Daniel Barenboim is, by any standard, a prodigy. Born in Argentina in 1942, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, he gave his first official piano recital in Buenos Aires at the age of seven. He moved with his family to Israel at the age of nine, and soon launched a career as a pianist and conductor that has led to international acclaim and several prestigious music directorships, including that of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He’s highly intelligent and intensely energetic, and he’s a stunningly fine musician. He speaks more than a half dozen languages fluently, though he says self-deprecatingly, “My Russian is only half good.”
He arrived amid much fanfare and many promises from the Orchestral Association of greater community involvement and cooperation between the city’s major cultural institutions. But critics complain that not much has come of those pledges, saying, for example, that Barenboim has made only a few visits to Chicago public schools and pointing to his bowing out of a much-publicized production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at Lyric Opera last fall. Such criticism can seem unfair. Solti, although not above suggesting the erection of a statue of himself, was hardly involved in the city’s day-to-day musical life. Whatever the complaints, Barenboim has given of himself much more generously.
DB: Yes, that’s right. You work closely together from one week to the next, from one style to the other and from one piece to another.
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BM: Can you speak of your goals and your vision for the CSO? It’s famous for the “Solti sound”–do you want to change that?
This is, in a way, what creates the tension of music: the sound has basically a tendency to drop into silence. You are a singer, so you know. You use so much energy to produce a tone; unless after you produce a tone you nourish it and hold on, it dies, it dies into silence. Therefore if you let it die you produce tension. The relation is not only between the sounds one after another, but the tension starts in a transition from silence to the first note. This is for me one of the really basic principles of music making. I think that it is something which one has to constantly remind oneself and those working in music of. Otherwise they just produce the sound and think it will stay by itself.
DB: It’s not a question only of their listening–that too–but they are more preoccupied with neatness than most orchestras. Not only neatness of intonation and things any professional orchestra does, but the neatness of expression.
