Beethoven and Barenboim: an epic partnership

There is a sense of history in the making, with one of the greatest pianists in the world, ­Daniel Barenboim, insisting yesterday that even after playing Beethoven in London for four decades, "every time you play this music it is as though you play it for the last time, and the first". Two years ago Barenboim played a complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas over eight nights at the Royal Festival Hall, which a consensus of ­seasoned critics and an enraptured public agreed was the most remarkable and tempestuous musical adventure within living memory. There were outbursts of applause between movements – which is not the etiquette – stunned silences, prolonged standing ovations and bouquets of flowers. Now, at the end of this month and into February, Barenboim returns to play a cycle of complete piano concertos by the same great composer whose work for keyboard he has mastered across those four decades but never performed as he does these days, aged 68. With all nights sold out within hours of tickets going on sale last year, and live screen relays arranged by South Bank for those who cannot get in, expectations could not be higher. "If you're asking me: 'Can I live up to it?' — and I think you are," laughs Barenboim, talking by phone from Vienna, "then I'll say this: the violinist Mischa Elman played his first concert at the age of five, and gave the same programme at a 75th anniversary concert. And when he was asked how different it felt, he replied: 'No difference at all. They said after the first concert that I played well for my age, and they are still saying the same thing.' I'm not yet 75, but I'm getting there." There is epic history between Barenboim, these concertos and London. He performed them, unforgettably, when living in the city with his wife, Jaqueline du Pré, and made what are still regarded as definitive recordings with Otto Klemperer and the New Philharmonia in 1968. But Barenboim, a puckish man as well as a genius, prefers to avoid grandiose recollection. During the 2008 sonata cycle, Barenboim says, "people kept coming up to me and saying that their first concert was one of mine, 40 years ago. It makes you feel nice and young, doesn't it!" It surprised some that Barenboim plays Beethoven with even more passionate impetuosity than ever; that Barenboim the wise owl plays even more impulsive and iridescent music than Barenboim the wunderkind. The sonatas were punctuated by stamping and kicking, ecstatic grimaces of ­concentration and rhapsodic, skyward rolls of the eye. "Some of this music," he says, "I have been playing for nearly 60 years. The first concerto I played when I was 10. But the wonderful thing is that every time you play music of this kind, of this depth, you play it as though for the very last time, and for the very first time, and that is how it will be with these concertos. "Arthur Rubinstein was still playing Chopin at the age of 89, for that same reason, for the last and first time. I don't want to sound portentous, but it's a ­wonderful way to live, and a wonderful feeling to meet that challenge." Barenboim is now chief conductor for life at the Deutsche Staatsoper, Berlin, major guest conductor at La Scala, Milan, and frequent soloist and conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic (which he brings for a special concert at the Oxford Sheldonian in spring) and the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he is about to tour America on his way to London. The director of music at the South Bank, Marshall Marcus, finds it, he said yesterday, "gratifying and important that, in this international jet set culture, a soloist and musician of this stature and insight still feels that he has a home, and that home is the Festival Hall. But the excitement goes beyond that: the striking thing is that Barenboim does what he does with a certain ease. "He can be about to tackle some of the most demanding music ever written, and you'll find him in the interval joking or talking about the Middle East. Then when he immerses himself, he is 110% with the music. I think there's a connection between this, his sense of ease with great music, and his being in the real world, not fenced into classical music as a state of isolation. There's a connection between these extraordinary performances and the fact that he's taken them beyond the arts pages." Indeed, the timing of Barenboim's return to London is compelling for reasons other than the piano concertos. Barenboim is well known for his advocacy of peace in the Middle East – not only the world's most famous Israeli, but the only Israeli to also hold Palestinian citizenship. Except that Barenboim's contribution to peace is music-making: "Acceptance of the freedom and individuality of the other is one of music's most important lessons," he said on another occasion. "Music is always contrapuntal, in the philosophical sense." The maestro spoke yesterday having just returned from Qatar, where on Monday his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – founded with his friend, the late Edward Said, and made up of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians — played its first ever concert in an Arab state, a date ­cancelled during the violence in Gaza a year ago. "It was a postponement, from that ­terrible time, and powerful for that – we all felt a sense of occasion," he said yesterday. Although the orchestra has played in the occupied Palestinian territories, this was "the first time in an Arab state, and people were very aware of that. But quite apart from the solemnity, we and the audience enjoyed it, and that is important. I was impressed by how committed the Emir and his people are to the culture itself, not just this attitude you get elsewhere of: 'We have all this money and we can buy everything and anyone in two weeks'. "The Divan has been very flatteringly described as a project for peace. It isn't. It's not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well. The Divan was conceived as a project against intolerance – that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to ­understand what he thinks and feel, without necessarily agreeing with it." For these Beethoven concertos, Barenboim will be accompanied by the orchestra of the Deutsche Staatsoper, the Staatskapelle, and they are performed alongside works by Arnold Schoenberg, which appears to be chalk-and-cheese programming between romantic and modern music. Not so, says Barenboim – the entwinement is didactic. "It's not my idea to accompany Beethoven and ­Schoenberg. But I wanted to show Schoenberg as the link, the continuum, between the 19th and the 20th century, just as Beethoven was the connection between the 18th and the 19th. At Berlin, we have rehearsed this difficult ­repertoire to a point of being able to show that he and Beethoven have much in common: they are a progression from what came before them to what followed them. Most great composers did one or the other – they do both." It seems incongruous, at face value, that Beethoven of all composers – played by Barenboim of all people – should command such devotion, when Beethoven's romantic revolutionary compassion and the human spirituality in his music are the antithesis of today's belligerent hyper-materialism. But this is exactly Barenboim's point. "Beethoven," he says, "was always a symbol of something titanic, but not only that. There are moments in the G major concerto, like the Pastoral Symphony, which have this deep mellowness, which is more difficult to bring out than the titanic. But it is all to do with the depth of the human spirit, the struggle, tragedy and greatness. "Beethoven's music is about challenge and inspiration, for those who play it and those who hear it, even now – especially now." Daniel Barenboim/Berlin Staatskapelle: Beethoven/Schoenberg Shell International Classics series from 29 January at the Royal Festival Hall, and at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 30 January