Was this Daniel Barenboim’s farewell to the Proms?

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Daniel Barenboim walked on stage, slow and frail, guided by the night’s soloist, Anne-Sophie Mutter. He was met by a hero’s welcome, the applause in the packed hall long and loud, only topped by the outpouring after the music. Acknowledgement, surely, of the 81-year-old conductor’s lifetime of achievement and the real possibility this may have been his last Prom, not that it was billed as such. Still, there was a valedictory air to the evening, a sense of an audience paying its respects to a legendary musician. Now living with a serious neurological condition, in the past two years his performances have become an ever-increasing rarity.
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Some concerts matter too much, however, and this summer Barenboim is touring with the remarkable West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he co-founded 25 years ago, in which Arab and Israeli musicians play side by side. Plenty has been said elsewhere about its context and purpose, including recently in Clemency Burton-Hill’s moving interview with Barenboim in this newspaper; Mutter’s encore of a Bach saraband was, in her words, a musical prayer for lasting peace in the Middle East. It came after a Brahms Violin Concerto in which Mutter’s sound was powerful and piercing, even if I’d swap some of that dazzling gleam for more light and shade.
We had those qualities and more — grandeur, warmth and clarity — in Schubert’s “Great” Symphony No 9, which accommodated Barenboim’s trademark fondness for stately tempos better than the Brahms. Conducting sitting down, his gestures contained and economical, he made this symphony feel more like a giant piece of chamber music than ever. No player names are given out by the orchestra but the purity of the opening horn solo and the eloquence of the oboist deserve their own mention. Yet the detail was always part of the whole, the shaping of this Schubert seeming entirely natural, rising and falling as if the orchestra was breathing as one. Available on BBC Sounds★★★★☆
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