Äìèòðèé Ëàðîø
28.06.2003, 09:40
Íåêòî Äàíèëà Áàðåíáîéì âûó÷èë âñå ñîíàòû Áåòõîâåíà. Çà÷¸ò áóäåò ñäàâàòü â Carnegie Hall â èþíå
:)
At New York's Carnegie Hall, the conductor-pianist gives performances that one really wanted to like.
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York City
Beethoven:
Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1
Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major, Op. 31, No. 3
Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106
("Hammerklavier")
Tuesday 10 June 2003
Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 2, No. 2
Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2 ("Tempest")
Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 14, No. 2
Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, op. 81a ("Les Adieux")
Thursday 12 June 2003
Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 ("Pathétique")
Sonata No. 12 in A-flat major, Op. 26
Sonata No. 25 in G major, Op. 79
Sonata No. 28 in A major, Op. 101
Sunday 15 June 2003
Anytime a single pianist performs the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas, hopes and expectations run high. One dreams of committed, monumental performances in which the veil of mystery is pulled back to reveal not only Beethoven's genius, but also startling, heretofore unperceived connections between movements and pieces — in short, one looks forward to an intellectual, emotional and spiritual involvement from the pianist that does justice to this extraordinary body of music.
That kind of artistic engagement was not forthcoming from Daniel Barenboim in the first three concerts of his eight-concert Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall. Although he attracted an enthusiastic audience — individual members of which seemed to compete to be the first standing during the ovations, even at the intermissions — there was an almost uncanny disconnect between that enthusiasm and what actually occurred onstage. Some pianistic grandiosity notwithstanding, Barenboim turned in, with too few exceptions, performances that were boring and spiritually indifferent.
In the early sonatas, Nos. 1, 2 and 8 ("Pathétique"), each a concert opener, Barenboim found his surest footing. While his playing seemed detached throughout, it had a polished, civilized quality (despite consistent overuse of the pedal); if these early sonatas had been the only ones he played, one might have interpreted that disengagement as objectivity and decided that Barenboim was giving us a classicist's utterly non-Romantic Beethoven. In fact, the "Pathétique" was possibly the strongest overall performance of all three concerts, with musical phrasing, dramatic chord execution in the first movement and a restrained lyricism in the slow movement. It seemed that Barenboim clearly liked and identified with this work.
With their tight Classical form, the early sonatas need little help to make themselves structurally clear. Yet as the sonatas become more complex, they require more shaping, more "vision" from the interpreter to make the themes and motives of the massive sonata forms click into place. Unfortunately, as a substitute for convincing musical insight, Barenboim deployed a seemingly arbitrary, almost fetishistic focus on certain details, even as he tossed others away with indifference. For example, very soft passages sometimes took on a halo-like glow, as with the arpeggiated first chord of the "Tempest" sonata, which the pianist played with exquisite care. Yet he rendered the allegro theme immediately following with a coarse, unloving series of thuds. Barenboim laid out the details of the "Tempest's" slow movement in a ponderous tempo with no sense of magic, like a nocturne unfolding in broad, humid daylight.
Certain individual movements did seem to hold Barenboim's attention: the fast, virtuosic finales of the "Les Adieux" and "Hammerklavier" sonatas, for instance, had a fiery, daredevil energy. Yet other high-energy pieces suffered: the opening Allegro of Op. 31, No. 3, which demands quick, almost Mozartean shifts of character along with a buffo wit and vitality and attention to myriad details of musical characterization, was earthbound and over-pedaled.
Between these extremes of quietude and high virtuosity — extremes that appeared to snap Barenboim into musical awareness — there were long stretches in which this technically very capable pianist plowed through the music without any evident sense of its import. In the Adagio sostenuto of the "Hammerklavier," a movement of quietly devastating architectural majesty, Barenboim simply drifted: he was able to set up individual moments of beauty (again with that quiet, ringing tone), but it was as if the piece's total structure — its most radical, breath-taking dimension — never entered his mind. Even in the better performances (as of the earlier sonatas, or in Op. 79, where Barenboim successfully conveyed a degree of humor and lightness), there was still a troubling undertow of detachment, even disinterest. It was like watching a young prodigy who has learned to physically recreate gestures of true expressiveness heard in the playing of others while seeming to have little internal, spiritual understanding of the content of those gestures.
