My average attendance at Berlin musical events usually hovers between two and three per week; this time it was at the lower end, but that still meant I attended four additional concerts since my last posting. They were so varied that I think just describing them will give a sense of why I love this town, musically and otherwise.
First, on Saturday April 26, I had a rematch with Barrie Kosky and the Komische Oper. If the previous opera, Echnaton, was an example of Kosky at his serious, intellectual, somewhat terrifying best, this one showed his opposite but equally entrancing side to great effect. The Pearls of Cleopatra is a 1923 operetta by the Viennese-Jewish composer Oscar Straus —someone I had never heard of before, but it seems he was in the Franz Lehar league, in his own day. I chose this production not only because it sounded fun, but because the choreography was by Kosky’s frequent collaborator, Otto Pichler—my favorite Berlin choreographer, which means one of the few I like. On both counts, I chose well, and in fact the production was huge fun in large part because of Pichler, who transcended himself with a series of near-constant dances that both drew from 1920s style and reflected the knowing sensibility of this semi-ironic performance.
We began each act with dancer-singers flooding the balconies and the aisles around us, as if to say: Join us! You too are part of this show! And that inviting sensibility pervaded the whole silly-on-purpose production, even for a foreigner who could not understand the Berlin-dialect asides that the main character kept making, to the rest of the audience’s complete delight. That main character, Cleopatra, was played by a well-known former-East-Berlin actress named Dagmar Manzel, born in 1958, who originated this role in Kosky’s production in 2016 and has been playing it ever since. Armed with a kitten-faced sock-puppet named Ingeborg who talked back to her in funny voices (a gimmick that the actress herself apparently originated), she was the wildest, craziest, most effective version of Cleopatra imaginable. This was a woman who clearly always got her way, and those around her had adapted to that fact in strange and ludicrous ways. The whole supporting cast, from her maid-servant Charmian (Julia Demke) to her righthand advisor Pampylos (Theo Rüster), turned out to be equally charming and endearing and funny, and the whole evening—musically, choreographically, and as a communal theatrical experience—couldn’t have been improved upon in any way.
Next up, on Sunday the 27th, was a concert on the other extreme of the Berlin spectrum, in every way except its quality. A one-hour performance of two Pierre Boulez pieces, held in the Werner-Otto-Saal, the tiniest space at the Konzerthaus, it was conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, my favorite Berlin conductor, and featured the eleven performers of the UnitedBerlin chamber group. The two pieces, “Dérive I” from 1984 and “Dérive II” from 1988–2009 (Boulez apparently couldn’t stop tinkering with it), were both extremely difficult to perform; the man sitting next to me said he could hear Jurowski heave a small sigh of relief when the concert ended. And the seriousness on all the players’ faces reflected the degree of concentration required of them. We in the audience took our parts seriously, too, and were quiet as mice throughout. Boulez is a difficult composer for me to take in—his rhythms (unlike Shostakovich’s, say) are always hard for me to follow, and I find it challenging to grasp what he is doing—but Jurowski’s expressive explanation, offered to us between the two pieces, gave me clues about what to watch for. It is these direct addresses to the audience, as much as the other factors one encounters at the Konzerthaus, that cause me to love this former-East music venue. The prices are great there, too: I believe I paid only 15 euros for this intense Boulez experience.
Pierre Boulez turned out to be the flavor of the week, because the following Sunday I attended a student performance at the Saal named after him. I have been to many fine concerts at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin’s latest and perhaps most congenial chamber-music space, but they have all been inside the concert hall itself. This one, titled Personal Note: Heartbeat, was in the lobby/bar area of the hall. As the students and one of their teachers explained to us in the course of the program, the nine pieces had been selected in large part because of their rhythmic qualities. Ranging from Bach, Vivaldi, and Schubert to relative youngsters like Marc Migó (born in 1993) and Matias Azpurua (born in 1983), the pieces were all short and lively, and they were played with vigor by the members of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, which was originally founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in order to bring together Israeli and Palestinian music students. The need for such unity is all too evident at this moment, and the diversity of the players’ backgrounds (I detected Hispanic, Armenian, and Turkish names in the mix, along with the Palestinians and Israelis) gave an added emotional punch to the sight of the valiant student performers. Among the standouts, I thought, were Andrés Gómez for his amazing percussion work, Ali Emir Bostanci for his delicious performance on the cello, and Eda Sevinis for both her piano-playing and her lovely speech about the meaning and function of music.
My fourth musical event was again at the Konzerthaus, but this one was a far more normal chamber concert, held in the Kleiner Saal. The performers were a Czech quartet group called the Bennewitz Quartett, joined after the intermission by the excellent German violist Veronika Hagen. I had never heard of the quartet before, but the program (Brahms followed by Dvorak) seemed attractive. As it turned out, the Brahms was perfectly fine; the Dvorak—the String Quintet in E-flat Major, opus 97—was out of this world. You could see from the expressions on the players’ faces that whereas Brahms’s String Quartet in B-flat Major struck them as a kind of entertainment, something to play for mere enjoyment, the Dvorak was serious business: so intense as to require their full-bodied involvement and concentration, and so passion-filled as to evoke an almost human singing quality from their strings. I was so inspired by their rendering of it that the minute I got home to my borrowed Berlin flat, I streamed the piece again on my little Micro Bose—and lo and behold, that recording too featured Veronika Hagen. Perhaps no one is allowed to play the piece without her.