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Rating: Between Innovation and Tradition: Beethoven, Liszt, and Barenboim
What do Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 have in common? Perhaps the fact that they both represent, even in the perception of Daniel Barenboim who recently performed them first in Turin and then in Rome, an epochal change.
Both concertos ‘substantiate’ a form inherited from the past with new contents, where eloquence, rhetoric, and idealism intertwine, clash, fuse, and distance themselves. One beginning of change, Beethoven, the other arrival and immediate departure.
Innovation and tradition in both.
Innovation and tradition in Barenboim’s interpretation, especially for Beethoven. An entirely English elegance his, always based on the minimal: few lines, few changes in phrasing, few differentiations in dynamics, and on the contrary, clarity and firmness in controlling tensions but also passions, an emotional intensity always measured, calibrated to the point of sometimes seeming more outward than genuinely felt. Barenboim deliberately ‘highlighted’, juxtaposing the old and the new of a ‘traditional’ performance practice felt as past but a starting point for a future-oriented innovation, even in terms of execution; the result was a Piano Concerto No. 3 in search of something that had not yet been done and that remained unexplored, a No. 3 interesting for some choices of taste, yet equally questionable as such.
Classicist but not classical. Romanticizing, not romantic.
No concession to the meditative, ecstatic, contemplative, almost improvised intimacy of the Largo felt by Barenboim rather as an Adagio. No concession to the humorous touch, genuinely delightful for once, of the agile theme of the 3rd movement, one of those themes that seem to have been gathered from the barrel organ of some unknown street musician and then processed and transfigured by Beethoven. A 3rd movement in line with the loaded and.. caricatural reinterpretation of the entire concerto where humor gave way to an irony not entirely fitting yet to Beethoven’s typically ‘masculine’ writing.
Choices.
Choices not always agreeable from the perspective of artistic/musical content communication and not always impeccable from that of good taste, yet choices of a pianist who is an artist and who, if nothing else, unlike others, has never sought to smuggle an image of himself that was not an expression of his own way of being and feeling.
Choices that the interpretation of Liszt cast in a new light because, without any fractures, Barenboim let the irony he had infused in Beethoven's concerto pass through them. Perfect understanding with Pappano, tight and convulsive rehearsals allowed the restoration to Liszt’s No. 1 of the provocative and desecrating originality that left... listeners and critics of the time bewildered. The control of the emotional aspect, the English humor, unsuited to Beethovenian Eloquence, found fertile ground in the insistent, distorting, and grotesque, tearful but also ironic and mocking, parodic eloquence of a Liszt with inexhaustible verve. And Barenboim’s pianism became hyper shimmering, bold, and elegantly aggressive, as a logical conclusion of the initial Beethoven reinterpretation premise.
A special concert, not very 'captivating' from an emotional point of view, but fascinating from an intellectual one. Still a lesson indeed.
Vera Mazzotta
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