Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich
They are two world stars who have known and admired each other since their childhood in Argentina – but Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim have only been performing together with the Berliner Philharmoniker for a few years. This season, they demonstrate their special bond in Ludwig van Beethoven’s youthful and spirited First Piano Concerto. Daniel Barenboim – honorary conductor of the orchestra – also presents Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.
With this concert and the performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, a short cycle comes to a close, as Daniel Barenboim has performed the composer’s first three symphonies with the Philharmoniker since 2021. Whether Brahms knew at the time of composition that his Fourth Symphony would be his last is unknown. The first theme, at least, is unmistakably melancholy and comes to a dramatic head in the course of the movement. In the finale, Brahms looks back to the Baroque era through the form of the passacaglia. To achieve an almost tragic conclusion to the work, the composer, as musicologist Egon Voss argues, unusually designed the third movement “like an exuberant old-style finale”. The symphonist Brahms’s impressive final word is an original appropriation of historical forms and techniques expressed in his own personal idiom.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, on the other hand, is a work of new beginnings. It is possible that the composer played it at his first public appearance in Vienna in 1795, thereby establishing himself as one of the most brilliant pianists of his time. The concerto bursts with ingenious ideas and features a contemplative slow movement before the jazz-like swinging rondo finale. The work is one of Martha Argerich’s signature pieces.
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