The first time I was ever in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, back in the fall of 2003, I heard Brahms’s German Requiem. This was the first time I’d ever heard the piece performed live, and it was not a work I knew well, so what I mainly took away with me was the tremendous sense of the waves of sound penetrating my body. This was attributable, of course, to the felicitous acoustics of the concert hall (my favorite in the world, I often think, though the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall in New York give it a run for its money), but it was also due, I now realize, to the music itself. The choral singing, in particular, moves its listeners by overwhelming them, whatever their knowledge or lack of knowledge about the German words being sung.
On my most recent visit to the Philharmonie, twenty-one years later, I was lucky enough to hear Ein deutsches Requiem again, this time conducted by the incomparable Vladimir Jurowski and played by his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. The RSB has taken the place of the fabled Berlin Philharmonic orchestra in my heart, now that Simon Rattle has stepped down from the latter in favor of Kirill Petrenko, and if Jurowski is conducting anywhere in Berlin during my stays, I always make an effort to hear him.
The effort, this time, was repaid beyond measure when I was treated on November 24 to a concert that began with Haydn’s sprightly Symphony No. 44—new to me, but then, since he wrote over a hundred of them, that is not surprising. So far, so good, I thought at the intermission. But then, as if in recapitulation of my first experience, I was transported beyond pleasure to something resembling awe at the RSB’s performance of the German Requiem. Jurowski was terrific, and the orchestra no less so, but pride of place went, as it should, to the Rundfunk Chor, which brought forth Brahms’s sonorous admonitions and praises and contemplations of death (and life) in a way that profoundly stirred me. The two soloists, soprano Elsa Benoit and baritone Gerald Finley, were fine, but as usual the performance left me feeling that the very existence of soloists, in such a piece, was rather beside the point. It was the cohesion of the choral voices—their harmony, their counterpoint, their unified strength—that gave Brahms’s work its terrifying, remarkable, infinitely moving power. I left Berlin the next day with the sense that the city had rewarded me, as it always does, with the best musical experiences the world has to offer. And to me, in the present state of the world, that means a lot.