I spent a wonderful nine days in Berlin earlier this month, but I didn’t have my computer with me, so I am only now catching up on the Lesser Blog account. (Apologies for the delay, but I have yet to figure out how to write criticism on an iPad.) As usual, I’ll report my musical experiences by date, in order of their occurrence.
Saturday, October 5: On my first night there, I went with my Berlin friends Martin and Barbara, who accompanied me on all these adventures, to a performance at the Berlin Philharmonic, which is the closest thing to a sure thing I have yet discovered in this world. This time Adam Fischer (the older brother of conductor Ivan Fischer—what a household that must have been!) conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker in four pieces of music: Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 at the start, Haydn’s No. 104 at the end, and songs by these two (Haydn’s “Berenice, che fai” and Mozart’s KV 505) as palate cleansers in between. The soprano in the two interval-hugging songs, Julia Lezhneva, was excellent, but the songs themselves felt oddly detached in this context. The Mozart symphony (more popularly known as the “Linzer”) was, dare I say it, a bit boring; I understood upon hearing it why it’s not played nearly as often as the Hafner or the Jupiter. But the Haydn was terrific, in a rather restrained and dignified way, and that made the whole evening worthwhile.
Sunday, October 6: If the large hall of the Philharmonie is a sure bet, the small hall is something even better, when it’s good at all. You are practically within touching distance of the players, and what you are hearing truly feels like intimate chamber music. For this Sunday night concert at the Kammermusiksaal, we were treated to the noted pianist András Schiff conducting, and in two instances playing with, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, an incredibly talented group of musicians from a variety of nations. The program couldn’t have been more pleasing. The first half was all Haydn—a brief overture to his Desert Island opera, the piano concerto in D major, and Symphony No. 88—and the second half was Mendelssohn: first the Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, and then the “Italian” symphony, his Fourth. I hope it conveys the quality of the evening if I say that the Haydn half was even better than the Philharmonic’s rendering of No. 104 the night before, and the Mendelssohn half was still better than that—the kind of musical experience that leaves you so immersed, so dreamy, that you forget where you are. (Afterwards, for instance,I spoke to the coat-check man in English, and only realized when Martin addressed him in German that I was in Berlin, and not in my own little world, where the music had left me.)
Tuesday, October 8: While Martin was in Hamburg for a few days, Barbara and I went to a short afternoon concert, called an “Espresso-Konzert,” at the venerable Konzerthaus in the Gendarmenmarkt. Part of what is great about going to hear music in this building is being in that physical space—not just the Schinkel-designed concert hall itself, but the wonderful public space of the Gendarmenmarkt, which is anchored by a cathedral at one end and the Konzerthaus toward the other. I know of very few other spaces (the central piazza in Bologna might be one) that offer such a sense of well-being even to the most casual stroller. Anyway, after Barbara’s and my brief but idyllic stroll, we were treated to a not quite lovely but still interesting one-hour concert by a French group called the Franz Trio. The three players—a female violinist, a male violist, and a female cellist—performed two pieces by French composers Barbara and I had never heard of (and Barbara, who among other things translates Simenon from French to German, knows a lot about France). One was Jean Cras, who lived from 1879 to 1932 and apparently made his living as an admiral in the French navy—an occupation you could actually detect in his String Trio. The other was Jean Français, a twentieth-century composer who is apparently somewhat better known in France. I will not mind if I never hear either piece again, but I enjoyed the experience, and it was especially fun to hear Barbara comment on the East-Berlin-ish aspect of the Konzerthaus space and audience. (These distinctions have not died out among long-time Berliners, even though the Wall has now been down for thirty years.) She has a particularly acute sense of smell—on another night, she could smell the mushrooms growing in the dark by the side of the path we were walking on—so for her, East Berlin’s most evocative quality was its aroma, which she can still sense when she enters the old former-East locations.
Thursday, October 10: With Martin back in town, the three of us ventured out to the Staatsoper to hear a revived production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova. All of Janacek’s operas are great, partly because he took such care in matching the Czech language exactly to the music he wrote—something he was only able to do after weeks and months of eavesdropping and note-taking in public places, where he wrote down the rhythms and melodies of spoken Czech. We had excellent seats to this Staatsoper performance—my favorite seats in any opera house in the world, right in the center of the First Ring—and the orchestral playing and the singing were both excellent, so you’d think I would have been happy. But the direction, by one Andrea Breth, was so atrocious, so resolutely and willfully wrongheaded, that I couldn’t even enjoy what was good about the show. From start to finish, everyone’s emotions were played at a heightened, exaggerated pitch, so that Katya’s own hysteria (and she is indeed a religious maniac, of an intense and self-destructive kind) barely showed up against the general background. And what were all those extraneous sex acts doing there? Poor Karita Mattila, who played Katya’s horrible mother-in-law, had to mime sex while singing to her visiting gentleman-friend, and Katya similarly had to have her illicit assignation onstage, which is not at all what the lyrics indicate. The whole thing worked against Janacek’s patent attempt at some sort of realism, some melding of regular life and opera life in his carefully devised “speech tunes.” I was glad, for once, that the composer was long dead, so he didn’t have to suffer through this travesty.
Sunday, October 13: Luckily, the Staatsoper’s act of directorial malfeasance was countered and practically wiped out by the new production of Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids, which we attended at the Komische Oper on the final night of my stay. I had been drawn to this event by two of its participants: the director Barrie Kosky, whose West Side Story thrilled me in the spring, and the conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who may well be my current favorite conductor in the world. (Both have received ample praise in these posts already.) Added to these was the genius of choreographer Otto Pichler, whose contributions had also been essential to that great West Side Story, and who in this case directed not just the movement of the highly skilled dancers, but also that of all the chorus members and the principal singers. When added to the wonders of staging and costuming wrought by Katrin Lea Tag—whose sole set for the entire opera consisted of an elegant, intimidatingly Speer-style flight of steps—these incredible talents produced what Martin characterized as “the best musical theater I have ever seen”; and even I, jaundiced as I am, figured it was the finest thing I was likely to see all decade. It’s hard to explain in this brief space what was so great about the production, so I will try to do it at length in the printed pages of Threepenny later on. But for now let me simply comment on the way Dionysus (sung by a fabulously agile and eloquent Sean Panikkar) and Pentheus (played by the excellent Günter Papendell) were made to mirror and even partner each other in this Auden/Kallman version of Euripides’ The Bacchae; the way the danced and acted Intermezzo (usually dropped from this rarely performed piece) weirdly and thrillingly intensified the frightening themes of the whole opera; the way Jurowski himself, raised up on a podium but very pointedly restrained in all his motions, was a kind of duplicate Dionysus leading the orchestra through its various frenzies; and the way the very things that make opera itself so powerful—its Dionysian qualities of overwhelming emotion and anti-quotidian atmosphere—were here deployed with pointed self-consciousness but also with enormous effect. I have rarely been so moved as in the scene when Pentheus’s mother (sung and acted by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner) sorted through the bloody intestinal remnants she was carrying with her and realized that she herself had torn her son apart in this way. The rest of the audience seemed equally stunned; and at the end of the intermissionless two-and-a-half hours, when the final notes of the score were sounded and the conductor lowered his arms, there was one of those divine moments that only occur rarely in the theater—a complete silence lasting a good five or ten seconds, before the onset of the thunderous, shouting applause.