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Daniel Barenboim

Pays d'origine: Israël
Date d'anniversaire: 15 novembre 1942

À propos de Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 to parents of Jewish Russian descent. He started piano lessons at the age of five with his mother, continuing to study with his father who remained his only other teacher. In August 1950, when he was only seven years old, he gave his first official concert in Buenos Aires.
Important influences in his development as a musician included Artur Rubinstein and Adolf Busch, both of whom performed in Argentina. The Barenboim family moved to Israel in 1952. Two years later, in the summer of 1954, the parents brought their son to Salzburg to take part in Igor Markevich's conducting classes. During that same summer he also met Wilhelm Furtwängler, played for him and attended some of the great conductor's rehearsals and a concert. Furtwängler subsequently wrote a letter including the words, "The eleven year-old Barenboim is a phenomenon …" that was to open many doors to Daniel Barenboim for a long time afterwards. In 1955 the young Daniel Barenboim studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Daniel Barenboim made his debut as a pianist in Vienna and Rome in 1952, in Paris in 1955, in London in 1956 and in New York in 1957 with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Symphony of the Air. From then on, he made annual concert tours of the United States and Europe. He toured Australia in 1958 and soon became known as one of the most versatile pianists of his generation.

He made his first gramophone recordings in 1954 and soon began recording the most important works in the piano repertory, including complete cycles of the piano sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven and concertos by Mozart, Beethoven (with Otto Klemperer), Brahms (with Sir John Barbirolli) and Bartok (with Pierre Boulez).

During the same period, Mr. Barenboim began to devote more time to conducting. His close relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra, kindled in 1965, lasted over a decade, during which time they performed frequently in England, with Barenboim as both conductor and pianist, and made tours all over Europe, to the United States and Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Following his début as a conductor with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1967, Mr. Barenboim was in demand with all the leading European and American symphony orchestras. Between 1975 and 1989 he was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, his tenure marked by a commitment to contemporary music, with performances of works by Lutoslawski, Berio, Boulez, Henze, Dutilleux, Takemitsu and others.

Daniel Barenboim has always been active as a chamber musician, performing with, among others, his late wife, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, as well as with Gregor Piatigorsky, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. He has also accompanied Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in lieder recitals.
Daniel Barenboim made his opera conducting début in 1973 with a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh International Festival. He made his Bayreuth début in 1981 and has been a regular visitor there ever since, conducting Tristan und Isolde, The Ring, Parsifal and Die Meistersinger.

In 1991 he succeeded Sir Georg Solti as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with which he has enjoyed countless successes in all the world's great concert halls. In 1992 he became General Music Director of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. In the autumn of 2000, the Staatskapelle Berlin appointed him Chief Conductor for Life.

Mr. Barenboim has also had a long and distinguished association with the Berlin Philharmonic and maintains a close relationship as well with the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he toured the US, Paris and London in 1997.
Daniel Barenboim is a prolific recording artist and has made recordings since 1954 for Westminster, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips, Sony Classical (CBS Masterworks), BMG, Erato Disques and Teldec Classics International. He currently records as a pianist for EMI Classics, who recently celebrated his return to the label and 60th birthday with the release of two CDs recorded live (his recital at the Teatro Colón in 2000 commemorating the 50th anniversary of his debut recital and his performances of the Schumann and Tchaikovsky First piano concertos with the Munich Philharmonic under Sergiu Celibidache from 1991) and a DVD (Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and Triple Concerto with Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Chor der Deutschen Staatsoper).

Musicians are by definition communicators. In their performances and with their unique interpretation of the music they convey the style and the meaning of a work to their audience. Daniel Barenboim's incisive intelligence, exceptional technique and meticulous musicianship have been at the core of many definitive performances and recordings as both pianist and conductor. He has also succeeded in building a variety of other bridges:

1) A Jew born during the Second World War - and an Israeli by nationality - he has worked closely over many years with three German orchestras - the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra - in an atmosphere of mutual affection and respect.
2) In the early 1990s, a chance meeting between Mr. Barenboim and the Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Saïd in a London hotel lobby led to an intensive friendship that has had both political and musical repercussions. These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999.

The West-Eastern Divan Workshop took two years to organize and involved talented young musicians between the ages of 14 and 25 from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and Israel. The idea was that they would come together to make music on neutral ground with the guidance of some of the world's best musicians. Weimar was chosen as the site for the workshop because of its rich cultural tradition of writers, poets, musicians and creative artists and because it was the 1999 European cultural capital. Mr. Barenboim wisely chose two concertmasters for the orchestra, an Israeli and a Lebanese. There were some tense moments among the young players at first but, coached by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony and the Staatskapelle Berlin, and following master classes with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and nightly cultural discussions with Mr. Said and Mr. Barenboim, the young musicians worked and played in increasing harmony. The West-Eastern Divan Workshop was held again in Weimar in the summer of 2000, in Chicago in the summer of 2001 and in Seville, Spain in 2002.

3) Mr. Barenboim has reached out, both in relation to his audiences and to opening himself up to new musical experiences. He has programmed contemporary works alongside repertoire from the classical and romantic eras. He has also expanded his repertoire to include African American music, Argentinian tango, jazz and Brazilian music and shared these experiences with his audiences.

In 2000 the music world celebrated the 50th anniversary of Daniel Barenboim's performance début with major musical events in Berlin, Chicago, New York - and on the actual anniversary, August 19 - Buenos Aires.

In October 2002 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said jointly received Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their work in founding the West Eastern Divan Workshop. Mr. Barenboim was also named an honorary citizen of Spain. In November 2002 he was awarded the Tolerance Prize by the Protestant Academy of Tutzing, in southwestern Germany, for his efforts to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through music. The same month, the president of Germany awarded Mr. Barenboim the Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz, the highest honor given to someone who is not a head of state.

A newly expanded version of Mr. Barenboim's autobiography, A Life in Music, was published in the autumn of 2002 (in English and Spanish editions), as was Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, a series of conversations between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said.

www.danielbarenboim.com

Produits