The conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim has announced that he is to relinquish his role as General Music Director of the Staatsoper Berlin (Berlin State Opera) due to ongoing ill-health. He took up the post in 1992 and has played a major role in inspiring the high standards of music-making at the German house. In a statement he said ‘Unfortunately the state of my health has worsened considerably in the past year. I can no longer achieve the level of performance which is rightly required of a general music director. As a result, I ask for your understanding that I will be giving up this role as from 31 January 2023.’

He also raised the playing of the Staatsoper’s orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, to considerable heights, regularly performing, and recording, the symphonic repertoire. Of their 2018 Brahms symphony cycle, Richard Osborne wrote ‘The blend of clarity, intimacy and power the engineers have been able to achieve here fits the lustre and glow of these Staatskapelle performances like a glove…These are not “here today, gone tomorrow” performances, as so many latter-day Brahms recordings are. They embody deeper memories and seek out larger horizons, as Brahms himself did when he created these astonishing works’, and in the current issue of Gramophone, ​David Threasher writes of their Schumann symphonies ‘The plushness of the Berlin strings contributes to the bigness of the sound picture; so too the presence within it and the almost brazen confidence of the wind and brass … the ear for balance is unfailingly acute, the end result always holding the attention, sometimes for its sheer beauty, sometimes for its provocation.’

Barenboim, who turned 80 last November, was the recipient of Gramophone’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award. During a long career, he has led numerous great musical institutions including the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, La Scala, Milan and his own West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that he founded in 1999 with Edward Said.