Word: barenboim
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That attitude sets Barenboim apart from a great many young professionals who are pianists to their fingertips, but unfortunately not to their minds and hearts. They hone their technique to a cold, steely edge, then use it to slice uniformly through whatever music is at hand. Barenboim, on the other hand, believes that "true technique is sound. Every composer, every piece, requires a different world of sound...
Orchestrated Piano. Last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, as he and the Israel Philharmonic launched the orchestra's 15-city North American tour, Barenboim created a sound-world for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 that showed how far beyond mere dexterity his technique goes.* Threading themes together, balancing passages against each other, molding the contours of the composition, he displayed a sensitivity and sense of structure that are lacking in many musicians twice his age. "Unless I feel the totality of the thing," he explains, "I can't understand what's going...
...Barenboim's quest for "the totality of the thing" has led him from the piano to the conductor's podium, which now accounts for a quarter of his more than 100 annual bookings. When the Israel Philharmonic went on to Cleveland last week, he led it from the piano in a smoothly flowing performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1, then stood up to conduct Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 with crisp authority. Such experience helps him as a pianist, he says, because "piano music is so symphonic. The piano is a neutral-sounding instrument...
Beethoven's 32. Barenboim's career parallels that of most prodigies. Born in Buenos Aires, he began studying with his piano-teacher parents when he was five, gave his first recital at seven. After his parents resettled in Tel Aviv, he studied in Europe, becoming at 13 the youngest student ever to win a master's degree at Rome's Academy of Santa Cecilia. Besides taking up conducting, he learned the violin to see music from still another angle, and he did some composing to give his playing "a quality of understanding...
Such a background gives Barenboim a fresh and unabashed outlook on some of the challenging peaks of the piano repertory. Most pianists refrain from tackling Beethoven's 32 sonatas until their ripest years. Barenboim had learned them at 14, played them in a cycle of concerts in London last spring, and is now recording them all on the Angel label. "If you could work to an ideal interpretation, then you'd have to wait to record everything on the day before you die," he says. "All music is something that's made at a certain time...