Review: Daniel Barenboim playing WTC @ Carnegie

Daniel Barenboim performing at Carnegie Hall on Saturday.
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: January 23, 2007


The two books of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” contain an immense amount of music. Their 48 preludes and fugues touch not only on every major and minor key, twice, but also on just about every way an 18th-century musician might have conceived and executed either form.

The preludes range from comparatively simple, arpeggiated strolls through straightforward chord progressions, to grandly structured, ornate proclamations. And the fugues, each an elegant puzzle, tour the solutions composers used to make these exercises in mathematical perfection into expressive music.

Playing both books over a weekend and making each prelude and fugue leap off the page is a tall order. But Daniel Barenboim has never been thwarted by self-doubt, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut — and perhaps to give a fresh push to his recent Erato recording of the complete work — Mr. Barenboim undertook a marathon, playing Book I on Saturday evening and Book II on Sunday afternoon.

A listener never knows what to expect from Mr. Barenboim’s piano recitals. He personalizes his performances to the point of perversity at times, but in a field so clogged with cookie-cutter players, there’s something to be said for that, not least because Mr. Barenboim is as likely to play with insight and beauty.

He touched both those extremes in these recitals. He was at his most rewarding either in fleet, light-textured readings (like his accounts of the Preludes in D and D minor from Book I and the Prelude and Fugue in C from Book II), or in forceful, crisp performances in which every line stood out clearly within the contrapuntal texture (as in the starkly chromatic Prelude in E flat from Book I and the Fugue in F from Book II).

Appealing as well were nuanced interpretations in which Mr. Barenboim imposed a scale of dynamics — sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden — that would have been impossible on the harpsichord. His reading of the C sharp minor Prelude from Book I, for example, was flexible and introspective, and the D major Prelude from Book II, with its fanfarelike figuration, took on a sense of high drama, with the slowly unfolding fugue offsetting it.

Often Mr. Barenboim’s fluid dynamics and tempos created an orchestration of sorts, as if moving the music from the harpsichord to the modern piano weren’t enough of a leap for him.

But engaging performances of this kind were sprinkled between solipsistic readings so quiet and introspective that you had to wonder whether Mr. Barenboim had forgotten that he was playing for an audience in a huge hall, or odd dissections (like the Prelude and Fugue in E flat, from Book I) in which emphases and tempo changes were exaggerated and labored. Other movements lacked even these peculiarities and were merely soporific.

In a program note Mr. Barenboim plays down the importance of the early-music movement’s research into how Baroque works were played in their day, saying that understanding what was done is less important than understanding why. Few period-instrument players would dispute that. Perhaps Mr. Barenboim should consider this: If you’re going to replace the performance style of a work’s own time with your own interpretive notions, will it be clear to your listeners that more is gained than lost? He accomplished this some of the time, but not consistently.

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Daniel Barenboim: pianissimo

When you have learned and played a Debussy pianissimo, and when you then return to a Beethoven pianissimo, you nkow even better what the differences are, and you realise you are dealing with two entirely different sounds. With Debussy the pianissimo has to be bodiless, and with Beethoven, it has to have a physical core of expression and sound.

Daniel Barenboim: Philosophy in music

Spinoza has written of knowledge as not just an amalgamation of information : there is indeed a difference between experience and knowledge. Many problems, like nervousness before starting to play, have to do with too great a reliance on purely intuitive feelings, or empirical knowledge. once you know how something is constructed, how it reacts to the laws governing sound and phrasing, then there is less reason for nervousness. This does not mean that one can always control one's nerves, but there is a nervousness that springs from a fear of not being able to realise everything one wants to, and of course there is a nervousness which comes from insufficient knowledge. Mechanical repetition is a musical equivalent of superstition. You repeat something mechanically and feel more secure because you have done it three or four times. This is a fallacy, and illogical thinking.

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Einstein said that the most inexplicable thing about the universe is that it is inexplicable. One could almost paraphrase him and say that the most explicable thing about music is its inexplicability. After every observation and analysis there is always an element that remains incomprehensible. This is to me music's transcendental quality.

