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Daniel Barenboim

Piano

Wagner; Der Fliegende Holländer; Mit Gewitter Und Sturm Aus Fernem Meer - Daniel Barenboim



Daniel Barenboim at Sixty-five “To separate the technical from the expressive side in music is like separating the body from the soul.” So says Daniel Barenboim, both one of the leading conductors and one of the greatest keyboard virtuosi of our time. It’s the philosophy he has always lived by, and he derived it from his father Enrique, who, after his mother Aida, was the only piano teacher he ever had. Descended on both sides from Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms and settled in Argentina, and with two piano teachers for parents, Daniel Barenboim was almost destined to become a pianist himself. Moreover his home town, Buenos Aires, was in the Forties the perfect place for a budding musician to grow up, with Toscanini, Furtwängler and Karajan among the conductors passing through, and Gieseking, Backhaus and Rubinstein among the pianists. Meanwhile, young Daniel had found his personal keyboard guru in the Chilean maestro Claudio Arrau: it was Arrau’s Beethoven, delivered with his trademark warmth and richness of sound, that set Barenboim on the path towards his own dominance as a Beethoven exponent. But Bach was the principal deity in Enrique’s pantheon. In his childhood Daniel played most of the preludes, fugues and partitas: this was the basis for his mastery of polyphony, and for what he calls the pianist’s necessary sleight of hand. “The piano,” he has said, “is a neutral instrument, which cannot seduce by virtue of its sound alone. But it is possible to create with it the illusion of sustained sound similar to that of a string instrument.” He has never practised mechanically: “My father’s teaching was based on the belief that there are enough scales in Mozart’s concertos.” Barenboim’s winning way with Mozart today is a vindication of that belief. He gave his first solo recital in Buenos Aires at the age of seven: he may have been fonder of football than practising, but he was precociously gifted. In 1952, when he was ten, his family moved to Israel — the tango disc he affectionately recorded later in life testified to his Argentinian nostalgia — and in that same year he gave his first concerts in Vienna and Rome; he made his first recordings in 1954. He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and joined Igor Markevich’s conducting classes in Salzburg. But the conductor who loomed largest in his firmament was Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was so impressed by Barenboim’s playing that he penned a letter hailing him as “a phenomenon” and invited him to play with him and the Berlin Philharmonic. Enrique declined the invitation on Daniel’s behalf — he deemed it too soon after the atrocities of the war for a Jewish family to visit Germany — but the letter served Barenboim as a calling-card for many years to come. Furtwängler died soon after this encounter, but Barenboim went on devotedly absorbing his musical wisdom through recordings, by studying his annotated scores, and by talking to people who had worked with him. Attending Carlo Zecchi’s conducting class in Siena two years later, he commenced friendships with his fellow-students Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta, the latter becoming a lifelong soul-mate. He gave his first London concert in 1956, and his first in New York the following year (with Leopold Stokowski conducting). And in London he also met Clifford Curzon, whose Mozart playing has deeply influenced his own. London in the Sixties was the recording centre of the world, and here Barenboim first forged many enduring musical relationships, both with orchestras — notably the English Chamber Orchestra — and with musicians, including Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman and, above all, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who in 1967 became his wife. Married in Jerusalem, with David Ben-Gurion in attendance, the couple were surrounded in a blaze of publicity, but managed to make some notable chamber recordings together. “Until illness began to cripple her,” Barenboim wrote of Du Pré in his autobiography A Life in Music, “she was able to do whatever she wanted on the cello, and needed very little practice. She had a capacity to imagine sound such as I never met in any other musician. She really was a child of nature — a musician of nature with an unerring instinct.” In 1969 Barenboim made his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and also began a long–term collaboration with the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. In 1972 he conducted his first opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, at the Edinburgh Festival. But it was in 1978, at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, that he first conducted the operatic composer who has since become his specialism — Richard Wagner. He intensified his relationships with both Wagner and Germany throughout the Eighties and Nineties, carving out musical fiefdoms at the Bayreuth Festival — where he conducted regularly from 1981, including the annual Ring cycles from 1988 to 1992 — and the Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, of which he became General Music Director in 1992 and where he heroically conducted two complete cycles of Wagner’s ten major operas within the space of just over a month in 2002. Meanwhile in 1987 he had been appointed Artistic Director of the new Opéra-Bastille in Paris, where his friendship with Pierre Boulez stood him in good stead, even if it couldn’t prevent his later falling-out with the French political establishment. He subsequently went on to become Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, ending a fifteen-year tenure there in June 2006, and he celebrates his sixty-fifth birthday in November 2007 by taking up the new post of Maestro Scaligero at Italy’s premier opera house, La Scala, Milan. But it is perhaps the Berlin Staatskapelle, who in 2000 appointed him Chief Conductor for Life, with whom Barenboim currently enjoys the closest relationship. He likened the orchestra, when he first encountered it at the Staatsoper, to “the most wonderful antique furniture, its beauty covered by layers and layers of dust”: taking that dust off, he quickly turned it into the world-beating ensemble it is today. Over the past fifteen years Barenboim has made a point of melding music and politics in an unusually fruitful way. He broke an unwritten taboo by performing Wagner in Israel, defending his decision by insisting that, in refusing to perform the composer’s works out of deference to the sensitivities of Holocaust survivors, Israel’s musical establishment was handing the Nazis a posthumous victory. “Not playing Wagner has harmed the Israel Philharmonic artistically,” he argued. “There is a vacuum in their music because there are few composers as important as Wagner. I don’t see how you can really understand Mahler and Schoenberg if you don’t know your Wagner.” More recently, in collaboration with his late friend, the Palestinian-Arab historian Edward Said, Barenboim has broken a much stronger taboo with what the pair called their West-Eastern Divan Workshop for Young Musicians, when they first conceived it in Weimar in 1999. Under this scheme, young players from both sides of the Middle East’s main political fault-line worked closely together: at each desk of instruments in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra an Arab was placed next to an Israeli; in the first half of their concerts, an Arab violinist would be leader, with an Israeli violinist taking over after the interval. When the orchestra played for peace in Ramallah in 2005, after rehearsals protected by heavily armed troops, a huge gesture was made on behalf of young people in the region. When the concert was over, Barenboim made a speech including these words: “It is our belief that the destinies of these two peoples, Israel and Palestine, are inextricably linked… Either we all kill each other, or we share what there is to share. It is this message that we have come here to bring.” The encore the orchestra then played was “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Daniel Barenboim’s pre-eminence as a conductor and soloist is founded on the intellectualism that led him to be invited to give the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures in 2006 and, before that, to collaborate with Edward Said in producing a book of conversations, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, published in 2002. There Barenboim’s rigorously analytical aperçus cover everything from the ephemerality of sound to the effect of professionalism on musical aesthetics. Of all the arts, he says, music is both the best school for life, and also the best means of escaping from its worst manifestations. Michael Church © Warner Classics 2007


