A couple of weeks ago I attended two terrific concerts as part of Berlin’s Musikfest, and both, by chance, had British links. This was not why I picked them—I chose them for their intriguing programs and their great conductors—but this Britannic element turned out to be something they had in common.
The first concert consisted entirely of Simon Rattle conducting Mahler’s Ninth with the London Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, an Englishman, has lived in Berlin since the beginning of the twenty-first century, when he took up the artistic leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic. After roughly fifteen years there, he moved over to the London Symphony, which he has led for the past six years, but he is now about to give that up in order to conduct the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. So this outing with the LSO was one of his last formal appearances as their official conductor. The Philharmonie was sold out for the occasion, and everyone (including the audience) lived up to the high expectations.
Every bit of the seventy-five-minute Mahler symphony was thrilling, but perhaps none more so than the closing moments. As the strings softly sounded their final few notes, gradually fading away into nothingness, the listeners respectfully maintained a total silence. The musicians kept their bows resting on the strings, with Rattle’s arms remaining outstretched in his final gesture, and still the hush continued. I began counting in my head: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand… We had reached the fifteen-second mark when the conductor finally lowered his arms and the audience burst into wild applause. I treasure moments like this at the Philharmonie: those prolonged silences, when not a cough or a rustle can be heard. And though I am not always a huge Mahler fan—sometimes he strikes me as too floaty and amorphous—Rattle’s knife-sharp interpretation of the Ninth made me into one.
The second great concert was Vladimir Jurowski’s evening with his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin—Berlin’s equivalent of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra that Rattle is about to take over. Jurowski has been with them since 2017, and under his hands the RSB has become a fine-tuned instrument, capable of doing anything well. In this case, in celebration of their 100th anniversary, they performed three pieces: Kurt Weill’s 1929 suite of music from The Threepenny Opera (labeled the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik für Blasorchester); Thomas Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring the marvelous pianist Kirill Gerstein (who also helped out in the Weill piece); and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3. All three were a revelation in different ways. I know the Weill practically by heart, but this version felt delightfully fresh and new. I’d never heard the Adès concerto before, but it was performed with such clarity and precision that every movement was graspable. And the symphony! I’d foolishly thought I had Rachmaninoff’s number, but it turned out I didn’t have a clue. Vladimir Jurowski has conducted the Third Symphony before, and has made at least one recording of it (which I will now proceed to listen to over and over). He was able to take us deep inside the music, to the point where even those of us with reservations about the composer could only give up and adore this symphony.
In a charming speech he made to the audience at the end of concert, Jurowski pointed out all the British elements in the program—Threepenny‘s London setting (along with its origins in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera); Adès’s British citizenship; and, not least, Rachmaninoff’s warm welcome to England by Sir Henry Wood, who first brought the composer and this symphony to London. As an encore, therefore, Jurowski offered us a piece by Henry Wood himself, a figure best known as the founder of the Royal Albert Hall Proms. (As an added fillip, Jurowski mentioned to us—in a confiding rather than boastful manner—that that RSB had recently played this exact programs at the Proms.) Both the speech and the encore were a lovely gesture of friendship across the water, and they rounded out the program to perfection.
I missed a third opportunity to hear a British-connected performance when a last-minute illness kept me from attending John Eliot Gardiner’s concert version of the five-hour Berlioz opera Les Troyens. Other things kept the eighty-year-old Gardiner himself away from it. In the week before his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique were scheduled to come to Berlin, they performed the same Berlioz program at another European festival, and that concert ended, backstage, with the conductor punching one of the soloists in the face. (The baritone’s crime had apparently been to exit on the wrong side of the podium.) This caused such an outcry, reasonably enough, that old J.E. was instantly shunted off to London, while his conducting duties were reassigned to his assistant, Dinis Sousa. The scandal only whetted my desire to hear the program, but a severe cold—and the fear that I might end up coughing for the whole five hours—kept me home in the end.
The next day I wrote to my friend Pamela (who, as a former artistic director of the San Francisco Opera and a former intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic, is far more musically aware than I am) to ask her how the performance had gone. “I don’t want to fill you with regrets,” she wrote back, “but the performance last night was simply phenomenal: wonderful singers, the best chorus ever, orchestra excellent and the conductor was TERRIFIC. It was the highlight of my musical year so far. I’m still floating.” Ah, well. One can’t be everywhere all the time, and a little well-earned regret is not a bad thing for a habitual audience member to feel, even—or especially—in Berlin.