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

 

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

 

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

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.

Barenboim ELGAR The Dream of Gerontius

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin continue their exploration of the music of Edward Elgar with a new recording of The Dream of Gerontius.

Barenboim and the orchestra are joined by singers Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Andrew Staples, and Thomas Hampson as well as the Staatsopernchor Berlin and the Rias Kammerchor.

Recorded under the baton of Daniel Barenboim with the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Rias Kammerchor, Thomas Hampson sings both the role of the Priest and Angel of the Agony. Tenor Andrew Staples joins, singing the role of Gerontius, with mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers as the Angel. Hailed as Elgar’s finest choral composition, The Dream of Gerontius explores a soul’s journey from near-death to the throne of judgement. Performed in concert at the Berlin Musikfest last year, Hampson was hailed as “rock solid” by the Financial Times, and as “filling the room with an angelic aura” by Kultur Radio.

‘Barenboim's long association with, and love for, Elgar has effectively made it part of his musical DNA’ (Gramophone)

‘Barenboim made this a Gerontius of transcendental splendour’ (Financial Times concert review)

‘If anyone can make a case for Elgar outside Britain, and without special pleading, it's Daniel Barenboim, returning to conduct this British composer's works’ (New York Times)

 

Lisa Batiashvili / Daniel Barenboim / Staatskapelle Berlin TCHAIKOVSKY - SIBELIUS Violin Concertos

On their latest album release, General Music Director Daniel Barenboim leads the Staatskapelle Berlin with violinist Lisa Batiashvili in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. 

Barenboim first heard Batiashvili perform with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, which inspired their future collaborations. “There are few violinists with better taste,” says Barenboim. 

The album, released on 4 November, 2016 on Deutsche Grammophon, marks Barenboim and Batiashvili’s first recording project together.

Barenboim / Staatskapelle Berlin ELGAR Symphony No. 2

This is a superb, in fact I feel justified in calling it unequivocally a great, Elgar Two. It's difficult to know where to start in listing its excellences -- the playing of the Berlin Staatskapelle, without one ounce of unnecessary emotion yet performing as if they've had the music in their blood all their lives? The warmth and yet crystal clarity of the recording, in which every counterpoint, every subsidiary voice in Elgar's hugely complex score is perfectly audible and ideally balanced? But one must start and finish with Barenboim's interpretation, his first in this work for 40 years, with which he burnishes his already impressive and long-established credentials as an Elgarian . . . this is a marvellously full-blooded reading of the Symphony, full of drama and passion and rich-hued colour . . . [Barenboim] also understands perfectly Elgar's inwardness, the moment where the dynamic drops to "ppp" and he seems almost to lose himself in the hush of his own thought. Barenboim certainly makes the most of the haunted quality of the first movement's development section. The celebrated oboe counter-melody in the "Larghetto" has seldom sounded so plangent, while Barenboim's "scherzo" is demonic in its remorseless forward drive, preparing for a complex and exciting finale in which those slashing off-beat chords at the return of the theme have all the necessary impulsiveness and confidence. This must be one of the finest performances currently on offer, and a wonderful follow-up to Barenboim's Elgar Cello Concerto with Alisa Weilerstein, winner of this year's BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Year.

[Record Review / Calum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine (London) / 01. July 2014]

Barenboim / Staatskapelle Berlin ELGAR Symphony No. 1

It is almost two years since the release of Daniel Barenboim’s exceptional recording of Elgar’s Second Symphony with the Berlin Staatskapelle.

The finest version of the work to appear on disc in many years, it signalled Barenboim’s return to the music of a composer he had conducted and recorded extensively more than 30 years earlier, but which he was now revisiting with an orchestra possessing its own very distinct tradition and soundworld.

Now, we have the First Symphony, recorded at concerts in the Berlin Philharmonie last September. If it’s not quite as overwhelmingly impressive as his account of the Second, it’s still a remarkable achievement. In its voicings and especially in its gradations of string tone, the performance seems to fix Elgar’s orchestral writing even more firmly into the context of post-Wagnerian romanticism than before; the veiled sound for the opening motto theme immediately evokes memories of Parsifal, while the slow movements sometimes acquire a Brucknerian spaciousness.

At 51 minutes, Barenboim’s recording isn’t as slow as several others – John Barbirolli, Colin Davis and Giuseppe Sinopoli all take significantly longer – but is still a thing of extremes. The first movement is allowed to unfold at its own pace, lasting almost 20 minutes, but that is followed by a lightning-quick scherzo, with Barenboim putting enormous faith in the fabulous articulation of the Staatskapelle strings. The finale, too, is immensely purposeful, and only the closing minutes of the symphony disappoint. The crowning return of the motto theme in the finale doesn’t quite sweep everything before it, as it can in some interpretations. There’s no unambiguously optimistic resolution, no real sense of what Elgar called “a great charity and a massive hope in the future”. For Barenboim, it seems, there has to be a compromise. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Daniel Barenboim / Gustavo Dudamel / Staatskapelle Berlin BRAHMS The Piano Concertos

This alliance of marquee names proves to be a resounding success, thanks partly to the robust personalities of Barenboim and Dudamel, and partly to the choice of material, showcasing the early and late Brahms. 

The Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor was the composer’s first performed orchestral work, and not initially welcomed. 