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If we are to understand the phenomena of nature, or the qualities of human beings, or the relationship to a God or to some different, spiritual experience, we can learn much through music. Music is so very important and interesting to me because it is at the same time everything and nothing. If you wish to learn how to live in a democratic society, then you would do well to play in an orchestra. For when you do so, you know when to lead and when to follow. you leave space for others and at the same time you have no inhibitions about claiming a place for yourself. And despite this, or maybe precisely because of it, music is the best means of escape fromthe problems of human existence.

Daniel Barenboim: Interpretation

Every masterpiece is open to any number of interpretations, as long as they do not falsify it. However, it is not possible to combine all interpretations in one performance, just as it is impossible to live more than one life. The interpreter can never perceive all the many details of the many possible interpretations. In any one performance he can only glimpse them.

We often become obssessed with one particular viewpoint or idea and thus become blind to its opposite. But to me, dualism, the paradoxical nature of things, is the very essence of music. It is not coincidence that the sonata form, which is based on this dualism, is one of the most perfect forms of expression. The structure of a classical sonata or symphony is based on this principle of dualism. It brings out the dramatic essence of music, which does not consist merely of loud or soft, of fast or slow, for music in itself is dramatic, even in its more epic forms such as the compositions of bach. The first subject may be more heroic, and the second subject more lyrical; it is the juxtaposition of these opposing elements that lends the music a feeling of tension and excitement.

Daniel Barenboim: Tempo

Singers, often ask me what tempo I am going to take. I answer that I cannot tell until I have heard them sing, and I often give the same silly but illuminating example: when you are going on vacation and have no suitcase, what do you do? Do you go and buy just any suitcase and then decide what you can put in it? Or do you first consider what you need to take - shirts, tennis racket, rollerblades whatever - and then buy a suitcase of certain size? most likely, you do the latter. The tempo is the 'suitcase;, and the music is the 'contents'. If the suitcase is too small, you can't fit in all your belongings, and if the suitcase too big, everything floats around. Once you arrive it does not matter if the suitcase is brown and round or square and black. The only thing that matters is whether you have what you need. The tempo is therefore to provide the correct speed for the content of the music; therefore it is the last decision I make.

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I think that there is something physical in one's feeling about tempo. You should feel uneasy when a tempo is not correct. This may apply to a particular moment, in a particular place, with a particular acoustic, tension and volume. in an over resonant church you are forced to take a slightly slower tempo than in a building with a dry acoustic, because the sound needs more time to come into being.
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The other extreme is that of slowness. If there is not enough intensity in the vibrato of the strings, or in the harmonic tensions of the music, even a relatively fast-moving tempo will sound too slow. When the tempo is right, all the different ingredients can correlate with each other in perfect harmony.
When you work at an opera house and rehearse with a singer at a piano, when the weight of the sound is considerably less than that of a full orchestra, you maturally take the music at a slightly faster speed. When the sound has weight, it needs time to move. The weight of the sound is a determining factor for the correct tempo. If you ahve an orchestra able to produce the necessary weight, you can take a certian tempo more slowly. With an orchestra lacking this weight the same piece has to be taken imperceptibly faster

Daniel Barenboim: Intonation

One of the most delicate subjects in this area is intonation, and I had my share of problems with intonation at the beginning of my conducting days. Having grown up playing the piano, I did not always notice i f something was not quite clean from the point of view of intonation in the orchestra. I knew what was not quite clean if a wrong note was played, and obviously I heard that chords were out of tune, but I could not always indicate which instrument was too low and which too high.
If you do not hear a chord very clearly or very cleanly, just say what you are thinking at the moment - that this is too high and that is too low - you may be right, and then you will know if this is the case for the next time. or you may be on the wrong track altogether and tell a musicain that he is too low and he may say "I was not too low, if anything I was too high". You musn't be afraid of saying something wrong, because that is how you will train yourself. And this is how I learned. I was not embarrased, if I heard something unclean, to say, this is too low.
At the beginning it often happened that a player replied: 'What do you mean , too low" I was far too high!" Then I would say, "Yes, you are right". This is how you train your ears. But you must be open about it, and not afraid of making mistakes. It is rather like learning a strange language. If you are afraid of making mistakes you will never learn to speak it.

