Staatskapelle Berlin, Royal Festival Hall, London - review

At the end of this concert Daniel Barenboim was presented with the Elgar Medal. The medal is customarily given to those who have promoted Elgar's music for 10 years or so. As Barenboim performed and recorded a lot of Elgar during his period in London in the 1970s, he has already clocked up nearly half a century. Perhaps the presentation was delayed by a few decades.

Back in Berlin, Barenboim has risen to pre-eminence as a conductor of the German romantics, such as Wagner, Brahms and Strauss, and Elgar is almost an honorary member of that group. In his acceptance speech Barenboim said he gets infuriated when people outside the UK routinely talk about "the English composer Elgar". "Do we talk about the Italian composer Puccini?", he asked indignantly.

This concert was the second of the Staatskapelle Berlin's visit. It ends the London leg of the orchestra's European tour, though the "Barenboim Project 2015" at Southbank Centre continues in May and early June with the conductor as pianist in a cycle of Schubert's piano sonatas.

The programme began some way off with outgoing Russian passion. Lisa Batiashvili was the soloist in a performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto that was lithe in the solo violin music, but bold and full-throated from the orchestra. Her sound is slim, with darker colours held in reserve, and her style unaffected. Every note was crystal clear even in the fastest music and Barenboim played his part by whipping up the excitement in the finale.

In the past couple of years Elgar's Symphony No. 2 has been central to Barenboim's programmes with the Staatskapelle Berlin (they are also about to take on the First Symphony). In their hands the symphony came across wholehearted, richly romantic, on a huge scale. Not everything worked well in this performance - too much of the time the orchestra sounded overloud and congested (the very opposite of the chamber-like intimacy they found for Wagner's Ring at the Proms). But Barenboim truly gave the symphony everything he had in terms of grandeur, depth and emotional commitment, and in his visionary handling of the final pages Elgar seemed to reach out to the timeless vistas of Wagner's Parsifal. Not such an English composer after all.

southbankcentre.co.uk

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