Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Age concern | 21 January 2016

And was Gustavo Dudamel happy with Barenboim’s Morton Feldman speeds in the Brahms? It certainly saved Barenboim from playing too many wrong notes

issue 23 January 2016

Daniel Barenboim back at the Festival Hall! Cue The Grand March of the Musical Luvvies Across Hungerford Bridge, a bustling overture by Karl Jenkins in which a trombone farts out the epigrams of Simon Callow and the violas mimic the gentle swing of David Mellor’s shoulder-length bob — modelled, I’m told, on Anna Ford’s barnet c.1982. Jolly fine it looked, too, on Sunday night.

Barenboim doesn’t have much hair these days, but baldness suits him. Sixty years after his RFH debut, as a 13-year-old playing Mozart under Joseph Krips, he has the same baby-pink skin as Winston Churchill in old age. He also shares Churchill’s belief in his own indestructibility. Is there any other 73-year-old in the world who would play both of Brahms’s piano concertos in one evening? And more or less get away with it?

Of course it helped that the audience, like Churchill’s adoring public during his ‘Indian summer’, had their ears cocked for rhetorical grandeur rather than geriatric fluffs.

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