Week 31: 'A kind of walk through the countryside'

Wonder spawned in: 1808 and 2012
Wondered into being by: Ludvig van Beethoven and the youth of today
Wonderspan: A lot more than 10 minutes.
To experience this wonder at its best: Don't delay because it'll be gone by Thursday evening.

This week's wonder is much longer than 10 minutes - it's Daniel Barenboim conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra playing Beethoven's Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony at the Proms last week.

Yes, we've all heard it before, but this performance gave me inflamed tear ducts.  It's not the sharpest playing but perfection is a red herring in music, a sort of idolatry.  The piece itself is a florid, slightly kitsch, urbanite rendering of the benign 'nature' of the countryside which, so the music seems to imply, is forever harmonious and reassures us that the Earth is always the same (which, with climate change and resource-depletion, is exactly what it isn't).  And a (really) cynical cynic could level the same charge at the orchestra, made up as it is of Israeli and Arab musicians playing in harmony as if peace has just broken out in the Middle East, but Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, who founded the ensemble, are hardly that callow.  As Barenboim told a Guardian interviewer a few years ago:

'The Divan is not a love story, and it is not a peace story. ... It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace. It isn't. It's not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well.  The Divan was conceived as a project against ignorance. A project against the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it.'

I've been wondering about this all week and my thoughts and feelings are still half-baked. The truth of our political, ecological, social situation never lets us say, 'It's simple' or, 'Don't worry' or, 'All is as it should be'.  So I don't find it easy to know what to make of an elite Arab-Israeli orchestra based in Spain, far away (or are they?) from their people/societies tangled in a violent knot, and playing music together... what does that actually mean?

But I think what I love about this performance is that for a while it allows a rest: just step out and enjoy it, it says, leave your doubts indoors for they will still be there when you get back.  After all, for all the messes we're making of the world, it is possible to walk out early one morning and witness the world as a pastoral symphony; that experience, like this orchestra and its music, is no less true or real than any other, and how beautiful - how heart-achingly beautiful - it is!  For 40 minutes I have loved abandoning myself to Beethoven's morning walk, full of passion and tenderness, its way of loving.

So although it's more than 10 minutes long, which is the Monday wonder rule, this will be a good thing to play in the background while you deal with your email or fix that spreadsheet or make a cup of tea for your colleagues. 

Here it is on iPlayer (until this Thursday only):

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01l58cp/BBC_Proms_2012_Season_Barenboim_Conducts_Beethoven_Symphonies_5_and_6/

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