In a 2006 interview, the conductor Daniel Barenboim declared a special affinity for the precocious Mozart. “Look, I know very well what it means always to be too young for everything,” Barenboim, a former child prodigy, said. That rings true. He was an international concert pianist at 10, debuting at Carnegie Hall at 14.
Now 83 and navigating a debilitating illness himself, he seems suddenly, sadly too old for many things — although he has done a lot since announcing his “serious neurological condition” in 2022.
After stepping down as the music director of the Berlin State Opera a year later and amid numerous canceled performances, Barenboim has appeared occasionally with the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic and at La Scala in Milan. It was only last year, though, when his frailty had become visible and undeniable, that he confirmed that his condition was Parkinson’s disease.
The illness has done little, however, to deter Barenboim’s commitment to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the ensemble he founded in 1999 with the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said to bring young Arab and Israeli musicians together. On Thursday, Barenboim appeared with the orchestra at the Waldbühne amphitheater in Berlin before a large and grateful audience.
The outdoor Waldbühne stage is a regular stop on the West-Eastern Divan’s annual summer tour, which this year will include the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Philharmonie de Paris. Although somewhat contained, Barenboim seemed happy to be in familiar surroundings.
Ambitiously, Barenboim is scheduled to tour with the orchestra for nine more engagements in total. And there’s a new West-Eastern Divan Festival, planned for Berlin in November, which offers the opportunity to hear the orchestra play music by Pierre Boulez in the techno club Berghain.
Thursday’s concert was one of four this month in which the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will be joined by Yo-Yo Ma — another child prodigy — for Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor. When Ma and Barenboim came on with their arms around each other, it was hard to tell whether it was for support or friendliness, or both.
It was a reunion of sorts: Ma was invited to the first West Eastern Divan workshop, before anyone thought the project would grow into an orchestra. His respect for Barenboim was evident on Thursday in the attention he paid him during the Dvorak, though there was very little to attend to: The baton in Barenboim’s right hand barely pulsed, and his left hand rose only occasionally to carve or point expression here and there.
These understated gestures, though, were often extremely effective, and conductors have done more with even less: The example of Leonard Bernstein conducting a Haydn symphony with just his eyebrows comes to mind. When Bernstein did that, in 1984, he could rely on the well-oiled machine of the Vienna Philharmonic. Thursday’s players weren’t as well synchronized and couldn’t necessarily count Barenboim, who conducted seated, for clear guidance.
It was fortunate that Ma had just come from Tanglewood, where he had organized a conductor-less performance of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. In a program note, he described it as “an example of what distributed leadership can sound like and a lesson in the practice of democratic responsibility.” This was exactly the responsibility that he and orchestra took in the concerto’s more intimate exchanges. The dialogue between cellist and woodwinds, and later, cellist and a solo violin, was pure chamber music.
Ma’s recent Tanglewood experiment aligns with the West-Eastern Divan’s musical and humanitarian ethos, which Barenboim articulated succinctly in the wake of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023: “We have to listen to each other.” At one point in the concert’s second half, during Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, Barenboim’s left hand pointed to his ear.
He has spent more than 25 years giving this orchestra what they could not get without him: a sound. Weighty but transparent. Old fashioned, in a way, but not fussy. It was there in the controlled explosions in the Schumann, the serenity of the counterpoint. It is undoubtedly Barenboim’s sound, but it’s also the orchestra’s to run with.
Barenboim seems to have recognized this. In the statement that announced he had Parkinson’s, he said he wanted “to ensure the orchestra’s long-term stability and development” and “take an active role in ensuring that the Divan has the opportunity of working with excellent conductors.”
But Barenboim’s first move in this direction was a rare misstep: hiring his close friend Zubin Mehta to direct a tour with the orchestra earlier this year. Mehta is excellent — but, at 90, he also conducts sitting down. This is not a plan for the future, nor a way to keep this symbol of imperiled international cooperation vital.
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