Daniel Barenboim with Mozart, Berg and Beethoven
Music from the First and Second Viennese Schools come together here under the baton of Daniel Barenboim, who also takes to the piano himself for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14. The centrepiece of the concert is Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6, which were composed at the beginning of the First World War. Their sombre final march is followed by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, symbolically leading us by the end of the concert out of darkness and back into the light.
The trio of Daniel Barenboim, the Berliner Philharmoniker, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano concertos has guaranteed musical highlights time and again since their first joint performances and recordings in the 1980s. It is not only Barenboim’s extraordinary feel for the composer’s multifaceted idiom, ranging from the light-footed to the deeply serious, that contributes to this. His familiarity with the orchestra – he was appointed honorary conductor in 2019 – also enables him to conduct the ensemble while playing the piano, relying in part on eye contact and the most economical of gestures.
Barenboim then conducts a striking contrasting programme with Alban Berg’s opulently scored Three Pieces for Orchestra. Berg dedicated the work to his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, hoping that this time he would be able to counter his harsh criticism: “I have really tried to do my best to follow all your suggestions and advice,” he wrote when sending the score. The pieces are titled Präludium (Prelude), Reigen (Round Dance), and Marsch (March). The middle piece was originally intended to be a light-hearted intermezzo, but the outbreak of war gave it a much darker character. Berg even described the final movement as “a march for an asthmatic, which I am and, it seems to me, will remain forever”. The premiere, given by the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1923, was surprisingly well received – although only the first two pieces were performed.
As both a pianist and a conductor, Daniel Barenboim has a particularly comprehensive perspective on Ludwig van Beethoven’s music, which he considers to be “universal”. Barenboim concludes the programme with the composer’s Fifth Symphony, a piece that has become one of the most famous works of classical music ever written thanks to its striking opening motif and the compelling energy that develops from it.
© 1997 NHK
Artists
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