Yes, I have escaped from America, if only temporarily. It’s amazing how just being out of the country seems to remove that tightening iron vise from around one’s head. I can still read about all the presidential crimes and depredations in the daily newspaper online, but it’s as if it’s all happening at a distance, diminished in its power over me. Which is of course a fiction, but one that allows me to relax a bit.
And the music here! That is one of the things that brings me back to Berlin again and again, and this past week it was outstanding. First there was a Good Friday concert at the lovely old Konzerthaus Berlin; then a Saturday night encounter with the Babylon Berlin Live Orchestra at the venerable cinema of that name; and finally, on Easter itself, Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten (or Echnaton, as they spell it here) at the Komische Oper. But I will take them in the order they came to me.
The Konzert zum Karfreitag (which is their name for Good Friday: my local interpreters define the Kar syllable as variously “flesh,” “sorrow,” and “precious”) featured the excellent RIAS Chamber Chorus, the regular Konzerthaus Orchestra itself, four fine soloists, and the English conductor Justin Doyle performing Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ. Due to Mark Morris’s strong advocacy of this piece, I even own a recording of it, but I have never heard it live, and the effect was profound. Like Brahms’s German Requiem (a work on which the Haydn clearly had an influence), it strengthens the emotionally persuasive effect of the human voice by intertwining it with instrumental music—in both cases powerfully reinforced by quantity and volume. Seven Last Words, though it follows a tight and somewhat repetitive structure, noticeably builds towards its end, so that you can really feel that end coming, even the first time you hear it. Because I was seated in one of my favorite Loge Right seats, suspended directly over the stage, I could even spot the three extra players —two brass and a percussionist—who sneaked into the orchestra during one of the final pauses between movements so that their resounding music could amplify the conclusion of the piece.
Lest we non-Christians in the audience feel left out, the designers of this program preceded the main event with a reading by the Persian-German scholar Navid Kermani, widely known in this country for his critical writings about Christianity. In this case he was reading a series of close analyses of Mary-and-Jesus artworks that were projected on the large screen behind him, interspersed with Gregorian songs broadcast from the first-ring level by two alternating soloists. I was not terribly attracted to Kermani’s readings, which emphasized his subjective take over anything that was actually happening in the paintings or sculptures, but I appreciated the inclusive gesture—anti-Christianity combined with Christianity—that made it a part of this concert. Only in Berlin, I thought.
And thought again the next night, when I attended a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times at the Babylon Berlin cinema, accompanied by the charmingly adept in-house musicians. Over the years I have heard them play along to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and Chaplin’s own first feature, The Circus, always to sold-out crowds at this wonderful Mitte-district film theater, which has been located on that spot since 1929.
I have always loved Modern Times (I must have seen it nearly a dozen times by now), but it took me until last Saturday’s viewing to realize that Chaplin himself had composed the music, along with doing the writing, directing, and of course acting (in which category I include his genius-level movement, of everything from his body to his face). As with my other musical experiences at the Babylon Berlin, I almost forgot about the orchestra, their performance was so in synch with what was taking place onscreen—until the very end, when the lights went up and we all applauded the musicians like mad. The orchestra in fact came in for even more applause than the film, to such an extent that they felt obliged to give us an encore. I emerged from the theater on Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse feeling that this vibrant, delighted audience consisted entirely of my kind of people: an illusion, no doubt, but one that I am happy to preserve.
And then, on Sunday, I attended the Easter Day performance of Echnaton, directed by Barrie Kosky (he of recent Threepenny Opera fame in Brooklyn, and of much else I have admired). Despite my affection for Kosky’s work—and for Glass’s, of which I am a strong though not die-hard fan—I had very low expectations for this event. For one thing, I was prepared to resent the architecturally cold Schiller Theater, the former-West-Berlin location to which the Komische has fled while its own former-East premises are being renovated. For another, I did not see how three hours of repetitive Glass music was going to hold my interest in a nearly plotless opera about monotheism. (The story in a nutshell: the old Egyptian pharaoh dies, the new one take over and makes his father into a singular all-powerful god, and then the establishment forces bring him down and return religious matters to the status quo.) But I did not count on the inventiveness, the sheer brilliance of Kosky’s staging, aided and abetted not only by his seven collaborators in “movement sequencing” (there was no choreographer listed), but also by the soloists he cast in the crucial parts. A particular standout was the countertenor John Holiday, who played Echnaton, and whom I’d unaccountably never seen before. But had I stayed in America, I would have seen him soon enough, for he will be performing during the next few weeks in the English Concert’s version of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, first at Zellerbach Hall (April 27) and then at Carnegie (May 4). If you live near Berkeley or New York, do not let this opportunity pass: he will astonish you, as he astonished me and everyone else at the Easter performance.
But even a great singer could not have supported this three-hour show on his own. That was accomplished by the abstract yet viscerally compelling staging: abstract in that it often consisted simply of repetitive yet slightly varying motions performed in front of non-representational sets; compelling because the quality of those motions was so very, very good. Berlin dance, as I’ve complained before, is often terrible because it either overdoes or underdoes the capacities of the human body to exhibit strain. But in this case Kosky and his collaborators got it just right.
The seven collaborating “movement sequencers” were the seven highly skilled dancers—four men and three women—who appeared in just about every scene of the opera, and whose gestures were often echoed by the members of the chorus and even the soloists. Perhaps because of this link to normal bodily abilities, the gestures were never stupidly exaggerated or annoyingly grotesque, as they so often are in this country. When not all the chorus members could perform the motions, Kosky wisely left it to just those who could—as in the wonderful scene where the dancers and about two-thirds of the chorus criss-crossed the stage carrying lit globes, while the non-dancing singers remained holding their globes on the sidelines. This approach matched what other choreographers have done with Glass’s music (I am thinking in particular of Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces, to which some of Kosky’s sequences seemed to allude) while at the same time making the performances seem even more natural, less artificially constructed, less “stagy” than in professionally choreographed dances. Yet there were scenes—as when the seven dancers lowered themselves slowly to the ground, backs perfectly straight as their knees bent more and more—that could not have been accomplished by any but the best-trained physical performers.
Despite the long musical passages that took place between sung interludes, there was never a moment when my attention drifted from what was happening onstage. And despite its obvious and indeed vaunted repetitiveness, there was never a note of Glass’s music that seemed unnecessary. I roared with delight when the final curtain came down, and so did the rest of the wildly appreciative Berlin audience. It had been the best three hours of opera one could imagine—a fitting conclusion to my multi-religious, musically enhanced Easter weekend.