Daniel Barenboim - A Stellar Expose'

[Mayhem]

Daniel Barenboim on ageing, mistakes and why Israel and Iran are twin brothers

At 73, the conductor is still lobbying presidents and bellowing at the violins in five languages. But has his passion project – an orchestra of players from across the Middle East – achieved any real change? We meet him in Buenos Aires

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...kes-and-why-israel-and-iran-are-twin-brothers

Even now, days later, the very thought of Daniel Barenboim leaves me exhausted. Over the course of a week, I trotted behind as he charged across the world’s widest avenue – the Avenido 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, 110 metres and four red lights across – wafting a large Cuban at the oncoming traffic. I was press-ganged into his campaign to eat more pudding than the waiters thought absolutely wise. Only one of us came out a happier man. Even the adjectives were explosive: in Barenboim-world, nothing is merely fine – it is “fun-TUSS-tic”. At 73, he is among the most venerated of all classical musicians. He is also as relentless as a stag weekend.

“To be famous young and to make fame last – the secret of combining the two is glandular,” Kenneth Tynan wrote of Noël Coward. “It depends on energy.” The same goes for Barenboim. Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, he gave his first piano recital there at seven, was making records by 11, and debuted, age 13, at the Royal Festival Hall. At the end of this decade, he will mark 70 years on stage. The celebration plans are already being drawn up.

The rest is mythology. How the great Wilhelm Furtwängler declared, “The 11-year-old Barenboim is a phenomenon.” His marriage at 24 to cellist Jacqueline Du Pré and their stint as a golden couple, before multiple sclerosis forced her to give up playing. The friendship the Argentine-Israeli pianist and conductor formed with the American-Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said that led to them founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a forum for “Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab musicians” to meet, talk and play alongside each other.

But to meet the conductor in Buenos Aires, hammering out the programme that he will bring to the Proms on 17 August was to see something less stately and more volatile. It was to witness how a legend is maintained.

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The article/interview is way too long to post here, but it's worth the time, whenever you're free.

And here's how I know who Daniel Barenboim is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3zbIG0MN4o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChygZLpJDNE