Berlin with a Bang

I am always happy to return to the concert scene in Berlin (not to mention the rest of this wonderful city), but this time the results exceeded even my high expectations. In the past few days, I’ve been to three of what might be among the fifteen or twenty best concerts of my life.

First up was the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin at the Philharmonie on Wednesday, October 15. I actually timed the trip to catch this one, arriving only that morning from New York. I’ve been following the RSB faithfully since Vladimir Jurowski took over as artistic director and lead conductor in 2017, and I’ve always been thrilled with Jurowski’s concerts. But this time there was the added allure of Christian Tetzlaff as the solo violinist in Alban Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. Having publicly announced his thoughtful opposition to Trump’s policies, Tetzlaff has been boycotting America since early this year, so I was hungry to hear him play again, especially in his home town.

And boy, was I rewarded! Following a brief, wrenching, and not entirely musical new piece by the youngish Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun (which featured, among other unusual sounds, the shouts and screams of the musicians), Tetzlaff gave us the Berg concerto. He and Jurowski have been collaborating since 1999, so they know and appreciate each other’s approaches, and in this case the sympathetic blending of soloist and orchestra was at maximum level. The Berg is a piece which highlights the soloist—he is not so much playing along as setting the tone—and the tone Tetzlaff lent the piece (or derived from the piece: it is never clear, with him, which way the influence goes) was essentially tragic. This made sense, given that the concerto was written in memory of the recently deceased daughter of Alma Mahler Gropius and Walter Gropius, the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius. Tetzlaff always dances when he plays, but this time his gliding, bending steps and curving, shuddering back had an almost klezmerish feel, as if he were the village fiddler called in to commemorate the shockingly early death of the local belle. That this atmosphere could accompany the most delicate and subtle expression of musical phrases is just one aspect of Tetzlaff’s many-faceted genius. Honestly, I could hear the guy play for hours without ever tiring of it, and I am always sorry when his part of a concert is over. In this case, though, I had an added treat in store, because when the intermission was over, Christian Tetzlaff—now changed out of his concert duds into more casual clothes—came and sat in the row behind mine to listen to Jurowski’s and the RSB’s superb performance of Brahms’s Second. What a mensch! I thought, considering that most soloists and even some composers rush out the door as soon as their part in the program is over. (Korsun, I noticed, was not in her seat for the second half.) But Tetzlaff, who is a Brahms expert himself, must have felt rewarded by the RSB’s animated and intense version of the symphony. Huge kudos to all.

My second concert took place in a much smaller venue: the Pierre Boulez Saal, which is Berlin’s latest and best chamber-music auditorium. Holding fewer than 700 seats, all arranged in the round, the Boulez Saal is a pleasure for performers and audience members alike. In this case, the incredible Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst was playing there for the first time on Friday, October 17. Like other foreigners faced with this knowledgeable and enthusiastic chamber-music audience, he and his piano accompanist, Roland Pöntinen, seemed almost overwhelmed by the excited applause that greeted their every piece, reaching its pinnacle before and after the two encores. I was drawn to this concert by the fact that it featured Anders Hillborg’s earliest piece for the then-young Fröst, Tampere Raw from 1991, and that was indeed a pleasure to hear. But as so often happens, the most unexpected delights came before and after the Hillborg. Once again I got Berg and Brahms in a row, and once again they proved an unusually complementary pair, with Berg’s 1913 Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano leading effortlessly into Brahms’s 1894 Sonata for Clarinet and Piano in F-minor. The Debussy and the Poulenc that followed the Hillborg were charming too, but my absolutely favorite thing on the program was the first encore—an adaptation of one of Brahms’s Hungarian dances (adapted by one of his brothers, Fröst told us) that included some wild bits of improvisatory clarinet playing. Fröst’s sound is unlike anything I’ve ever heard on a clarinet before, ranging from the mellowness of a cello to the piercing quality of a trumpet, but with most of it in the quieter cello range. He too dances, but unlike Tetzlaff, he dances in a way that often seems at odds with the music—as if the impulses were coming from his own body rather than from the external sounds. Never mind, though: whatever he needs to do to produce those sounds is fine with me.

My third and final concert may actually have been the best of the three, though with everything at such a high level, it is always hard to tell. I was back at the Philharmonie on Saturday, October 18, this time to hear Simon Rattle conducting the famed Berlin Philharmonic itself. It struck me in advance as a rather odd program—I only knew one piece on it beforehand—and Rattle’s presence was the thing that guaranteed my attendance; I have learned over the years to trust his programming more than I trust my own taste.

This concert began with Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, a weird medley of folk tunes adapted for “military band.” It was possibly louder and certainly more eccentric than anything I’ve ever heard in the Philharmonie before. I knew almost nothing about Grainger before this, barring his name (his dates are 1882 to 1961), but apparently Rattle has been a great champion of his, and now I’m open to hearing more. For the moment, though, that fifteen minutes sufficed. It was immediately followed by a beautiful, intense, persuasive rendering of Prokofiev’s First Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, written in 1923, when the composer and the Russian Revolution were both still young. A great deal of the beauty and intensity were attributable to the astonishing yet somehow understated soloist, a Dutch woman named Janine Jansen whom I’ve never heard before. She was spectacular, and the orchestra did everything in its power to showcase and support her.

When her part ended, you might have suspected the concert had reached its high point, but you would have been wrong. For after the intermission we were treated to the best performance of John Adams’s Harmonielehre that I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing. Yet another work by a then-young composer (Adams was not yet forty when it premiered in 1985), Harmonielehre possesses the exuberance of a brilliant neophyte trying out just about everything that an orchestra can do. At the same time, it maintains a strict discipline over its players and listeners, with various competing “minimalist” rhythms modulating, disappearing, and returning over the course of its forty-minute duration. As I sat enraptured by its three marvelous movements, I thought of Beethoven: how I never want a Beethoven symphony to end, and it never seems to want to end, either. The Adams piece, this time, gave me the same feeling. I have heard it before in the last forty years, and I know I liked it then, but this performance was something else. The exuberance of it carried me out of the concert hall, down Potsdamerstrasse, and onto the double-decker M29 bus, where I luxuriated, from my second-story, perfect-view-of-the-city seat, in the satisfied feeling of having once again returned to Berlin.