I was listening a few weeks ago online to the BBC Proms from London, which is still going on I think, and Daniel Barenboim and the West Divan Orchestra played all 9 Beethoven symphonies back-to-back over a week of concerts, which has never been done before at The Proms in over 100 years. I didn’t hear them all, but maybe 3 of them I think, certainly No’s 1 and 2, and 5 and 6, and the mighty 9th. Unfortunately in between a couple of Beethoven symphonies, for some reason he also slotted in a work each night by Pierre Boulez, atonal rackets that sounded like a bunch of intoxicated chimpanzees that had been let loose in a infant-school music department classroom, which spoilt the experience for me to a very large degree, it felt a bit like attending a sublime Van Morrison show, with an interval in the middle filled by 30 minutes of gangsta-rappers. But the West Divan are a quite remarkable orchestra, and Barenboim is a remarkable humanitarian, for me perhaps the greatest living classical musician, he nowadays is as great a conductor as he is a great pianist. As ILJP has already referred, Barenboim basically brought that orchestra together in an attempt to foster unity between Israelis and Palestinians/Arabs, as it is made up almost entirely of young musicians from the middle-east, essentially I suppose to demonstrate the unifying powers of music, it was Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in his 9th which is basically a declaration in favour of universal brotherhood, so it’s no wonder they specialise on Beethoven so much, seems most appropriate. I probably won’t be buying their set of recordings though, I already have 3 sets of the Beethoven symphonies, and I’m not myself a great believer in owning multiple-recordings of identical music by different sets of musicians, though I know a lot of classical music lovers who are very serious collectors of particular composers or works, and I can totally respect that devotion, I have a good friend back in England who is a ‘Baroque’ fanatic and I think he owns over 50 different versions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons!!... but to me the tiny differences in interpretation are so slight that they don’t to me justify the cost of duplication…I always think that if say Pink Floyd had recorded ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ 50 times, each time slightly differently, with occasional differences in tempo and dynamics and instrumental phrasing, would any rock fan wish to own all 50 versions…or even 5 of them?!! Maybe they would knowing some Floydians!! Having said that we have I think at least 8 or 9 different recordings of Edward Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’ oratorio, though most of them belong to my wife who once had to write a paper on the piece towards her music doctorate, so I will attribute about 6 of them to research!!
