During the past week, I’ve attended concerts in three of Berlin’s terrific spaces for chamber music — and I would have had a fourth, except that this week’s afternoon Espresso Concert at the Konzerthaus, normally held in one of the smaller halls, had been allowed to expand into the Grosser Saal. (I’ll get to that one at the end of this entry: I’m not going to be deprived of writing about a concert just because it doesn’t fit with my title.) You might begin to wonder how anyone can afford to splurge on concerts in this cavalier way. But let me just point out that three out of the four concerts charged less than 25 euros per ticket, and the fourth (at the somewhat pricier Boulez Saal) was capped at 55 euros, with various discounts available for students and such. This too is what it means to have ideal chamber music spaces—that people in general, including young people, can afford them.
My first event of the week was last Saturday’s concert at the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie. Like the larger auditorium housed within the same gold-scaled, geometrically complicated building, this chamber music hall is acoustically perfect and incredibly comfortable. This time I was sitting in the A section, close to the performers, but I have sat way up in the highest E rows, where the sound is still excellent. The sightlines, too, are wonderful from every seat, and the seats are even cunningly angled so that you don’t have to crane your neck (or your back) if you happen to be placed in a corner. In this hall, you always feel close to the performers, and this was especially true of Saturday’s concert, which featured young players from the Karajan-Akademie of the Berlin Philharmonic: in other words, the training ground for new professional players. In a varied program that emphasized the earliest years of adulthood—from a pastiche of Mozart’s Magic Flute tunes, to a “narrative” with speaking actor based on Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho music, to a series of Janacek pieces reflecting back on his youth, to Prokofiev’s First Symphony—everything either stemmed from or responded to youthful impulses. The music was well done, but what I particularly enjoyed was the lack of professional polish on the part of the players. They had rarely been onstage in such a prominent position before, and that showed in their facial expressions (open, sometimes anxious, sometimes grinning with relief) and their bodily gestures (which tended toward the “what do I do now” when other musicians were playing and they were left silent). I always get a kick out of youth orchestras in Berlin, because they are good enough to afford us the standard pleasures of live music but also naive enough to create a special sense of intimate joyfulness.
On Sunday morning I went to a venue I’d never even seen, much less visited before: the Gobelinsaal at the Bode Museum. A collaborative effort with the musicians of the Staatsoper Berlin, this 11:00 a.m. concert was part of a series regularly held at the Bode, which seems to be the most old-fashioned, the least visited, and the most forbiddingly “grand” of the museums on Museum Island. To get to the Gobelinsaal (nothing is well-marked in this building), you have to go up at least one flight of curving marble stairs and then ask directions down a series of hallways, until finally you enter the designated room, in which choir stalls (on which one is forbidden to sit) line the two long sides. Having achieved my chair on an aisle—it was open seating, first come first served—I was treated to a concert slightly longer than an hour that included six string players and a mezzo-soprano. The first item on the program featured five of the musicians—a string quartet plus an extra viola—in two pieces by Alexander Zemlinsky, a turn-of-the-century figure (his dates were 1871 to 1942) who is well worth knowing about, though I didn’t. Next up came the excellent mezzo, Rebecka Wallroth, in seven songs by Alban Berg, with accompaniment by four of the string players. Berg is definitely having a moment here in Berlin—he has been on sixty to seventy percent of the programs I’ve attended here in the past few weeks—but I’m not complaining, because mostly we don’t hear enough of him. And finally came a Haydn quartet that I listen to all the time on my miniature Bose speakers, the Opus 76 Number 2 String Quartet in D minor—and wow, did it feel different live! Part of the difference, as I had already noted in the earlier pieces, lay in the loud, perhaps even over-loud acoustics of the long, thin, bare room, which amplified every element, from the strings to the human voice. But part of the difference was just what you would expect: the familiar made strange and new, as it always is when you turn from a recording to a live performance.
My third chamber-music event of the week was a Thursday concert at the Pierre Boulez Saal, featuring a highly accomplished Catalan/Spanish group, the Cuarteto Casals. They played a warm sandwich of classical favorites, starting with Haydn’s Opus 76, Number 5 (another of my regular streamers) and ending with Schubert’s weighty String Quaret in D-major. In between came a sliver of modernity from one of their compatriots: Terra encesa, a 2025 work by Elisenda Fábregas. (The title means “fiery land,” as I learned from the composer herself—who was quietly seated in the row behind me, both before and after her modest bows—and the intense, melodious work fit its title perfectly.) Like the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie, this cunningly intimate auditorium was purpose-designed for chamber music, and like that auditorium, it is built in the round. But the difference at the Pierre Boulez Saal is that the players perform in the round too. At the interval, they always shift their seats so as to be facing a different part of the audience. (In this case, the Cuarteto players faced inward toward each other as they played, but at least two of them traded seats after every piece, so in the end we all got a glimpse of everyone from the front.) This makes the experience at the Boulez Saal uniquely congenial—an experience reflected in the faces of the performers as they bow to the audience members in all directions: you can see they’ve made a kind of connection that is rarely so viscerally evident.
But now let me go back to that Konzerthaus concert, which started at 2:00 on Wednesday afternoon and last a bit over an hour. Normally, as I said, these weekly “Espresso Concerts” are held in the Kleiner Saal, or even the tiny Werner-Otto-Saal, both great rooms in which to hear chamber music. But this time, because the program featured a Mozart symphony played by a full if reduced orchestra (that is, members of the Konzerthausorchester conducted by a youngish woman named Yi-Chen Lin), the concert had been relocated to the Grosser Saal. I love this room, even though its acoustics are not quite up to the level of the Philharmonie and its sightlines are not always the best. I love it because the sense of grandeur inherent in Schinkel’s gorgeous Konzerthaus building has been converted indoors into a kind of Music Palace for the People, replete with glorious organ, glittering chandeliers, and ring upon ring of three-sided seating, leading up to the decorated ceiling high above our heads. Perhaps this curious quality of belonging to all of us is due to the pricing (22 euros for any seat in the house, at this Espresso concert), or perhaps it owes something to the decades in which this hall was the main music venue for East Berlin. No matter.
I had initially been drawn to the concert by the inclusion of Mozart’s “Linzer” symphony. But in the event, what really moved me was the preceding item on the program: Aaron Copland’s Concert for Clarinet, Strings, Harp, and Piano. Part of what delighted me was the stellar performance by the tall young clarinetist, Oleg Shebeta-Dragan, a Ukrainian-born musician now resident in Germany. But I was also aware, as I listened to Copland’s vital, attractive, jazzy score, of a less familiar emotion than admiration. Part of what I was feeling on that Wednesday, November 5—the day after the heartening blue wave which, among other terrific things, elected Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor—was an unusual sense of pride in this great American composer, whose work was at once so personal and so characteristic of his nation. I had almost forgotten that such patriotism (if you want to call it that) might still be possible for us.