Daniel Barenboim was 13 when he first appeared at the Festival Hall, and he was back there last week to mark the 60th anniversary of that adolescent debut – playing both of Brahms’s heavyweight piano concertos with Gustavo Dudamel and his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela in a hot-ticket event that didn’t deliver all it promised. On paper it was a collaboration that looked good, given the extent to which Barenboim has championed Dudamel over the years and made productive relationships with young ensembles of the Simón Bolívar type. But it proved a case of wondrous piano ... shame about the band. There was a time when Simón Bolívar’s young players captured everyone’s imagination. They were energised and uninhibited, dispensing with formalities and dressed in shell suits. But they’re older now, the shell-suits dropped in favour of white tie and tails. And it’s become apparent that the wild exuberance we all enjoyed was camouflaging serious deficiencies. The magisterial depth of these two Brahms concertos was beyond them. Raw, thin string tone; indecisive entries and poor intonation didn’t help. And neither did the flabbiness of Dudamel’s conducting. In the past I’ve seen him lead dynamically alive performances – but not here. Barenboim, by contrast, was completely captivating. He’s less agile than he used to be: fast fingerwork gets smudged. And you might argue that he overcompensates with eccentricity (some strangely choppy playing in the 2nd Brahms) or ponderous reflection (in the 1st, which was, as somebody described it to me, an “autumnal” reading). But for all that, Barenboim remains a pianist of great insight and tenacity. It’s no small thing to play two Brahms concertos one after the other, and they shone with a transcendent – I’d be tempted to say spiritual – wisdom, which held everybody in that audience spellbound. For Pope Francis, 2016 is the Year of Mercy, and for Britain it may yet be the year of leaving Europe. But at Kings Place concert halls it’s the Year of the Baroque – or as the halls themselves are calling it, Baroque Unwrapped, a 12-month programme focusing on music from the early 17th century to the mid-18th. In terms of composers, that means Monteverdi through to Bach and Handel. And it started with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Age of Enlightenment performing Monteverdian vocal music based on psalm texts – well enough but with no great distinction. I’d have liked more elegance, more style and more panache. The best thing about the evening was the irony with which Kings Place has hung a set of crystal chandeliers in its contemporary-cool main auditorium, to summon up the spirit of Baroque. Presumably it is ironic...