Philharmonie, Berlin, 2 October 2025
Carl Maria von Weber: Overture to Oberon
Franz Schubert: Symphony No. 7, “The Unfinished”
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 7
Slowly, still a little unsteady on his feet after a recent serious fall, he makes his way to the podium. The audience greets him with warm applause; they have had to do without him at the Berlin Philharmonic’s podium for quite some time. Now Daniel Barenboim is back. And musically, he presents himself as magnificent as he has in years.
A chair stands in front of his podium, but the 82-year-old’s determination compels him to conduct standing, leaning slightly against the railing behind him. Marked by illness, the maestro looks fragile, yet his pared-down late style is striking.
Like Richard Strauss in his final years, Barenboim relies on the most minimal of gestures, taking on the role of a subtle prompter—aware of the moments when every eye turns to him, and when he can let the orchestra run on its own. This works, of course, thanks to his decades-long partnership with the Berliner, stretching back more than half a century.
They understand and respond to the rare and welcome unhurriedness of their elder statesman, and to his refined, nuanced shaping of quiet passages—already evident at the very beginning of Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon Overture.
Few conductors before him have undergone such a radical transformation: from a bundle of energy, sometimes almost carried away by his own force, to the calm center he now represents. One comparable figure might be another great, Sergiu Celibidache.
The value of such subtle music-making becomes especially audible this evening when, over the finest thread of string sound, clarinet and oboe (brilliant guest soloists from the Deutsche Oper and DSO: Thomas Holzmann and Juan Pechuan Ramirez) begin their lines with the utmost tenderness, each phrase allowed to fade away at leisure.
In Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, the audience on the first night finds it hard to endure the extraordinary stillness, coughing intrusively from several corners at precisely the most intimate and beautiful moments of the first movement. Fortunately, the opening bars are spared such unrest—those measures in which one might recall Joana Mallwitz’s own fascination with Schubert, wondering, as she did, how the composer managed to weave the otherworldly, which the cellos render here in pale hues, into the music at all.
In Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the performance achieves seldom-heard extremes of contrast, from the lyrical slow movements to the rapid finale. But why, one wonders, did Barenboim scratch his ear several times? Was something amiss—or was he marveling himself at how vividly even the most delicate motifs emerged in the broad panorama of sound?
