Saturday, October 26, 2024

Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin

Not looking in the best of health and seated to conduct, Daniel Barenboim led a stoical account of Brahms’s swansong Symphony, the Fourth, spacious (some will have found it leaden), the opening a series of sighs, which anticipated this general approach across the four movements and forty-seven minutes, reminding at various times of late-phase Celibidache, Giulini and Klemperer, played by the Berliners trenchantly and with intense lyricism. It held the attention though, even when there was little coming from Barenboim, certainly not in gestures, the orchestra generating its own passions (Noah Bendix-Balgley, concertmaster) if within Barenboim’s constraints. The danger is, which came to pass, that the first two movements would be two sides of the same slow-gait coin for all the Andante’s soulful beauty and the players’ concentration. However, the Scherzo was quick and incisive, rhythmically vital, save when standstill reflection was interspersed, and there were some intriguing ‘Celi’-like dynamic shades in the coda, leaving the passacaglia Finale to be on the grandest of scales (or meander) determined to get to the finishing post, which it did with a sudden increase of vitality and emphasis.

In the first half Barenboim set a fairly lively tempo for Beethoven’s C-major Piano Concerto (catalogued as No.1), the tutti detailed, and further enlivened by hard-stick ‘period’ timpani. Martha Argerich gave a quicksilver account of the first movement, yet poised and dynamically considered, searching the music’s development, quite suspenseful at times, always buoyantly and characterfully accompanied, with her scintillating in the runs and her left-hand resolute in the bass; if the cadenza was Beethoven’s it was the short one. The Largo was given time for eloquent and intimate expression – with lovely clarinet contributions from Wenzel Fuchs – the whole a sacred meditation, riposted by a hair-let-down racing tempo for the Finale, the ‘pub piano’ episode less syncopated than it can be simply because of the lightning tempo – make no mistake, Argerich’s fingers are as mercurial as ever, as further demonstrated in ‘Traumes Wirren’, No.VII from Schumann’s Opus 12 Fantasiestücke.