Daniel Barenboim: Orchestras and Conductors

If you were to ask a first-class orchestral player, he would say that few conductors have any influence on the orchestra. They play the tempi indicated by the conductor, adding the nuances or the balance he wants, and that is the end of it. But with a good conductor, musical contact can be so strong that the musicians react to the slightest movement of his hand, his finger, his eye or his body. I f the orchestra is at one with the conductor, they play differently if he stands up straight, or bends forward, or sideways or backwards. They are influenced by every movement. The conductor’s up-beat, moreover, has an influence on the first sound. If his up-beat has no authority, the sound is dead, unless the musicians ignore him completely. If they cannot or do not want to play for him, feeling that he has nothing to impart, they will just play the Beethoven symphony the way they have played it a thousand times before. But if they respect him, they will be with him from the up-beat, which as a direct influence on the first note, whether it should sound hard or soft, on the way it is sustained and to what extent it should vibrate.

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When Sergiu Celibidache said that none, or very few of his colleagues could read scores, a lot of people got cross. But they were taking what he said at face value. What he meant was that many conductors cannot hear the sound, the dynamic or balance of the orchestra during their reading. When you look at a score and at a certain point it says crescendo, then the whole orchestra plays crescendo from pianissimo to fortissimo. Now if the second flute, which is not unimportant and the kettle drum, the trumpets and the trombones all start the crescendo at the same time, as is pointed out in the score, you can hear this. But for that you need knowledge and the ability to read, in order to realise a crescendo in an orchestra, the instruments cannot all start at the same time. The crescendo must be organised in such a way that everything can be heard, the full capabilities of every instrument have to come through. A conductor must be able to think acoustically, and that is very difficult.
For instance, in the beginning of Wagner’s Die Walkure. The cellos and double basses play five semiquavers and a crotchet all marked forte, and after that the second beat is subito piano. You cannot just lay forte and then the subito piano. The forte must rise so that you get the effect of a precipice before the subito piano. This is all part of the reading: the first two crotchets are forte, and the third piano. Everything can be learned in detail except the intensity. The intensity of a forte or a piano, the strength with which you play a forte before getting through to the subito piano is something that cannot be learned.

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Absolute pitch is a help in correcting false intonation. Intonation does not exist in a vacuum, since it is often influenced by correct or incorrect balance. A note may be too high or too low, or a chord may sound unclean because it is wrong from the point of view of balance. Or the overtones may suddenly be too weak or too loud in the chord, or the sound is not homogeneous. In a woodwind chord and instrument like the oboe can sometimes be very penetrating and harder than the others, and that automatically sounds wrong and unclean. You may then get the impression that the oboe is too high, but in fact it is only too hard. With orchestras you know really well, you can correct these things during the normal rehearsal time. They present no problems to me in Chicago and Berlin.

Daniel Barenboim: Different piano schools

There have been different piano schools. There was the so-called German school, which stemmed to a great degree from Theodor Leschitizky in Vienna. Under various guises, one could count such a variety of pianists as Artur Schnabel, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Backhaus, Walter Gieseking and Wilhelm Kempff. And there was the very famous Russian school, which was well known throughout the world through the great Soviet virtuosi such as Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter and earlier on through Rachmaninov and Vladimir Horowitz and others. And before both of these there was a French school, which was more limited, but which gave us Alfred Cortot and Yves Nat – to my mind a great pianist but much underestimated outside France; and the great Italian school that went from Busoni to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Maurizio Pollini. Each of these schools had, in a certain sense, a connection to Liszt. None would have been possible without this grandfatherly person. To my mind, the Hungarian-Slavic side of Liszt was developed by the Russians; the elegance of Liszt’s playing went to the French school, and the slightly more intellectual side to the German and the Italian schools. When you analyse these piano schools you can almost see the different stages of Liszt’s life; Budapest with the connection to the East, Rome in later years, Weimar and of course Paris.

The German branch, which came to us through Busoni and Arrau in more recent days, was probably influenced by the side of Liszt that was interested in Wagner and in the transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies and the songs, most of which were by Schubert. The Russian branch was more concerned with the virtuosity; the pure, pianistic side of Liszt was developed there with a much greater sense of freedom in rubato, a great ability to bring out hidden voices in the chords of the piano – the prime example of this was the Polish pianist Josef Hofmann – and a great capacity to develop a sense of perspective in piano playing. In this school you feel a much greater dynamic range between the melody and the accompaniment. You very often hear the melody being played in a good healthy mezzo forte or forte and the accompaniment pianissimo, whereas the German school balances the accompaniment and the melody within a very narrow area. This is only on e of the Russian school’s characteristics, which was then carried over into the modern Soviet school.

