Word: barenboim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...estimated to total 835 compositions, instead of the familiar Kochel list of 626. The complete presentation will enable a sufficiently dogged listener to sample such obscure efforts as the unfinished opera L'Oca del Cairo. And the quality of performances should be extremely high -- Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim playing violin sonatas, for example; Mitsuko Uchida all the piano sonatas; both the Juilliard and Tokyo quartets on hand for chamber music...
Brahms: The Three Violin Sonatas, Itzhak Perlman, violin; Daniel Barenboim, piano (Sony Classical). There are half a dozen or so great sonatas for violin and piano; Brahms wrote three of them. Perlman and Barenboim -- the latter back at the keyboard, where he belongs -- give them robust yet sensitive readings...
Finally, in August 1988, Berge, the dynamic president of Yves Saint Laurent, was appointed to run the project. Five months later, he set off the biggest flap of all when he unceremoniously fired Daniel Barenboim and shelved the conductor's programming plans. By May of last year, when Chung, plucked from | the obscurity of the Saarland Radio Orchestra in West Germany, was named Barenboim's surprise successor, the new administration had little more to offer than a notion that the house would open early this year, with something, sung by somebody or other. The stage seemed set for disaster...
Chung's success was emblematic of the larger triumph. At every step in the Bastille's history, it would have been much easier to do nothing rather than something. It would have been easier to leave the Opera in the Garnier, easier to leave the solid but dull Barenboim in place, easier to maintain the Paris Opera's reputation as the art form's great underachiever...
Whether Berge fired Barenboim because the Bastille boss is a power-hungry egomaniac or a brilliant visionary who has entrusted the future of one of Europe's august cultural institutions to a young man for whom music is still an art and not just a job is irrelevant. The fact is, without offense to Barenboim (music director-designate of the Chicago Symphony), it was the best thing that could have happened. The Berge-Chung regime sends a signal that there can no longer be operatic business as usual in Paris. That big-league opera means something more than canary fancying...