Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle are in the UK performing two complete Brahms cycles - one in London, one in Birmingham - over four consecutive nights. The enterprise carries intimations of the Herculean tasks that Barenboim has set himself of late, most notoriously his recent decision to conduct all of Wagner's major operas over 12 days. Inevitably, one wonders how he and his orchestra can maintain standards under such pressure, though the opening concert of the London cycle revealed occasional interpretative inequalities rather than an inherent slackening of energy.
The programme consisted of the second and fourth symphonies. The former was subjected at times to an excess of intellectual scrutiny. Barenboim stressed the work's pivotal nature, playing up its profound reliance on counterpoint that peers back to Bach as well as its dependence on the development of cell-like themes that subsequently fed the imagination of Schoenberg.
These are important elements, but in this instance the emphasis came at too high a price. The sense of overarching structural logic occasionally vanished beneath the detail. Speeds, particularly in the first movement, were wayward and swerving, often leaving the impression of the symphony being forced along in fits and starts rather than evolving as an organic whole. The astringent Staatskapelle sound - often more telling than the plushness of the rival Berlin Philharmonic - is appealing in Brahms, though the playing took a while to settle.
Many of these problems vanished, however, when Barenboim turned to the fourth, in which the balance between structural logic and emotional rhetoric was almost perfectly maintained. The tone of the whole - nobly tragic, yet intimate - was established at the outset, as the opening theme seemingly slid from silence into sound and gathered momentum with inexorable urgency. There was not a trace of sentiment anywhere, only an immaculately judged interplay of form and mood, with all the work's ambivalences well to the fore: the conflicting counterpoint that drags you in two emotional directions at once, the timeless optimism that intrudes on the remorseless trudge of the slow movement, the plunges into exhaustion that break the mania of the Scherzo. This was Barenboim's Brahms at its considerable best, an outstanding performance of what is arguably the greatest symphony ever written.
At the Symphony Hall, Birmingham, tonight and tomorrow. Box office: 0121-780 3333.
