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The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are on fire with the joy of music-making to the delight of a very sympathetic and enthusiastic audience at London's Southbank Centre. 

Daniel Barenboim offered an unusually Germanic take on César Franck, while section leaders Michael Barenboim and Kian Soltani pulled double duty as soloists in Brahms' Double Concerto.

A mixed performance from Bonn, but there was magic from Barenboim's fingers in the Third Piano Concerto.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra presents a superb programme executed with power and urgency to herald the return of public music-making at the Pierre Boulez Saal.

There was vibrancy and subtlety in these cultured performances of Schubert and Lutosławski, with Martha Argerich still showing how it’s done with ‘that’ Tchaikovsky concerto.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s Prom with Daniel Barenboim went in search of identity and found ecstasy

Barenboim's strangely blank Strauss thankfully led to a thrilling Tchaikovsky 5 in tribute to Jacqueline du Pré.

Last night in Sweden: Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra make a performance of Strauss' Don Quixote to remember at the Stockholm Concert Hall.

Martha Argerich shows her star quality in an extraordinary, intimate rendering of Liszt's First Piano Concerto; the West-Eastern Divan orchestra make a big political statement in performing Wagner.

“Let me play the lion too.” I hadn’t associated Daniel Barenboim with Nick Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream before, but during Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, I half expected him to leap from his piano stool and play the violin and cello parts too. 

Unity over division, peace over war, a higher cause for humanity: no symphony better expresses the mission of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra than Beethoven’s Ninth, and no orchestra plays this symphony with greater emotional power. With Daniel Barenboim on the rostrum, this symphony’s composed, collective redemption becomes at once entirely natural and entirely miraculous.

Two down, two to go. Whereas at the 2012 BBC Proms Daniel Barenboim and the West-Easter Divan Orchestra paired the Pastoral symphony with the Fifth, just as Beethoven programmed them in the infamously long concert that premièred them both, here the Pastoral prefaced the Seventh.

“Daniel Barenboim can be a frustrating... conductor”, I wrote after the first concert in this series of four, in which he and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are presenting all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. As if to prove the point, to follow that stunning concert of First, Eighth and Fifth, these forces delivered a maddeningly inconsistent Fourth and a far loftier but hardly flawless Eroica.

Daniel Barenboim can be a frustrating – and frustrated – conductor. When his grand plans don’t quite come off, he can become irritable, his gestures more didactic and his brow ever more distractedly mopped. Not so in this concert, however.

Few conductors could hold an audience's applause whilst shaking hands with every member of the orchestra and then speaking extensively about politics. Daniel Barenboim, though, on completion of a week-long Beethoven cycle, did so and then dashed to the Olympic opening ceremony to bear the Olympic flag alongside Ban Ki-Moon, among others.

Onwards Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra went, then, jumping forwards from a rousing Fifth to the Eighth, once again playing the later, even-numbered half of a ‘pair’ before the odd. Asked why the Seventh was much preferred publicly to the Eighth, Beethoven is apocryphally to have replied: “because the Eighth is so much better.

So Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra continue on their odyssey demonstrating for us what Beethoven might mean in the 21st century. Barenboim’s back-to-the-future approach clearly to some seems anachronistic after years in which Beethoven has been the preserve of ‘period’ bands, and in which even the grandest and oldest of orchestras have altered their traditions.

Programming works by Pierre Boulez alongside a high-profile Beethoven symphony cycle is an easy way to give exposure to the strikingly modern works of the Frenchman, but on seeing a substantial chunk of the audience disappear for an early drink before tonight's Boulez, I wondered if the Beethoven was perhaps too reliable a foil, leaving people little incentive to stay.

Why would you ever perform Beethoven 1 and 2 today? Beethoven wrote seven later symphonies which are clearly better. That's kind of the point of Beethoven. Looking back on these two quite early works given knowledge of those masterful symphonies yet to come, it's hard to justify their performance except as stages in a story – a story which, if truth be told, is pretty familiar.