Wigmore Hall, London
It is more than 30 years since Daniel Barenboim played the Wigmore Hall where, as a prodigy in short trousers, he once performed Beethoven's Hammer-klavier sonata. This much-anticipated return was a huge and happy coup for the Wigmore's director John Gilhooly, and Barenboim, with an audience that seemed to consist of most of the people who matter in London music, clearly treated it as a serious and special occasion too.
Barenboim plays everything in the repertoire, but Schubert has not latterly featured much. So a programme of two of his most taxing but less often featured sonatas ? in G major D894 and C minor D958 ? was in itself a statement of self-imposed gravity and challenge. By a scheduling quirk, it also meant Wigmore regulars got to hear the G major on consecutive nights: Paul Lewis on Tuesday, now Barenboim.
The comparison was fascinating. Where Lewis's Schubert was impeccably clear, balanced and objective, expounded in long arcs in the Brendel manner, Barenboim's ? played on his own Italian Steinway imported specially for the occasion ? was dramatic, subjective and certainly far from technically impeccable, more reminiscent of one of Rudolf Serkin's titanic Schubert recitals from decades ago.
For some, such personality and creativity at the keyboard is unsettling. But Barenboim blew away most doubts, and there was never any showing off in the Lang Lang manner. One immediately noticed the intuitiveness of Barenboim's playing in the G major sonata, its theatricality in the best sense, its spur-of-the-moment qualities, the shafts of lightning, as well as some expressive liberties. The C minor sonata, a work that does not always yield its secrets even to experienced and nimble hands, was even better, an interpretation that reached for the stars and at times touched them.
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