Anne-Sophie Mutter / Yo-Yo Ma / Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Triple Concerto (Video)

 TRIPLE CONCERTO

Martha Argerich / Michael Barenboim / Kian Soltani / Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim CLAUDE DEBUSSY

 

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

 

Emmanuel Pahud BEETHOVEN

 

BEETHOVEN

 

Daniel Barenboim / Michael Barenboim / Kian Soltani BEETHOVEN Piano Trios

 

PIANO TRIOS

 

Astrig Siranossian / Nathanaël Gouin / Daniel Barenboim DEAR MADEMOISELLE

 

DEAR MADEMOISELLE

 

Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Diabelli Variations

 

DIABELLI VARIATIONS

 

Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas Nos. 27 - 32

 

PIANO SONATAS Nos. 27 - 32

Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas Nos. 20 - 26

 

PIANO SONATAS Nos. 20 - 26

Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas Nos. 13 - 19

 

PIANO SONATAS Nos. 13 - 19

 

Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas Nos. 7 - 12

 

PIANO SONATAS Nos. 7 - 12

 

Daniel Barenboim LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 - 6

 

PIANO SONATAS Nos. 1 - 6

 

Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim BRAHMS The Symphonies

THE SYMPHONIES

Kian Soltani DVOŘÁK Cello Concerto

CELLO CONCERTO

Daniel Barenboim / Staatskapelle Berlin ELGAR Sea Pictures - Falstaff

SEA PICTURES - FALSTAFF

Anne-Sophie Mutter / Yo-Yo Ma / Daniel Barenboim / West-Eastern Divan Orchestra LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Triple Concerto - Symphony No. 7

                                            TRIPLE CONCERTO - SYMPHONY NO. 7

Daniel Barenboim / Michael Barenboim / Kian Soltani MOZART Piano Trios

Deutsche Grammophon releases Daniel Barenboim’s latest album, Mozart: Piano Trios, featuring Kian Soltani (cello) and Michael Barenboim (violin).

In the album’s program notes, Artistic Director of Mozartwoche and acclaimed tenor Rolando Villazón shares:

“There is a delicious combination of mastery and innocence in their interpretation, the music is Mozart’s, they have stolen it from him with great respect, and now it is theirs.”

Daniel Barenboim / Michael Barenboim / Yulia Deyneka / Kian Soltani MOZART Piano Quartets

Daniel Barenboim has signed a new and exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon.

He will work with the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Staatsoper unter den Linden, the Boulez Ensemble and members of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, with many recording sessions taking place in the the Boulez Saal.

DG will develop three distinct recording series, focusing on Barenboim as pianist and conductor, chamber musician, and ‘educator and innovator’. The latter will take the form of digital-only releases on Barenboim’s own label, Peral Music, and will be complemented by social media campaigns, a strong YouTube presence and programmes for children’s television; Barenboim will appear as a character in Max & Maestro, a 52-part cartoon series co-produced by RAI, France Television and ARD-HR, in which he introduces 11-year-old rapper Max to classical music.

Two physical albums are set for release this summer: a Brahms symphony cycle with the Staatskapelle Berlin, and Mozart’s two piano quartets with Michael Barenboim, Kian Soltani and Yulia Deyneka.

Future albums include Dvořák’s cello concerto with Kian Soltani and the Staatskapelle Berlin, and Smetana’s Má Vlast with the Wiener Philharmoniker. There are also plans to mark Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020 with major releases featuring such leading artists as Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-Yo Ma.

Barenboim said he believed the new relationship would help to introduce ‘the philosophy of the Pierre Boulez Saal, with its vision of the “thinking ear” and of active, engaged listening, to a large new audience.’

Michael Barenboim / Daniel Barenboim / Wiener Philharmoniker / Pierre Boulez SCHOENBERG Violin & Piano Concerti

Peral Music—Daniel Barenboim’s digital record label “for the thinking ear”—is proud to release the Vienna Philharmonic’s debut recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto and Piano Concerto, featuring the iconic composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, and violinist Michael Barenboim. The new release captures the esteemed Vienna Philharmonic’s first performances of both works.

Dating from 2005 and 2012, these are the Vienna Philharmonic’s first recordings of two of Schoenberg’s works: the Piano Concerto with Daniel Barenboim under Pierre Boulez and the Violin Concerto with Michael Barenboim under the direction of his father.

The Vienna Philharmonic has enjoyed a close bond with Schoenberg’s music, since he himself conducted two performances of his Gurre-Lieder in 1920 and afterwards wrote a personal letter of thanks, expressing his gratitude to the musicians for their work together. Since then there have been more than 100 performances of his works, and the orchestra even played an important part in the foundation of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna in 1998.

