Here Comes Treble: Daniel Barenboim - A Communicator Of Note
...“Daniel Barenboim, for instance – a world-class pianist – take his sheet music away and he can’t play a note!”
A comment on a talk radio programme compels Isabel Bradley to present the true facts about a brilliant musician and an outstanding human being.
To read more of Isabel's sparkling prose please click on Here Comes Treble in the menu on this page.
Our local talk radio station in Johannesburg, South Africa, burbled in the background while I worked in the kitchen. I focussed on the programme as the interviewee said: “Daniel Barenboim, for instance – a world-class pianist – take his sheet music away and he can’t play a note!”
This comment cannot go unchallenged.
Any musician of Barenboim’s stature has memorised a huge amount of music. Remove the sheet music and he would certainly sit at the piano and play for hours, no doubt combining his musical experience and ideas into a repertoire covering at least four hundred years’ of composition.
Music is a language, which transcends nationality, cultural differences and age. Music can be understood anywhere in the world: whether it is Western ‘classical’ or popular music, music of India, China or Japan, or folk music, everyone can understand it at some level. Music speaks directly to the soul. Whether a person enjoys what he hears or is made uncomfortable by it, music evokes a reaction, whereas words spoken in an unknown language create puzzlement.
Daniel Barenboim has performed as a pianist on many continents. He regularly conducts some of the world’s best-loved orchestras. He holds Argentinean, Israeli and Spanish citizenship.
In collaboration with Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said, he co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, Spain. It unites young Israeli and Arab musicians, aged from fourteen to twenty-five. Master-classes and rehearsals for these young musicians are led by friends of Barenboim’s: musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestras and internationally acclaimed soloists such as ‘cellist, Yo-yo Ma.
To quote Barenboim’s official website, “musicians are by definition communicators”. Daniel Barenboim is the perfect example of this. He communicates across language, cultural and racial diversity through his music; he gives international lectures and speeches and writes prolifically. He is a living ‘bridge for peace’.
So, in reply to the anonymous interviewee on the radio, I would like to say, “With or without music in front of him, Daniel Barenboim not only plays the piano to perfection and conducts the world’s leading orchestras, he is a thinker and an activist for world peace.”
It was an honour and a delight to learn more about him while researching this article. For more information, see Daniel Barenboim’s official website at www.danielbarenboim.com
Until next week, ‘here comes Treble!”
By Isabel Bradley
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