1:48pm Wednesday 5th May 2010
By Christopher Gray
May morning revellers blinking blearily homeward stumbled into a Radcliffe Square transformed as if for a motor show. A gleaming collection of top-of-the-range Volkswagen Touaregs surrounded the Camera; beyond stood three or four huge outside broadcast trailers. “Must be something to do with the election,” said one passer-by in my hearing. Actually no. This was the Berlin Philharmonic, in the city for its annual VW-sponsored Europa-Konzert, traditionally held on May 1, the anniversary of the orchestra’s foundation in 1881. For 20 years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this has taken place in some specially selected city of cultural significance. This year the choice fell on Oxford.
The thrilling two-hour concert was broadcast live across Germany and in a number of other European countries (but not, shamingly, in the UK, though it was recorded for later transmission by the BBC). How wonderful it must have looked and sounded! Not quite as wonderful, of course, as it did for those of us lucky enough to have had tickets. This truly was a performance one could never forget, with the Sheldonian itself one of the stars. Wren’s lovely building was seen at its glorious best with sunlight streaming through its south windows – a study in gold that admirably reflected the warm and optimistic tone that conductor Daniel Barenboim was encouraging from the orchestra.
This was especially the case, of course, where the horns were concerned The pinpoint accuracy of the players and the emotional tug of the big sound they produced in a venue of such comparatively modest proportions were apparent from their entry in the first piece in the programme, the Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
This work of “profound melancholy”, as its creator described it, set the tone for a programme in which, to be truthful, a tear was rarely very far from the eye. The young American cellist Alisa Weilerstein gave an affecting, and technically accomplished, account of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. This is a composition forever associated with Barenboim’s first wife, Jacqueline du Pré, and this performance – the conductor’s first with a female cellist since his last with du Pré – could hardly fail to connect with her memory.
The concert ended with a sensational performance of Brahms’s Symphony No 1 into which the players threw themselves, with much bodily involvement, in a manner reminiscent of pop stars. The last movement, with its overtones of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, has never moved me so much. Utterly amazing!
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