It is all the harder to believe that the Vienna Philharmonic had never previously played either of these two works. For Daniel Barenboim the orchestra’s performances of Schoenberg’s music are full of “tenderness, good-natured informality and naturalness.” Their “playing is very much inspired by the venue.”

This makes it all the more inconceivable that these works by arguably the greatest composer of the 20th century, and a native of Vienna to boot, had been overlooked by the orchestra for so many years.

It was not until 2005 that Pierre Boulez conducted the Vienna Philharmonic’s first performance of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, when the soloist was Daniel Barenboim. Seven years later Barenboim returned with his son Michael and the two of them gave the first performance of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto op. 36 with the orchestra. “Highly explosive music,” Michael Barenboim describes Schoenberg’s piece: “Every bar is aflame.” The work’s difficulties are plain. When it received its first performance in 1940, the composer’s daughter, Gertrud Greissle, remarked that “The difficulties are not purely intentional, but they are unavoidable.” Even today the virtuosity of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto instils a sense of awe in many violinists. For a time Jascha Heifetz regarded the work as unplayable.

But for Barenboim, “Where other orchestras wrestle with the difficulties, the Viennese may do so as well, but they then discover themselves in the music, and this is really wonderful.”

Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim BRAHMS The Symphonies

Formed in 1570, the Staatskapelle Berlin is the world’s third oldest orchestra with an exceptional, dark and warm sound shaped by a long line of celebrated conductors including Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss and their relative isolation in East Germany.

In addition to winning seven Grammy Awards and holding the Musical Directorship of the Staatskapelle Berlin since 1992, Maestro Barenboim is also the General Music Director of the Staatsoper Berlin. He previously served as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris and Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Fluent in Spanish, Hebrew, English, French, Italian, and German, he is the only Israeli in the world to hold both Palestinian and Israeli passports. He co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which was designated a United Nations Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding in 2016. In 2008, he received the International Service Award for the Global Defence of Human Rights.

As part of his recently announced exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, the world’s iconic classical label, Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin have recorded the complete Brahms Symphonies, which will be released by Universal Music.

Daniel Barenboim SCHUBERT Piano Sonatas

How does he do it? We all know Daniel Barenboim eats, sleeps and dreams music, but somehow he has found time to set down five discs’ worth of Schubert: the 11 completed sonatas. He has been playing them in concert but it’s a tribute to his immense musical intelligence that he can grasp a whole oeuvre in this way and make it his own.

The first word that comes to mind, after extensive listening, is ‘unflinching’. These performances don’t prioritise finesse per se but they are fiercely honest. In a sense, Barenboim reminds me of Richter in the way that you either accept his vision or you don’t; he probably cares little. Some musical decisions seem against received opinion (just as they could with Richter): the notion that an underlying sense of pulse, of a regular tempo, is crucial in traversing the vast spans of the first movements of D894 or, even more so, the final B flat Sonata, for instance. Barenboim is highly reactive, so there’s a tendency for phrases that with some artists form large-scale arcs to become bittier – more Beethovenian in some respects. But he can be gripping and revelatory, as in the way he varies the rondo theme in the finale of the last A major Sonata.

This is, on the whole profoundly serious Schubert. There’s a hint of a smile in the opening movement of the E flat Sonata, D568, but little of the playfulness that others find in the finale of the G major; and Barenboim eschews elegance, which can be a pity, as witness the plain-Jane theme of the slow movement of the A minor Sonata, D537. The slow movement of the G major Sonata is to my mind too slow, its distinctive dotted rhythms sounding deliberate compared to, say, Imogen Cooper’s most recent recording or those of Paul Lewis and Volodos.

All of that is, you could argue, a subjective viewpoint. But, and this is not subjective, Barenboim’s technique is not what it once was and this leads to passages that sound approximate. It tends to result in tempi that aren’t ever particularly fast. The death-haunted tarantella of the finale of D784 has none of the fleet terror of Uchida, though in its place is a barely suppressed ire that flares at the least provocation. The Scherzo of the late A major, too, is a little studied and some of the accentuation seems overly strong. And in the slow movement of the same sonata, the flaring from sanity to total mental collapse that is conjured so vividly by some (Uchida, Brendel, Lewis) here seems a touch subdued. I suspect that these interpretations are more compelling when you’re hearing the great man himself in a darkened concert hall. In the bright light of my study, they tended to throw up more questions than answers. (Harriet Smith / Gramophone)