Alongside this disengagement was a disturbing tendency toward self-dramatizing showmanship: sometimes Barenboim would stomp his foot against the pedal or trace a backward arc away from the keyboard with his hands in order to emphasize the drama of the chord or figure he had just played. At its worst, this musical self-involvement produced dumbfounding results: though he played it very fast and hit all the notes, Barenboim turned the first movement of "Les Adieux" — which contains some of the most joyous, saddest and bittersweet music ever written — into a blurry, heavy-handed, musically careless mess.
This lack of engagement could be construed as conservation of energy for a grueling eight-concert cycle; perhaps Barenboim wasn't feeling his best (more than once he appeared to be coughing into a handkerchief). I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt; I wanted to like these concerts. But by the end of the third night, disappointed irritation was unavoidable. Nevertheless, there was one reassuring aspect: Beethoven's works, it seems, can withstand anything. Despite all the performance's shortcomings, the radiance of genius — especially in, say, the "Hammerklavier's" slow movement or in the proto-Schumannesque Op. 101 — could still be discerned.
Daniel Barenboim Talks About the Evolution of His Beethoven
David Patrick Stearns
Philadelphia Inquirer - 3 June 2003
Like a comet that returns every 15 years or so, Daniel Barenboim is playing all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas again. (http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=21098&highlight=1&highlightterms=&l stKeywords=)
Although the former child-prodigy pianist has been doing so over roughly 50 of his 61 years, his career as an opera and symphony conductor has long eclipsed his keyboard activities. When he recently recorded the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, the soloist wasn't Barenboim himself, but Philadelphia-based pianist Lang Lang. The latest Wagner opera recordings are ones he conducted. When portrayed in the film Hilary and Jackie — a controversial biopic of his first wife, cellist Jacqueline du Pre — he was mainly a conductor.
And that's why Barenboim is playing an all-Beethoven sonata program Thursday at the Kimmel Center, prior to traversing the entire canon over several concerts at Carnegie Hall. As music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chief of the Berlin State Opera [Staatsoper unter den Linden], he doesn't touch the keyboard for up to four months at a time, and he says he needs to get his fingers back into music — literally. And with so many Wagner operas in his immediate past, Barenboim, in a telephone interview from Chicago last week, seemed as curious as anyone else to see how his Beethoven had evolved.
David Patrick Stearns: I've been listening to your Beethoven recordings, from your teenage years to "Daniel Barenboim" Live From the Teatro Colón, 2000" that just came out on EMI.
Daniel Barenboim: Don't tell me they're all the same.
DPS: Anything but. There's no sense of a "Barenboim method" applied from one year to the next or from one piece to the next. There are no mannerisms.
DB: You mean I keep finding new mannerisms?
DPS: You know what I mean — every time you return to a piece, it's not a refinement over what you did before. You start from scratch.
DB: That's my philosophy of making music. As you know, I started very young. I met many of the great artists of the past and saw the dangers of that. Many of them were very great artists who made important contributions and discoveries, such as Pablo Casals. Before he came along, nobody articulated notes as clearly as he. But it's as if he found a system.
I don't want to sound mean — and this is an oversimplification — but there almost comes a point where these artists do things to prove their theory. This is where you get mannerisms.
DPS: I noticed that as a young man you reveled in the dark, Gothic side of Beethoven, but not so much as an adult.
DB: With maturity, you're more aware some moments have to be sacrificed for the totality of the organic whole. You put things more in context.
DPS: Some of your earliest recordings are having high-profile reissues. Do you worry about having the sins of your youth back on the market?
DB: If somebody gave me a copy of the disc, I'd listen out of curiosity. It was what it was. Both the good and the bad brought me to where I am today.
