten on my nerves, in spite of what I suppose must have been a good interpretation by excellent pianist Pierre Laurent Aymard. Never having heard it before, and never having seen the music (which wouldn’t do me much good anyway, but the statement looks good on the page), I cannot judge Claudius Popp’s rendition. But, for all it’s worth, I can say that not for a moment was I bored or inattentive to the interesting music. Many contrasts and departures and reunions, the two instruments seeming to hesitate between marriage and divorce, and finally coming together blissfully. A Coplandesque Adagio and a jazzy Allegro, with echoes of country and Broadway music. Either this piece is better than the piano quintet, or I’m really opening up to contemporary music (cf. my experiences at Kronberg), quite a development considering my advanced age and many years on the Baroque-Classical-Romantic circuit, with some incursions into the 20th century (Shosta, Prokofiev, Bartók, Kodály, Stravinsky, Katchaturian, Villa-Lobos, etc., actually a much longer list than I imagined).
After the intermission, disaster struck. Well, disaster might be an exaggeration, but the second part of the concert, entirely devoted to Brahms’s third quartet, in C minor, although not completely catastrophic, did expose all the weaknesses of the young musicians. Not even Barenboim could get them to fully rise to the height of Brahm’s grandiose music. The violist and the violinist, although a little daintily, did manage to hold their ground. But Popp, lacking tone quality and even playing with a certain harshness, completely botched the magnificent cello solos. In the last movement, Barenboim was quite alone.
And during the final bows and curtain calls, there was even a certain amount of discreet reprimanding on his part, not on account of the music, but of the fact that the youngsters systematically forgot to turn around and acknowledge the applause coming from the audience in the stage seats.
A final word on an often overlooked figure: the page turner. I don’t know who this one was, but he bore a striking resemblance to the French actor Jean Reno and he seemed to get along famously with Barenboim, who exchanged glances and smiles with him throughout the concert, as though he was not only there to turn the pages but also to give Barenboim the feedback he may have felt was not really forthcoming from his young partners.