BBC Proms 34 and 37 review: The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and L’Enfance du Christ make a poignant pairing

Seeing Barenboim’s ensemble bring young Arab and Israeli musicians together just days before Berlioz’s emotive musical journey through the Middle East is a powerful experience, finds Alexandra Coghlan

Maxime Pascale conducts the Hallé, Britten Sinfonia Voices and Genesis Sixteen in Berlioz’s The Childhood of Christ (Photo credit: BBC/ Chris Christodoulou)

Prom 34: Martha Argerich, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim / Prom 37: L’Enfance du Christ, Halle Orchestra, Maxime Pascal

★★★☆☆ / ★★★★★

Whether accident or design brings a performance by Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and one of Berlioz’s Biblical oratorio L’Enfance du Christ to the Proms in the same week, the effect is poignant, not to say pointed.

For 20 years Barenboim’s ensemble has brought young Arab and Israeli musicians together, confronting conflict and difference through shared music-making. To see this philosophy in action just days before Berlioz’s emotive musical journey through the Middle East, his reminder of the human cost of war and the desperation of displaced peoples, is to make the kind of connection that often gets lost in the Babel of so huge a festival.

Their symbolism may be powerful, but WEDO’s sound is less so. There’s an anonymity, a two-dimensional quality to their strings that finds itself exposed in the Royal Albert Hall. Faced with so neutral a canvass, Barenboim’s own musical personality asserts itself perhaps too powerfully.

His reading of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony is grandiose, control verging on dogmatism. More interesting is an incisive account of Lutoslawski’s Concerto For Orchestra – solid folk-melodies shattered into gleaming fragments in celesta and violins, skittering bat-like calls and rustlings in the scherzo, and finally a hazy, haloed chorale – but it’s the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto the packed audience had queued to hear.

Daniel Barenboim conducts the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Martha Argerich in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (Photo credit: BBC/ Chris Christodoulou)

Refusing to play up to so large a venue, piano-legend Martha Argerich instead draws her audience in close, transforming one of the repertoire’s technical giants into a larky piece of chamber music, semiquavers glittering, dance never far away. This Tchaikovsky isn’t about perfection but playful dialogue – an intimate conversation Barenboim and his orchestra sometimes struggle to keep up with.

Illness robbed the Berlioz of both conductor Mark Elder (replaced by the rubber-limbed Maxime Pascal) and mezzo Sarah Connolly (replaced by Julie Boulianne), but it’s hard to imagine the final performance bettered. Italianate in tone but with a Bach Evangelist’s care and clarity of phrasing, tenor Allan Clayton makes a vivid narrator, aided by the Halle, Britten Sinfonia Voices and Genesis Sixteen, who all help shade a work that is soft, chalky pastels to the Symphonie Fantastique’s primary colours.

Boulianne and Roderick Williams are a well-matched, idiomatic Mary and Joseph, their ravishing stable-duet a highlight. But the wildcard in this Biblical retelling is Neal Davies’ Herod – a despot whose dream-monologue makes him persistently and disquietingly sympathetic.