Beethoven / Mozart: Live in Ramallah: Symphony No.5 / Sinfonia Concertante, K297b

It is one thing for a young orchestra to produce a passionate, full-blooded and widely-praised recording of a Tchaikovsky symphony for their first disc; it is quite another to try to reach the same heights in a recording of Mozart and Beethoven. I suspect many ticket-holders were disappointed when they heard that this orchestra had chosen to replace their scheduled 2005 Edinburgh Festival performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony with Beethoven’s Fifth; yet by the end of the evening, I’m sure no-one regretted the substitution, such was the inspired, fiery and totally committed performance that we had experienced.

This new disc captures the live performance given in Ramallah a week later, and all the excitement and energy evident in Edinburgh are there in abundance. From the weighty opening chords, this is a pulsing, organic performance with Barenboim an expert guide. The first movement is propelled forward, with menacing timps, surging strings and fearless wind and brass, while the Andante combines weight with grace. The end of the third movement displays the most ghostly, delicate touches before we are whirled into the final Allegro.

I enjoyed the Mozart even more than its Edinburgh performance: it’s quite large-scale, and would have benefited from silkier string tone, but the wind soloists enchant; they are such a marvellous ensemble, as well as providing highly-accomplished, perky, witty individual contributions. Elgar’s Nimrod is the serene encore that ends the disc. If you didn’t catch the Edinburgh concert, now is your chance to hear what you missed!

About the orchestra

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was founded in 1999 by conductor Daniel Barenboim and the writer and philosopher Edward Said, bringing together young Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab musicians in a shared workshop and ensemble. The two met that year in Weimar, Germany, and named the project after Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, a poetry collection inspired by the idea of a shared world culture across East and West. The orchestra found a permanent home in Seville under the regional government of Andalusia a few years after its founding. Its Ramallah concert, captured live on this disc, was itself a landmark occasion, one of relatively few performances the orchestra has given in the West Bank given the political circumstances its musicians work under.