Musicians aren’t ranked like tennis players. But if they were, Daniel Barenboim would rank … in the top five? Top ten? Let’s say top ten, just to be on the safe side. Whatever the number, he is one of the outstanding musicians in the world today. Both a pianist and a conductor, he has been a fixture among us for some forty years now. He is a tremendously versatile musician, at home in the keyboard works of Bach and in the pit of Bayreuth. This is no common thing. About the only thing Barenboim does not do is compose. In this respect, André Previn, another pianist and conductor, may have a leg up on him. Indeed, it’s somewhat surprising that Barenboim has not (that we know of) put pen to paper, so thoroughly musical is he. He did study with Nadia Boulanger, teacher of just about everybody in twentieth-century composition. Perhaps it didn’t take.
Barenboim, born in 1942, is celebrating this year the fiftieth anniversary of his debut, at the age of seven, in his native Buenos Aires. His mother was his first teacher; his father was his second. He would have no other, formally. When the boy was ten, the family moved to Israel. Barenboim eventually came under the influence of Arthur Rubinstein, whose playing, even now, is stamped all over Barenboim’s own. In his twenties, Barenboim was seemingly everywhere: playing Beethoven concertos with Otto Klemperer, conducting the English Chamber Orchestra, and, most memorably, playing chamber music—with his wife, the late Jacqueline du Pré, and Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman, and Zubin Mehta, and the rest of that golden crowd. He seemed to represent, more than any of them, the high energy of youth. He has not lost an iota.
It is for his conducting, more than for his piano playing, that he is increasingly known today. And for good reason. He commands one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Chicago Symphony. In 1991—after almost fifteen years of leading the Orchestre de Paris—he got the call from Chicago to replace the beloved George Solti. In the first years, there was some grumbling around town that the orchestra was perhaps not the marvel it had been under the old man. In fact, it wasn’t: it was far more marvelous. Only nostalgia, obstinacy, or ignorance kept Chicagoans from knowing this. The city is, by all accounts, more comfortable with its whippersnapper of a conductor now (even at fifty-seven, conductors are whippersnappers). High time.
Lately, Barenboim has been a steady presence in New York, engaged in a Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall. The Hall has been doing this lately, with some of the heavy hitters in music (Pierre Boulez, Maurizio Pollini). Over this and the next season, Barenboim will appear in a variety of his guises: soloist, conductor, chamber musician, teacher, lecturer. He happens to be one of the most fluent talkers in all of music. Few are the musicians who can communicate, verbally, what they know and do. James Levine is one; Barenboim is another. One of Barenboim’s evenings in March was a conversation about music with the critic and Middle East opinionist Edward Said. Barenboim shares the professor’s politics— but that is a subject for another article.
Barenboim launched his series on January 30, with a recital alongside Plácido Domingo. This was, believe it or not, the tenor’s New York recital debut, after about thirty years of being on top of the operatic heap. Barenboim, that afternoon, played two solo pieces, or rather, showpieces: the Concerto Paraphrase on Rigoletto by Liszt and a section from Iberia by Albéniz. Barenboim is an ebullient, swashbuckling, somewhat old-fashioned pianist. Like his model, Rubinstein, he boasts a big, fat tone, unapologetic in its fullness and grandeur. You wouldn’t think he had a lot of time for practice, what with his conducting responsibilities, but he retains rivers of technique. His arpeggios, for example, were rippling and unerring. His only fault, really, was a tendency to pounce on certain notes, distorting the musical line. This is a habit that Barenboim has always had to fight, often without success.
In the first week of March, Barenboim and his Chicago forces performed at Carnegie on three consecutive days. The first concert began with Mozart’s Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503, with the conductor at the keyboard. Oh, dear: why do they always do this? They do it, mainly, out of ego. There is little musical benefit to it; there is mainly musical harm. Murray Perahia, a leading Mozartean, recorded all of the Mozart concertos this way, and so did Barenboim, before him. Neither set of recordings is the better for it. It’s a stunt, really—not the worst stunt in the world, but a stunt nonetheless. Playing and conducting are separate activities, and to do them together is inevitably to slight them both. Worst of all, Barenboim will play and conduct all of the Beethoven concertos— almost unheard of—next fall, as the series continues. We all know he’s a wonder. He doesn’t need to do this—to Beethoven, for one.
