All told, I attended eleven musical events over the course of three weeks. As is usual in my Berlin stays, none was a waste of time. Another way of putting it is that all were at least worth the 35 to 50 euros (about 38 to 54 dollars, at current exchange rates) I spent to go to them. At prices like these, one can afford to experiment. But here I am only going to focus on the six best evenings of my stay.
April 27: This was the first of my two Tetzlaff concerts, and it was held in the larger hall of the Konzerthaus Berlin, the venerable and beautiful Schinkel auditorium located in the Gendarmenmarkt plaza. It featured the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, conducted by someone I had never seen before named Marc Albrecht, with Christian Tetzlaff performing as a soloist in the first of the two major pieces on the program. That was the German premiere of a new piece by a living composer named Christian Jost, his second violin concerto, subtitled “Concerto noir.” I don’t know if the color referred to his mood in composing it or the difficulty of the piece, but as Jost said in his personal introduction to the premiere, it was written for Tetzlaff, who can do anything. (Jost also mentioned modestly—or faux modestly, it is always hard to tell in German—that the evening’s program featured two composers: Richard Strauss, whose name would be familiar to all present, and himself, who would be less so.) It is lucky that Tetzlaff can do anything, because this concerto struck me as almost impossible to play, it was so thorny and harsh and arhythmical and fast. I imagine I have never heard as many separate notes played by a violinist in such a short period of time. And yet the rewards, in Tetzlaffian terms, were relatively skimpy, because although one could see that he was doing everything right—superlatively right—there were no supremely melodic moments in which one could savor his golden tone, and practically no variations in the dynamics, so that the soloist had to perform at an intense volume throughout. I was glad to have been present—I am always glad to be present at a Tetzlaff concert—but let’s just say that the Strauss Sinfonia domestica, agitated though it sometimes was, came as a bit of a relief after the Jost.
Much more rewarding, I would say, was my second Tetzlaff concert, which took place on April 30 in the smaller hall of the Konzerthaus. I bought the ticket because Tetzlaff was on the program, and he was indeed marvelous in the Kodaly Duo Opus 7 for violin and cello that was the penultimate event on the three-hour program. But the whole event was even better than its many parts. A memorial concert for a dead cellist and cello teacher named Boris Pergameschikow, who had taught several generations of major cello players at Berlin’s prime music academy, the event featured about ten different accomplished cellists (plus a pianist, a clarinettist, and Tetzlaff the violinist) in pieces ranging from venerable composers like Beethoven, Saint-Saens, and Debussy to modernists like Ernest Bloch, Samuel Barber, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Held as a benefit concert for the academy at which Pergamenschikow had taught—the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik—it felt like something of a family affair, with people greeting each other as they took their seats. I was in the second row, surrounded by all these devoted music fans and musicians, and practically onstage (the Kleiner Saal is very intimate) with Tetzlaff and the others. Perhaps the most moving moment came right after Tetzlaff’s terrific performance, when a whole wave of new cellists—students of two of the major ones, Nicolas Altstaedt and Claudio Bohórquez, joined their teachers and five others for a final Hymnus by Julius Klengel. The sound of fifteen or sixteen cellos playing at once, and the sight of the proud teachers winking and nodding encouragingly at their students, was nothing short of divine.
In between these two, I attended something that I normally wouldn’t even have counted as a concert, but it seems to deserve the name in retrospect. On Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse in the middle of Berlin is an old cinema called Babylon—yes, just as in Babylon Berlin—that dates from 1929, though the building that now houses it is no doubt a postwar reconstruction. Frequently they run silent films accompanied by a live band (titled, appropriately enough, the Babylon Berlin Orchestra), and the last time I was in Berlin I saw Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great Metropolis screened there in that way. This time, on April 28, what I saw and heard was Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, The Circus, accompanied live by the score that Chaplin himself had composed for it. What a complete and total delight that was!
There are so many fine conductors in Berlin—Vladimir Jurowski and Simon Rattle, just to name two of my world favorites—that I sometimes forget to trumpet the achievements of Ivan Fischer, who has also worked primarily in that city since fleeing from his native Hungary a number of years ago. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 5, I was back in the large hall of the Konzerthaus to hear a typically great and inventive program put together and conducted by Fischer. Once again it featured the Konzerthausorchester, but this time they seemed to me to come to vibrant life in a way that had not been true under Albrecht. Or perhaps it was the program itself that brought them to life: a short and typical orchestral piece by Philip Glass called Facades, following by a Bach choral piece (the Cantata for Soloists, Chorus, and Orchestra, BWV 105), which was in turn followed by a major choral work by Philip Glass, the Passion of Ramakrishna. The soloists were outstanding, the chorus even more so, and I had a terrific seat up in the first-ring Loge, right over the conductor’s podium, which allowed me to watch Fischer’s kindly face and eloquent hands as he gestured toward the players and the singers. You might think that a Bach sandwich with Philip Glass as the bread wouldn’t work, but it succeeded beautifully, and the different kinds of spirituality in the vocal pieces, expressed in different languages (German and English), made the whole thing feel universally inviting, even to a confirmed atheist like myself.
The two concerts I had most anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—took place on the last two nights of my stay. First, on May 14, was my second chance in less than a month to hear the Danish String Quartet in a chamber-music venue. They were playing at the Pierre Boulez Saal, where the audience is seated in the round and the players are in the center, and in their comments to the audience (which were in English), they observed that it was a bit difficult to know where to face when talking. When playing, they faced each other, and if anything, this increased the sense of mutual animation and pleasure they clearly derived from each other’s company. The program was quite similar to the one I heard at Princeton last November—the Haydn Opus 20, No. 3, Shostakovich’s brief yet intense No. 7, and a selection of Irish and Scandinavian folk tunes the DSQ had adapted for string quartet—except that instead of the Britten piece they had played at Princeton, there was a very good Thomas Ades string quartet called The Four Quarters. The audience members loved the classical pieces (not to mention the players’ friendly, somewhat humorous commentary), but they went wild over the folk tunes, stamping and whistling and yelling “Woo-hoo!” when that final segment of the concert was over. Their degree of enthusiasm clearly took the DSQ musicians by surprise—not that they had expected anything less than heartfelt applause, which is what they always get, but the intensity of this prolonged response was unusual. I was happy to see them get their due from the normally restrained Germans, and I felt thrilled, as I always am with the Danes, to be part of their warm and appreciative audience.
And then, on May 15, came the concert I had prolonged my stay to hear: Simon Rattle conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the last three Mozart symphonies. Recently the MCO acquired José Maria Blumenschein as its concertmaster, and hearing this fine violinist play again after a gap of nearly fifteen years (I last heard him when he was a member of the youthful Vertigo Quartet, having just graduated from the Curtis Institute) was a pleasure in itself. But the real delight was in listening to—and seeing, because he is a very active conductor—the performance that Rattle drew out of the orchestra as a whole. The 39th and 40th Symphonies were excellent; the 41st was a revelation, and made me feel I had never really heard it done properly before. During the interval, my friend Martin and I had been discussing with each other the fact that Mozart is almost always a youthful passion; one slightly grows out of him with age, and at times perhaps even tires of his repetitions, as one never does with Beethoven. But as we were leaving the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall that night, after that singularly life-enhancing performance of the “Jupiter” symphony, I said to Martin: “Well, even Simon Rattle can’t quite turn Mozart into Beethoven. But he can make us feel nineteen again.”