The cheers should have been for Daniel Barenboim. Berlin’s new Ring was to be a celebratory cycle conducted by him to mark his forthcoming 80th birthday, and completed, unusually, in a single week instead of across several seasons. The cast of world-class Wagnerian singers, along with the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov, are artists Barenboim has nurtured over many years.
Wagner has been central to Barenboim’s repertoire at Berlin’s Staatsoper, where he is music director; at the composer’s festival town of Bayreuth and elsewhere. Who can forget his Ring cycle at the Proms in 2013, or his appearances with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he co-founded with Edward Said to bring musicians from Middle Eastern countries together – an act of imaginative political philanthropy.