The Mozart C Major was bold and grand, in true Barenboim style. This was the antithesis of dainty, drawing-room Mozart. The pianist displayed his big, fat tone, and his phrasing was lovely. He conducted whenever he had a hand available—that is, even while he was playing with the other —and he conducted, too, with his playing —that is, he executed the keyboard part in such a way as to lead others. A nudge here, a nudge there, and pretty soon the musical line is out of whack. Refinement suffers, as well. When you conduct, you simply do things at the keyboard that you wouldn’t do otherwise. Barenboim overpedaled in spots, and he missed some notes needlessly (another hazard of the stunt, to continue to harp). As usual, certain notes were strangely, and wrongly, accented. He used a generous amount of rubato, or license in tempo, but did not quite go out of bounds. His cadenza was dashing, virtuosic, and fun.
Barenboim was at his least musical in the Andante. Quite simply, he pounded, and made a truly ugly sound. He lost his singing tone whenever he rose to the level of forte (a difference between him and Rubinstein). In certain passages, he jabbed violently at the keyboard; in others, he played richly, beautifully, deep into the keys. Also, he projected this movement line by line, rather than as a whole. The entire thing was disjointed and unbeautiful. The Finale, however, was more successful: jaunty, nicely arched, and rhythmically arresting. For all its problems, this was commendable Mozart—an athletic and muscular reading. Barenboim is a lion of a pianist, even in Mozart. There’s room for such men.
The second half of the concert saw Barenboim as conductor, only. He puts on an impressive show. He strides onto the stage with lavish confidence, as befits someone who fairly rules music. He has the bearing, and panache, of Napoleon (we might imagine). The work that evening was the Symphony No. 4 of Bruckner, “The Romantic”—a huge, sprawling piece, right up Barenboim’s alley. Bruckner conducting requires, above all, a sense of pacing, an understanding of the vast architecture of this unusual music. This, Barenboim has. He held the piece—which can easily overwhelm even a good conductor—in the palm of his hand. He communicated effortlessly to the orchestra; every gesture, every movement, every glance, was musical. He is one of those conductors who seem to enact their interpretation on the podium, though not self-consciously or obtrusively. Another imperative of Bruckner conducting is not— ever—to allow the music to get sluggish. Again, Barenboim took care of this. He guided his Chicago machine surely. The strings, which usually play second fiddle to the famed Chicago brass, were exemplary. The big brass chorales, too, were glorious and powerful—always on the verge of blaring, of course (this is a Chicago weakness), but just pulling back.
In the second movement, the Andante, the music always breathed, with Barenboim showing a sense of dance. Rhythm, phrasing, dynamics—all were sheerly musical. The conducting was tight where it should have been tight, and more free where it should have been that. The Scherzo was laid out in great blocks of sound, and afforded the space it requires. Barenboim drove the piece metronomically in spots, to thrilling effect. Though it’s easy to make this piece appear fragmented, Barenboim did not. Nor did it seem repetitive, which is really astonishing. There was enough tempo variation, enough dynamic variation, enough alteration of sensibility—in short, enough musical sense. What to do simply came to Barenboim—not everything in this field is forethought—as to every true musician.
The Finale had another important Brucknerian quality: it was suspenseful without being urgent or hurried. It was convincing line by line, but the entire work—not just the movement, but the whole work, from minute one to minute seventy (or whatever)—was in mind. The unison playing of the orchestra was superb. The entire symphony was held on the point of the conductor’s baton, and before the evening was over it was clear that Barenboim is one of the great Brucknerians of our time.
The following afternoon began with a curiosity: a one-act opera called What Next? by Elliott Carter, commissioned by Barenboim two years ago, when the composer was ninety. The opera—Carter’s first!—is a complicated affair, with a gross amount of percussion, including everything but the kitchen sink. The piece requires a cool, confident leader—a manager—which, in Barenboim, it had. He cued like a madman and succeeded in unifying players, singers, and music. He makes a strong advocate for this work, as he does for all contemporary music. The performance carried his vivacity and conviction all the way through. The score is dense and tricky, but Barenboim achieved clarity in it; the denser the score, of course, the greater the need for clarity. Most touchingly, the composer himself was on hand, spry and appreciative. He was born during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. His maiden opera may not enter the permanent repertory, but it is an admirable work, and it represents Elliott Carter’s defiance of and triumph over decay.
