8 January 2010
Daniel Barenboim is about to embark on a major Beethoven & Schoenberg project at the South Bank Centre.
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Something major is afoot at the South Bank Centre. Later this month, Daniel Barenboim will return to the UK to perform all five Beethoven piano concertos and conduct the Berlin Staatskapelle in Schoenberg’s greatest orchestral works. ‘The most revolutionary composer of the start of the nineteenth century meets the most revolutionary composer of the start of the twentieth, at the start of the twenty-first,’ quips Marshall Marcus, head of music at the South Bank. ‘Performed by someone who is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest interpreters of this repertoire. It’s a very exciting prospect.’
That may just be the understatement of the century. Whenever Barenboim undertakes a complete cycle – as he also did at the South Bank in 2008 with Beethoven’s piano sonatas – it constitutes an ‘event’. You see what Marcus describes as ‘the Barenboim effect’ in action: a box-office frenzy, and an audience that includes many who wouldn’t usually frequent classical concerts. But this particular project, yoking as it does two of the greatest and most revolutionary titans of music and masterminded as it is by someone ‘with a brain the size of Barenboim’s’, looks set to be particularly momentous. No wonder that when Barenboim suggested the idea after the sonata cycle, the South Bank team jumped at the opportunity.
‘We said yes, immediately. The challenge was then to make it work’, Marcus recalls. ‘It’s a massive undertaking. But Barenboim has such an extraordinary ability, a way of focusing in microseconds, and an unparalleled level of musicianship and energy. He’ll play four Beethoven piano concertos in three days, as well as conducting all the major Schoenbergs, and it doesn’t even seem like work for him.’
Possibly, Daniel Barenboim doesn’t even view it as ‘work’, so ingrained is this repertoire in his soul and so convinced is he that music is not separate from the world but inherently connected to it. He also believes, passionately, that both Beethoven and Schoenberg changed classical music forever, leaving ‘audible fingerprints’ on their successors. That is why the programmes – one of which will be performed in Birmingham – will pair the familiar and much-loved Beethoven concertos with Schoenberg, notorious ‘emancipator of the dissonance’ and hardly the most audience-friendly of composers.
‘Schoenberg can be a tough nut to crack, and that’s the challenge – or that’s what audiences think is the challenge’, says Marcus. ‘Here is this music, a hundred years old, which can still feel scary and ‘new’. But I don’t think people are coming just for the Beethoven. Barenboim has such iconic status that audiences know they are in good hands. There’s a kind of trust there.’
Such is the trust, indeed, that tickets sold out almost instantly. The Royal Festival Hall concerts will therefore be relayed for free to the Clore Ballroom, allowing for another thousand people to experience it near-live each night. And Barenboim will be ensuring that his audiences, whether or not they are already bilingual in both Beethoven and Schoenberg, grasp the significance of the pairing. He is illustrating the final concert with a talk about Schoenberg’s fiendish Orchestral Variations and has written an essay for the programme that explains, beautifully, his sense of their relationship as ‘structural pillars’ in the development of music, whose late works were so radical that they changed the course of musical history forever.
If the Schoenberg first-timers must work that little bit harder, it certainly promises to be worth it. ‘Just as Barenboim inspires excellence in his players, he will inspire in his audiences a motivation to understand,’ Marcus adds. ‘He has such a fantastic spirit that having him here will raise everyone’s game. It will make the place sing.’
© Clemency Burton-Hill