Like a flash mob they came at 24 hours’ notice to hear Daniel Barenboim at Tate Modern, celebrating 60 years of public performance – and incidentally promoting three new releases from Universal Classics.
On the Bridge and round the Gallery of the Turbine Hall sat or stood the lucky holders of free tickets (8,000 people applied for just 400 tickets), while the proceedings were transmitted via a big screen to over a thousand more in the hall below.
Barenboim had brought with him a string quintet from the Berlin Staatskapelle, with whom he played an arrangement of the slow movement of Chopin’s E minor Piano Concerto. For the rest he charmed and mesmerised his audience at this hour-long concert with a series of solo works – a Nocturne, a Waltz and the Barcarolle – each charged with the highly subjective emotional intensity, sonorous tone and poetic insight Barenboim brings to bear these days.
The musical items were punctuated by philosophical and political observations peppered with humour. Connoisseurs will have been frustrated by how much detail was lost in this cavernous space – only the speech was amplified, not the music – but the gain, in the atmosphere of a special occasion, was immense.
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