DPS: You recently recorded the first Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn piano concertos with Lang Lang. He says that you really took him back to basics, looking at the score and rediscovering anew exactly what it says.
DB: He's a very serious boy. He came to Vienna and we worked quite a lot; then he came to Chicago to make the recording. He's an extraordinarily talented young man.
DPS: He has a big personality, a Leonard Bernstein-sized personality.
DB: The thing about Lenny is that he had a solid, meticulous knowledge of the music he conducted. It's important that Lang Lang has this kind of knowledge. Then his personality will be able to fly much more securely.
DPS: I read your autobiography, A Life in Music. It's full of great stuff, but there's nothing on your emotional life. You've been through a lot — Jacqueline du Pre's decline and death from multiple sclerosis, and the 1989 firing from the Bastille Opera in Paris. Will you ever write about what all of that felt like?
DB: No. Each one of us has the right to a private life and to keep it that way.
DPS:A number of Jacqueline du Pre's live recordings have come out in the past few years — a Dvorák Cello Concerto with Sergiu Celibidache and some Brahms cello sonatas with you. Is there more to come?
DB: I think that's about it.
DPS: You obviously revisited those performances to authorize their release. What was that like?
DB: It reminded me how vividly she played, and how much I miss that she's not here.
DPS: During your Beethoven cycle in the mid-1980s, you told me you have a secret repertoire that you play just for yourself. Then, it was Enrique Granados and Bach's Goldberg Variations.
DB: I like that duality. Now, I'm playing the last two books of Albéniz's Iberia and [Bach's] Well-Tempered Clavier. I've never played The Well-Tempered Clavier complete.
DPS: You've often performed here, but you haven't guest-conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1980. Why?
DB: I don't guest-conduct anywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been able to come, but I can't conduct opera, the Chicago Symphony, play piano and guest-conduct. This is not possible.
DPS: At times, though, it seems that you tried. Over the years, you've been known as the busiest classical musician in history. Now conductor Valery Gergiev has taken the heat off you — he's even busier — but do you ever worry that your reputed restlessness colors the way your performances are heard?
DB: Frankly, I don't care. The ones with discerning ears listen and form an opinion — positive or negative — without preconceived ideas.
8)
:)
At New York's Carnegie Hall, the conductor-pianist gives performances that one really wanted to like.
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York City
Beethoven:
Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1
Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major, Op. 31, No. 3
Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106
("Hammerklavier")
Tuesday 10 June 2003
Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 2, No. 2
Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2 ("Tempest")
Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 14, No. 2
Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, op. 81a ("Les Adieux")
Thursday 12 June 2003
Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 ("Pathétique")
Sonata No. 12 in A-flat major, Op. 26
Sonata No. 25 in G major, Op. 79
Sonata No. 28 in A major, Op. 101
Sunday 15 June 2003
Anytime a single pianist performs the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas, hopes and expectations run high. One dreams of committed, monumental performances in which the veil of mystery is pulled back to reveal not only Beethoven's genius, but also startling, heretofore unperceived connections between movements and pieces — in short, one looks forward to an intellectual, emotional and spiritual involvement from the pianist that does justice to this extraordinary body of music.
That kind of artistic engagement was not forthcoming from Daniel Barenboim in the first three concerts of his eight-concert Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall. Although he attracted an enthusiastic audience — individual members of which seemed to compete to be the first standing during the ovations, even at the intermissions — there was an almost uncanny disconnect between that enthusiasm and what actually occurred onstage. Some pianistic grandiosity notwithstanding, Barenboim turned in, with too few exceptions, performances that were boring and spiritually indifferent.
In the early sonatas, Nos. 1, 2 and 8 ("Pathétique"), each a concert opener, Barenboim found his surest footing. While his playing seemed detached throughout, it had a polished, civilized quality (despite consistent overuse of the pedal); if these early sonatas had been the only ones he played, one might have interpreted that disengagement as objectivity and decided that Barenboim was giving us a classicist's utterly non-Romantic Beethoven. In fact, the "Pathétique" was possibly the strongest overall performance of all three concerts, with musical phrasing, dramatic chord execution in the first movement and a restrained lyricism in the slow movement. It seemed that Barenboim clearly liked and identified with this work.
