Barenboim becalmed

Fidelio; Samson
The Proms

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Ian Williams

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The visits to the Proms of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under their co-founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim have become, already, something more than an artistic event — or, this year, four artistic events in two days. It is immensely moving to see young people from endlessly embattled states making music together, and doing it with such panache and precision. By the time of the last concert, an unstaged performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, with a starry cast of soloists, it was possible to feel, however, that Barenboim’s hyper-Gergievean rate of work was taking a toll, both on him and on his orchestra. Not that they had lost any precision or attack, but there was a lack of drive in the performance, for all its predominantly rapid tempi, which made this wonderful opera less moving than it can be, indeed for long stretches hardly moving at all.

Barenboim had decided — his first mistake — to begin with the Leonore No.3 Overture. That, as Wagner always claimed, tends to make the ensuing drama seem superfluous. The trouble here was that the overture itself was fatally lacking in drama. Barenboim was at his most Furtwänglerian, adopting an incredibly slow speed for the opening, and then moving into the allegro in an almost inaudible pianissimo. The big difference, if you listen to the overture as Furtwängler performed it, especially before the final scene in Salzburg in 1950, is that the tension he generates there is so hair-raising that you nearly scream, and then the release is more than cataclysmic. With Barenboim and his fine players, the first minutes were becalmed, nerveless, and nothing needed release or, if it had, would have achieved it.

Dispensing with the dialogue, every word of which I adore, Barenboim had his Leonore, Waltraud Meier, reciting the narration that Edward Said had written in its place — amplified, and in English.