Daniel Barenboim: 'If I could never conduct a live Ring cycle again, I don't know what I would do'

The pianist and conductor has been busy in lockdown, practising the piano and arranging a festival of new music. But his fears for the future of music pre-date the pandemic

It takes more than a global pandemic to stop Daniel Barenboim. The pianist and conductor is not merely one of the modern world’s pre-eminent musicians and public intellectuals. He is also one of those people who is temperamentally unable to let a crisis go to waste.

On the phone from Berlin, Barenboim admits the past few months have been a challenge. “I will have been making music in public for 70 years next month,” he says. “But in the last 60 I have never had so much time as now.” He has filled the gap by practising the piano at home, including a lot of works he has not played for decades. “I have enjoyed it tremendously,” he says.

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