With their tight Classical form, the early sonatas need little help to make themselves structurally clear. Yet as the sonatas become more complex, they require more shaping, more "vision" from the interpreter to make the themes and motives of the massive sonata forms click into place. Unfortunately, as a substitute for convincing musical insight, Barenboim deployed a seemingly arbitrary, almost fetishistic focus on certain details, even as he tossed others away with indifference. For example, very soft passages sometimes took on a halo-like glow, as with the arpeggiated first chord of the "Tempest" sonata, which the pianist played with exquisite care. Yet he rendered the allegro theme immediately following with a coarse, unloving series of thuds. Barenboim laid out the details of the "Tempest's" slow movement in a ponderous tempo with no sense of magic, like a nocturne unfolding in broad, humid daylight.
Certain individual movements did seem to hold Barenboim's attention: the fast, virtuosic finales of the "Les Adieux" and "Hammerklavier" sonatas, for instance, had a fiery, daredevil energy. Yet other high-energy pieces suffered: the opening Allegro of Op. 31, No. 3, which demands quick, almost Mozartean shifts of character along with a buffo wit and vitality and attention to myriad details of musical characterization, was earthbound and over-pedaled.
Between these extremes of quietude and high virtuosity — extremes that appeared to snap Barenboim into musical awareness — there were long stretches in which this technically very capable pianist plowed through the music without any evident sense of its import. In the Adagio sostenuto of the "Hammerklavier," a movement of quietly devastating architectural majesty, Barenboim simply drifted: he was able to set up individual moments of beauty (again with that quiet, ringing tone), but it was as if the piece's total structure — its most radical, breath-taking dimension — never entered his mind. Even in the better performances (as of the earlier sonatas, or in Op. 79, where Barenboim successfully conveyed a degree of humor and lightness), there was still a troubling undertow of detachment, even disinterest. It was like watching a young prodigy who has learned to physically recreate gestures of true expressiveness heard in the playing of others while seeming to have little internal, spiritual understanding of the content of those gestures.
Alongside this disengagement was a disturbing tendency toward self-dramatizing showmanship: sometimes Barenboim would stomp his foot against the pedal or trace a backward arc away from the keyboard with his hands in order to emphasize the drama of the chord or figure he had just played. At its worst, this musical self-involvement produced dumbfounding results: though he played it very fast and hit all the notes, Barenboim turned the first movement of "Les Adieux" — which contains some of the most joyous, saddest and bittersweet music ever written — into a blurry, heavy-handed, musically careless mess.
This lack of engagement could be construed as conservation of energy for a grueling eight-concert cycle; perhaps Barenboim wasn't feeling his best (more than once he appeared to be coughing into a handkerchief). I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt; I wanted to like these concerts. But by the end of the third night, disappointed irritation was unavoidable. Nevertheless, there was one reassuring aspect: Beethoven's works, it seems, can withstand anything. Despite all the performance's shortcomings, the radiance of genius — especially in, say, the "Hammerklavier's" slow movement or in the proto-Schumannesque Op. 101 — could still be discerned.
Daniel Barenboim Talks About the Evolution of His Beethoven
David Patrick Stearns
Philadelphia Inquirer - 3 June 2003
Like a comet that returns every 15 years or so, Daniel Barenboim is playing all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas again. (http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=21098&highlight=1&highlightterms=&l stKeywords=)
Although the former child-prodigy pianist has been doing so over roughly 50 of his 61 years, his career as an opera and symphony conductor has long eclipsed his keyboard activities. When he recently recorded the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, the soloist wasn't Barenboim himself, but Philadelphia-based pianist Lang Lang. The latest Wagner opera recordings are ones he conducted. When portrayed in the film Hilary and Jackie — a controversial biopic of his first wife, cellist Jacqueline du Pre — he was mainly a conductor.