Next came Manuel de Falla’s ballet The Three-Cornered Hat. Barenboim, given his boyhood in Argentina, might be expected to be particularly idiomatic in Spanish music, and he is, somewhat—but no more so, really, than in other types of music. He captured nicely the pomp and majesty of this music; less well, its tenderness. This was grand-scaled Falla, featuring great, even startling, eruptions of sound. The technical precision and energy of the performance were astounding. Even so, certain of the dances could have used a little more suavity, a little more slinkiness, more lightness and grace. So too, there might have been a little more Spanish plaintiveness, a bit more of the wail. The concluding Jota, to be sure, was exhilarating, with its relentless pulse and bone-jarring volume—as much Bruckner as Falla. And why not? Falla with a Brucknerian wallop is a fair idea, once you’ve experienced it.
The last of the three concerts opened with a work by another versatile musician—the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. He’s now in his mid-seventies and undertaking a Perspectives celebration of his own. Boulez wrote his Notations for piano when he was a student under Olivier Messiaen. Many years later—partly at the prodding of Barenboim—he orchestrated these humble studies, giving us the Notations for Orchestra. Barenboim’s programming of such music is dutiful, but his heart is in it, too. Ultimately, these pieces can’t help having the feeling of student exercises, even if grandly dressed up, and magnificently played. Barenboim did what he could to fish out of the Notations whatever music they contain. The last one played—Très vif. Strident—has a jauntiness, a chopping, ragged, insistent quality. Barenboim drew from it every drop of pleasure to be had, acting as a sort of jazzman. Then, he had the orchestra play it again—a true “encore.” Yet this was a forced one, imposed on an audience whose applause, in fact, had been petering out.
The final work of the Chicagoans’ visit was Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, a staple of ambitious and skillful conductors for several generations now. Solti, a bull moose of a maestro, bade farewell to Chicago with it. Barenboim was gutsy, in a way, to take it on. This was not, however, his finest outing. The opening funeral march was rather limp and blunt, without much sorrow or inwardness. Barenboim frequently gave too much sound (though not as much as the unsurpassable Solti). Strangely, there was little intensity here; it was all too relaxed, even indifferent—not normally a Barenboim failing. Barenboim could have used a thinner, more transparent sound, less lush and round. His reading was often boisterous and extrovert, as you’d expect, but it lacked psychological involvement, the delirium—or at least anxiety—that Mahler demands.
The Adagietto—one of music’s most beloved stretches—is a keen test of a conductor’s ability. Barenboim gave it a workable tempo, not too slow. Yet this was hardly a delicate or ethereal account; it was rather earthbound and solid—an undreamy Adagietto from an undreamy conductor. It did not cast the spell that it might have, but neither was it sentimental or syrupy, which was a relief. Also, it concluded with a world-class diminuendo, an achievement worth sighing over.
In the Rondo-Finale, Barenboim and his men at last hit their stride. This movement was clear and well weighted, revitalizing and bright. There were a few lapses of ensembleship—surprising from this bunch— but nothing ruinous. Barenboim reveled in this music, rejoicing in the happiness that Mahler affords us—he can be so stingy with it—in the end. In every measure, the conductor knew what he was doing. Of course, this is a more straightforward, more self-sustaining movement than the preceding ones, offering little room for rumination and subjectivity. The close, by the way, was maybe the fastest on record—Barenboim was in no mood to savor these measures —but it was accurate, and, for most listeners, exhilarating.
Danny B., as he is known in some circles, has few rivals among conductors. For that matter, he doesn’t have all that many rivals among pianists. He is still a youngish man —especially, again, by the standards of conductors—but he has already enjoyed a very lengthy, enormously fruitful career. How many years does he have left? By the standards of Elliott Carter, a great many— more, in fact, than Franz Schubert had total. By the time Barenboim is through, he will have performed and recorded everything, or practically so. He will presumably grow in wisdom and power. And who knows? Given his talents, he may spring a symphony—or, to begin with, a piano prelude—on us someday. No one would be shocked. He is one of the most impressive musicians we have ever had the privilege of knowing, observing, and following.