  • Thursday, 31 January 2013 Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall New York, NY, USA
    Conductor
    Beethoven, Symphony No. 4 in B flat Major, op. 60, Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E flat Major, op. 55 ("Eroica")
  • Saturday, 02 February 2013 Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall New York, NY, USA
    Conductor
    Beethoven, Symphony No. 6 in F Major, op. 78 ("Pastoral"), Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A Major, op. 92
  • Sunday, 03 February 2013 Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall New York, NY, USA
    Conductor
    Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 in D Major, op. 36, Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125 ("Choral")
  • Monday, 11 February 2013 Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Mozart, Piano Concerto in B Major KV 595, Strauss, Ein Heldenleben
  • Tuesday, 12 February 2013 Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Mozart, Piano Concerto in B Major KV 595, Strauss, Ein Heldenleben
  • Wednesday, 13 February 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Parsifal: 3rd Act Concert Performance
  • Sunday, 17 February 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Mahler, Debussy, Berlioz, Schubert, Mendelssohn
  • Sunday, 03 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Wednesday, 06 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Sunday, 10 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Monday, 11 March 2013 Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Brahms, Violin Concerto, Liszt, Les Préludes, Berg, Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6
  • Tuesday, 12 March 2013 Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Brahms, Violin Concerto, Liszt, Les Préludes , Berg, Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6
  • Sunday, 17 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Brahms, Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34, Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony No. 1, op. 9
  • Saturday, 23 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Das Rheingold
  • Sunday, 24 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Die Walküre
  • Tuesday, 26 March 2013 Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Verdi, Overture to I vespri siciliani, Berio/Verdi, Orchestra Songs, Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
  • Wednesday, 27 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Siegfried
  • Wednesday, 27 March 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Siegfried
  • Saturday, 30 March 2013 Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Verdi, Requiem 
  • Sunday, 31 March 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Monday, 01 April 2013 Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Mozart, Requiem
  • Thursday, 04 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Das Rheingold
  • Friday, 05 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Die Walküre
  • Sunday, 07 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Siegfried
  • Monday, 08 April 2013 Konzerthaus Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante in E flat Major KV 297b , Carter, Concertino for Bass Clarinet , Mozart, Concert Arias , Carter, A Sunbeam's Architecture , Mozart, Symphony No. 35 in D Major Haffner 
  • Tuesday, 09 April 2013 Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante in E flat Major KV 297b , Carter, Concertino for Bass Clarinet , Mozart, Concert Arias , Carter, A Sunbeam's Architecture , Mozart, Symphony No. 35 in D Major Haffner 
  • Wednesday, 10 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Friday, 12 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Ravel, Chansons madécasses, Debussy, Ariettes oubliées, Haydn, Arianna a Naxos, Bartók, Dorfszenen
  • Saturday, 13 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Das Rheingold
  • Sunday, 14 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Die Walküre
  • Thursday, 18 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Siegfried
  • Saturday, 20 April 2013 DR Concert Hall Copenhagen, Denmark
    Piano
    Schubert Piano Recital
  • Sunday, 21 April 2013 Schiller Theater Berlin, Germany
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Monday, 06 May 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
  • Thursday, 16 May 2013 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Florence, Italy
    Conductor
    Verdi, Requiem
  • Saturday, 18 May 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Monday, 20 May 2013 Salzburg Whitsun Festival Salzburg, Austria
    Conductor
    Brahms, Requiem
  • Wednesday, 22 May 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Sunday, 26 May 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Thursday, 30 May 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Monday, 03 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Friday, 07 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Tuesday, 18 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Die Walküre
  • Thursday, 20 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Siegfried
  • Saturday, 22 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Monday, 24 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Das Rheingold
  • Tuesday, 25 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Die Walküre
  • Saturday, 29 June 2013 La Scala Milan, Italy
    Conductor
    Wagner, Götterdämmerung
  • Daniel Barenboim 70th birthday 15 November
    09 November 2012
    Maestro Daniel Barenboim celebrates his 70th birthday on 15 November. We salute a world class musician with a gift to transcend many musical and physical boundaries.