And that's why Barenboim is playing an all-Beethoven sonata program Thursday at the Kimmel Center, prior to traversing the entire canon over several concerts at Carnegie Hall. As music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chief of the Berlin State Opera [Staatsoper unter den Linden], he doesn't touch the keyboard for up to four months at a time, and he says he needs to get his fingers back into music — literally. And with so many Wagner operas in his immediate past, Barenboim, in a telephone interview from Chicago last week, seemed as curious as anyone else to see how his Beethoven had evolved.
David Patrick Stearns: I've been listening to your Beethoven recordings, from your teenage years to "Daniel Barenboim" Live From the Teatro Colón, 2000" that just came out on EMI.
Daniel Barenboim: Don't tell me they're all the same.
DPS: Anything but. There's no sense of a "Barenboim method" applied from one year to the next or from one piece to the next. There are no mannerisms.
DB: You mean I keep finding new mannerisms?
DPS: You know what I mean — every time you return to a piece, it's not a refinement over what you did before. You start from scratch.
DB: That's my philosophy of making music. As you know, I started very young. I met many of the great artists of the past and saw the dangers of that. Many of them were very great artists who made important contributions and discoveries, such as Pablo Casals. Before he came along, nobody articulated notes as clearly as he. But it's as if he found a system.
I don't want to sound mean — and this is an oversimplification — but there almost comes a point where these artists do things to prove their theory. This is where you get mannerisms.
DPS: I noticed that as a young man you reveled in the dark, Gothic side of Beethoven, but not so much as an adult.
DB: With maturity, you're more aware some moments have to be sacrificed for the totality of the organic whole. You put things more in context.
DPS: Some of your earliest recordings are having high-profile reissues. Do you worry about having the sins of your youth back on the market?
DB: If somebody gave me a copy of the disc, I'd listen out of curiosity. It was what it was. Both the good and the bad brought me to where I am today.
DPS: You recently recorded the first Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn piano concertos with Lang Lang. He says that you really took him back to basics, looking at the score and rediscovering anew exactly what it says.
DB: He's a very serious boy. He came to Vienna and we worked quite a lot; then he came to Chicago to make the recording. He's an extraordinarily talented young man.
DPS: He has a big personality, a Leonard Bernstein-sized personality.
DB: The thing about Lenny is that he had a solid, meticulous knowledge of the music he conducted. It's important that Lang Lang has this kind of knowledge. Then his personality will be able to fly much more securely.
DPS: I read your autobiography, A Life in Music. It's full of great stuff, but there's nothing on your emotional life. You've been through a lot — Jacqueline du Pre's decline and death from multiple sclerosis, and the 1989 firing from the Bastille Opera in Paris. Will you ever write about what all of that felt like?
DB: No. Each one of us has the right to a private life and to keep it that way.
DPS:A number of Jacqueline du Pre's live recordings have come out in the past few years — a Dvorák Cello Concerto with Sergiu Celibidache and some Brahms cello sonatas with you. Is there more to come?
DB: I think that's about it.
DPS: You obviously revisited those performances to authorize their release. What was that like?
DB: It reminded me how vividly she played, and how much I miss that she's not here.
DPS: During your Beethoven cycle in the mid-1980s, you told me you have a secret repertoire that you play just for yourself. Then, it was Enrique Granados and Bach's Goldberg Variations.
DB: I like that duality. Now, I'm playing the last two books of Albéniz's Iberia and [Bach's] Well-Tempered Clavier. I've never played The Well-Tempered Clavier complete.
DPS: You've often performed here, but you haven't guest-conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1980. Why?
DB: I don't guest-conduct anywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been able to come, but I can't conduct opera, the Chicago Symphony, play piano and guest-conduct. This is not possible.
DPS: At times, though, it seems that you tried. Over the years, you've been known as the busiest classical musician in history. Now conductor Valery Gergiev has taken the heat off you — he's even busier — but do you ever worry that your reputed restlessness colors the way your performances are heard?
DB: Frankly, I don't care. The ones with discerning ears listen and form an opinion — positive or negative — without preconceived ideas.
8)