It’s subsequently been reassessed as a youthful masterpiece, especially the haunting Adagio, to which Barenboim here brings a muscular tenderness, while the Staatskapelle Berlin is robust and responsive in the dashing Rondo 22 years later, the Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat major” was an instant success, the closing section’s parade of memorable themes, and the unusual prominence of the cello in the third movement both reflecting Brahms’ increased confidence in his abilities. (Andy Gill)

Anna Netrebko / Daniel Barenboim / Staatskapelle Berlin RICHARD STRAUSS

Deutsche Grammophon have certainly worked on the principle of saving the best until last when it comes to Richard Strauss’s 150th anniversary: it doesn’t get much starrier than Daniel Barenboim and Anna Netrebko taking on the mighty Four Last Songs with Barenboim’s long-term collaborators the Staatskapelle Berlin.

As I’ve discussed in reviews of her recent Verdi recordings, the Russian-born soprano’s voice has expanded and gained exciting new colours over the past few years – her operatic work has seen her moving away from the Susannas and Manons with which she made her name and into heavier repertoire such as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth. German repertoire has yet to play a part (the only such music I’d previously heard from her was a radiant, sensual Morgen! at the Last Night of the Proms in 2007, though there are rumours of a forthcoming Elsa in Lohengrin under Christian Thielemann), so I was intrigued to see what she’d do with Richard Strauss’s late, great meditations on twilight and mortality.  

She brings a suitably dusky, veiled tone to the entire cycle, with plenty of colour and presence in the middle and lower reaches of the voice (the first phrase of ‘Frühling’, which can sound undernourished in some hands, made me sit up and listen immediately!). Her big lyric voice floats effortlessly over the sensitively-handled Staatskapelle forces, with no sense of driving the voice too hard, and a wonderful sense of intimacy in moments like the depiction of summer ‘shuddering erotically’ in the second song. The Staatskapelle players enter fully into this mood of interiority, approaching the songs almost like chamber-music – the recessed horn and violin solos in the third song are quite magical (having reviewed this from a preview-copy without full sleeve-notes, I can’t alas, credit the players by name), and there are some exquisite soft-focus string sonorities here and in the transcendent final song.

So how does Netrebko’s interpretation compare to her esteemed predecessors in this holy of holies? First, a word on the language issue: despite being a fluent German-speaker and long-term Vienna resident (she’s held Austrian citizenship since 2006) Netrebko’s sung German may sound rather cloudy and occluded to those used to the crisp precision of a singer like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and she doesn’t go in for the very detailed word-painting of some earlier recordings. However, her broader approach to text comes with its own pay-offs: the mood of each phrase is exquisitely judged, and everything feels fresh and spontaneous rather than micro-managed or cerebral. She allows herself the occasional breath in places which you may not expect, true, but is still more than capable of soaring to thrilling effect in the big moments like the climax of ‘Beim Schlafengehen’.

I’d originally hoped that we’d get more orchestral songs as companion-pieces (I’d love to hear her in the big dramatic ones like Cäcilie and Zueignung!), but Daniel Barenboim’s take on Strauss’s great heroic tone-poem Ein Heldenleben is more than fair compensation. What struck me from the very beginning was how well matched this particular take on a ‘Hero’s Life’ is to the Four Last Songs: there’s a nobility and maturity about this interpretation which somehow mirrors the autumnal mood of the song-cycle, with the distinct sense that our eponymous hero is looking back on his youthful exuberance and struggles from the vantage-point of his twilight years. The grandiose opening statement, for instance, is less brash and exuberant than it can sometimes seem, but grips you from the off with its expansive authority. The carping critics in the second section are personified to perfection by the Staatskapelle winds, and the great battle-scene rages with almost Mahlerian intensity. But once again that superb first horn and leader are first among equals in the rapturous love-duets, particularly the glorious final pages of the score. (Presto Classical)

Alisa Weilerstein / Staatskapelle Berlin ELGAR - CARTER Cello Concerto

In 1972, Virgil Thomson wrote that Elliott Carter was America’s “most admired composer of learned music and the one most solidly esteemed internationally,” an appreciation that was still accurate when Carter died, last month, at the age of a hundred and three. It is in the realm of chamber music that Carter’s work will most likely endure, not only because of its inherent excellence—his cycle of five string quartets is perhaps the finest since Bartók’s—but because his orchestral pieces are expensive to rehearse and challenging for an audience to digest: the complexity of his musical language is best experienced on an intimate scale. But the Cello Concerto (2000), a fabulously inventive product of Carter’s astonishing Indian summer, may be an exception, an impression confirmed by the rapidly rising cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s new album, “Elgar / Carter: Cello Concertos” (Decca), recorded with the Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

For many listeners, the entry point will be the Elgar, and, while this is a dramatic, big-boned performance, connoisseurs won’t be tossing away their copies of the work’s greatest recording, which the phenomenal Jacqueline du Pré and the conductor John Barbirolli laid down for EMI in 1965. Barbirolli came at the piece through the prism of Italian opera and the English pastoral tradition, and the result shivers with life. Barenboim—who once recorded the piece with du Pré, to whom he was married—approaches the concerto by way of his beloved German classics: any passage that hints at Wagner is boldfaced and underlined, with sometimes leaden results.

Weilerstein is an exuberant performer in public, but she seems muted here; not so in the Carter, where she relishes the composer’s bristling passagework and insistent personal voice. The work’s first recording (on Bridge), by Fred Sherry, with Oliver Knussen conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, will always be the reference version; Sherry worked intimately with Carter for decades, and the crystalline purity of his interpretation seems incised for the ages. But Weilerstein and Barenboim’s generously expressive alternative makes this craggy and mysteriously compelling piece seem vulnerably human. Thomson, going out on a limb, once linked Carter’s working method to that of Poe, a comparison that, in a recording like this, seems apt: the piece is a clearheaded exploration of the “grotesque and arabesque,” the warring spaces of the human soul. (Russell Platt / The New Yorker)