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SYMPHONY REVIEW
January 11, 2004
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By Allan Ulrich
The remarkable, if unofficial festival of international orchestras spicing Bay Area musical life this season introduced one of the world's oldest bands to the community Sunday evening, when the Staatskapelle Berlin, led by Conductor for Life Daniel Barenboim, reminded Davies Symphony Hall of the untamable vigor of the Romantic movement. Barenboim is touring this country with nothing but Robert Schumann in his luggage (some other cities will hear the concertos for piano, cello and violin). Whatever the excesses or idiosyncrasies in these readings, they came as an antidote for or rebuff to the authentic performance practice crowd, who might force this most refulgent of mid-19th century symphonists into a whalebone corset.
Seams, in fact, were consistently burst during Barenboim's enveloping performances of the Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61; the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 97 (“Rhenish”) and the Overture to Byron's Manfred, Op. 115. And this was the ensemble to do it. The Staatskapelle Berlin is the resident orchestra for the Berlin Staatsoper, the most traditional of the German capital's three opera houses, and an institution whose roots can be traced back to the sixteenth century. It would be presumptuous on first hearing to affix a sonic identity to the Staatskapelle, but under Barenboim, these players (reasonably youthful and substantially female) are capable of producing an enormous, burnished sound, leavened by the divided strings arrangement favored by the conductor. The winds emit the slightly acrid timbre one associates with German orchestras, while Sunday's timpanist relished his assignment, and then some. The results were weighty and lush in texture, quirky in pacing and for all the wayward details, an act of genuine interpretation. The acoustical peculiarities of Davies Symphony Hall do not figure in the equation: Barenboim's recorded cycle of the Schumann symphonies, just published by Teldec Classics, is uncannily consistent with the live presentations.
Barenboim's traversal of the C major, the most lyrical of the quartet, might have driven a score reader slightly mad. The conductor extended fermatas on one page, whipped his players into a frenzy on the next and spot-lit inner voices throughout. The results were unsettling, unpredictable and uncommonly compelling. More important, they seemed born from a profound conviction. The emphasis on a singing line — right from the soft trumpet at the start of the first movement — afforded its own considerable rewards.
So, as much as one regretted the blurred articulation and imprecise entries in the Scherzo, and as much as one bristled at the unwritten ritards in the Adagio, Sunday's performance delivered the mixture of anguish and repose that epitomize Schumann. Lest one think that exposed nerve endings were all, the final movement, with its reiteration of thematic material and its instrumental contrasts elicited from Barenboim a solidly constructed and emotionally cogent response. The more compact “Rhenish” Symphony. completed by Schumann only four years later, sustained a more dramatic arc. Barenboim's acknowledged reverence for conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler came into play here. Downbeats were downright casual, and rallentandos erupted like allergic rashes, yet the cumulative energy of the reading made its own case. For every dubious moment — like the clumping Scherzo, utterly bereft of lilt — Barenboim's pliant phrasing offered an epiphany: has the middle movement ever breathed such a wondrous air of repose? The brass, so preternaturally eloquent at the lower end of the dynamic range, blazed with glory an anthem-like celebration of the Cologne Cathedral, the launching of which inspired the composer's attendance and this work. The Manfred Overture may strike some ears (these, for sure) as indicative of Schumann's deteriorating mental state, but Barenboim evidently believes in its brooding manipulation of Romantic rhetoric. The performance wanted nothing in turbulent musicianship, although this conductor sometimes underbalances his reeds to the point of oppression. The surprise encore was provocative. Hearing the Poco Allegretto movement of Brahms's F Major Symphony — and in an immaculately voiced and serenely paced performance — generated reflections on the extent to which the four decades separating these works of Schumann and Brahms did not so much quell the uncontrollable beast of Romanticism as lend it a friendly face.
(Allan Ulrich covered music for the San Francisco Examiner and then for the San Francisco Chronicle for a total of twenty-two years. He writes for a variety of national and international publications.)
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Daniel Barenboim