Daniel Barenboim: Sensation-> Imagination-> Reason

I have learned a lot about music by reading books that have nothing to do with it – books by Spinoza and Aristotle, for instance. Aristotle tells us about the faculties of the soul – sensation first, then the internal sense of imagination and memory, and then reason. To me this represents the right path to absorbing a musical composition. It is a never-ending process of adaptation to the work, of absorbing it until it becomes part of ourselves. Only when we reach this stage, can we recreate the work. In the actual performance, the Aristotelian order is reversed: we reason before we start, and then through our senses, recollect our first sensation. The sensory impression of a musical composition can be experienced either through reading or through playing it. His first sensory contact is extremely subjective – he perceives the work through the effect it produces on him and this perception is not always reliable or necessarily compatible with knowledge of the work itself.

Daniel Barenboim: Language and Music

Language is also of great importance in interpretation. It is impossible for a child who has been hearing French from the day he or she was born not to be influenced by its sounds when playing music. The same applies to Germans, Russians and any other nationality. The fact that in French a heavy accent is often placed at the end of words produces difficulties when trying to work out musical phrasing. There is nothing more unnatural in music than an accent at the end of a passage or a sentence. The German language, however, due to its heavy consonants, possesses a certain weight which is reflected in German music. In several ways German music is the opposite of French music. The main difficulty with German music, from the dynamic point of view, is the slowness of the build-up, of the Steigerung and the idea of allmahlich steigern which one often sees in German music scores. It is difficult to translate this: it means approximately ‘increase’ or ‘gradually increasing’. One could describe this particular difficulty in German as an almost structural one. In French music, in Debussy and Ravel, we have exactly the opposite – there it is the swiftness of the dynamics that is so difficult. It is like a sudden spark that flashes up; there is a crescendo or diminuendo in a single note, and you have to execute the dynamics as swiftly as possible. The French use a very descriptive word for this: etincelle, meaning spark. These are basic characteristics of language which are audible in the way musicians of different nationalities play. French musicians have a basic difficulty with solid rhythm, solid sound but fantastic capacity for very imaginative sound colours and swiftness. The German musician tends to possess a better sense of rhythm but probably less imagination for sound.

I consider that differences in language really do have an influence on musical performances. It has to do with the question of tempo, and the question of colour. In Latin orchestras the strings often display an ability to play thinly, lightly, which is very appropriate for a lot of music. An some German musicians, with a natural tendency towards a weightier sound, have greater difficulty with this kind of music.

The element of flair and colour, and an ability to attach as much importance to the least significant detail as to the most important, is a very French characteristic. Once cannot begin to read a Debussy score unless one knows this, and has a feeling for it. You see this characteristic in other areas of French life – the importance the French attach not only to the food but also to its presentation, for instance. They have a capacity for devoting an incredible amount of time and energy to what would seem to other people to be unimportant details, and this emerges very clearly in their music. They can do something quite out of the ordinary from sheer enthusiasm, which, at its best, is exceedingly attractive. On the other hand, with good German musicians you feel the foundation of the music in the way they play. One of their most impressive qualities is their ability to play loudly and intensely, yet never harshly.

The French brass players have serious problems with their language when they play non-French music- they have to come to terms with the fact that they are used to French (u umlaut) sounds and do not really have the ‘a, o and u’. Therefore the sound has a tendency not to be well supported.

Daniel Barenboim on Jacqueline Du Pre

Whatever I showed her, or whatever she heard, seemed to bring out something that was already in her. She had a horror of anything that was fake, or insincere, of anything artificial. She had a gift very few performers have, the gift of making you feel that she was actually composing the music as she was playing. She did not know what it was to have technical difficulties, nor what it meant to play safe. There was a sensation of pure abandon when she played and it was that quality that endeared her to her colleagues and to her audience. There was something in her playing that was completely and inevitably right – as far as tempo and dynamics were concerned. She played with a great deal of rubato, with great freedom, but it was so convincing that you felt like a mere mortal faced with somebody who possessed some kind of ethereal dimension.

Daniel Barenboim: Polyphony in music

The only really polyphonic instruments are the piano, all forms of harpsichord or clavichord, the guitar, organ and the harp. You can create an illusion of polyphony if you play Bach unaccompanied on a cello or violin, but by nature these instruments are monophonic. Music, however is polyphonic by nature, and harmony is possible only in polyphonic terms. I have often found it necessary to point out to both singers and instrumentalists the polyphonic nature of music - the relationship between the vertical and the horizontal, the horizontal being the separate lines of melody and the vertical the harmonies, the polyphony. If the relation between the horizontal and the vertical is incorrect, then the whole interpretation is incorrect.

Daniel Barenboim: Crescendo

With Beethoven you often need to build up a crescendo over a long time and if you arrive at a forte or a fortissimo too soon, the rest of the crescendo is gone. With Debussy it is often exactly the oppisite: there are sudden flashes of crescendo or diminuendo that happen very quicly - sometimes on one note only - and if you miss them you achieve only a very thick sound that simply does not suit the music.

Daniel Barenboim: Lieder

It can be very useful for a pianist to know the Lieder literature, and to play it. First of all, the human voice isthe most direct musical instrument. When you play music that has a text, like the German Lied, you understand what hapens to the music when a vivid word or striking idea comes from the text. For instance, when the word Tod (death) is used in Schubert's songs, something unusual happens harmonically and rhythmically. It is not really important whether this something was a conscious or subconscious act on Schubert's part; the important thing is that it is special. And when you find similar petterns in Schubert's sonatas or impromptus, the experience is that much richer. In other words, there is much to be gained from dealing with different works by the same composer.

Characterisation is clearly of great importance in a Lied. When the piano plays the introduction, an interlude or a clising section, the whole atmostphere should be expressed in it. Sometimes it may be just half a bar - in Schubert's 'Gretchen am Spinnrade', the spinning wheel is first set in motion through the piano. By playing Lieder, the pianist can develop gifts of characterisation- sometimes by very small rhythmical patterns or modulations - which completely change the atmosphrere.

Another factor, which applies also to chamber music with piano and strings but is all-important to the voice, is the use of the pedal. Although the voice is independent of the piano part, as soon as there is any over-pedalling in the accompaniment, both the text and the voice are blurred. Also important is the fact that a sustained vocal line often needs a certain dryness in the piano part to compensate - as a contrast to the mellifluous legato line.

Daniel Barenboim: 3 camps of piano playing

There were basically 3 distinct camps for piano music:
1) the admirers of the virtuoso school, who had no time for either Fischer or Schnabel
2)the so-called intellectuals, who were fascinated by Schnabel's analytical capacities, as manifested in his edition of the Beethoven sonatas, and who regarded Edwin Fischer as a sensitive and vivacious but purely intuitive, improvising type of pianist
3) the Fischer camp, looked of course upon the Schnabel adherents as being far too intellectual and rational.

It was through my friendship with Sir Clifford Curzon that I became aware that a musician could combine great flair and intuition with deep thought and analysis, and that this was the essence of Schnabel. Schnabel was criticised by the purists for being too emotional, and by admirers of the intuitive approach from being too cerebral. In actual fact there is no contradiction between these two qualities

Daniel Barenboim: Communication to listener

I cannot see music as a profession but rather as a way of life. Immersion, complete concentration, is condition sine qua non for the interpreter and performer, because the conscious projection of music for the pleasure of the listener instantly changes the character of a performance. We must not permit our thoughts to wander: the best way to communicate with the listener is to communicate with ourselves, and with the music we are performing.

Daniel Barenboim: Inner Ear

No matter what instrument you play, or whether you conduct or sing, you will only produce the sound you want if you can hear it in your head a fraction of a second beforehand. This is the part of music which is impossible to teach. I could teach people how to put down their hands, how to balance the two Ds, the three Gs and the three Bs in the opening chord of Beethoven's G major concerto, that there is a register where the note has a tendency to be louder, and that the thumb has more weight than the little finger. But if a student is unable to imagine the sound before he starts to play - even if it differs from what I am trying to explain to him - he wil never produce the sound he wants. This ability to hear the sound and the phrasing you want in the inner ear is one of the most essential qualities.