My four weeks in Berlin are coming to a close, and I had no more concerts on the agenda. But I hate to let a night go by in this wonderful music-loving and music-producing city without taking advantage of its charms. So on Monday night I opted to buy a last-minute ticket to a performance at the Berlin Philharmonie, the same hall where I began my concert adventures on October 15.
The difference is that this time I had no expectations about the performers. Instead of a beloved soloist (Tetzlaff) performing with my favorite conductor (Jurowski), I was faced with two unknowns: a Russian-born pianist named Alexander Malofeev, and the Vienna Symphony, of which I had never even heard. I am not a great fan of the famed Vienna Philharmonic—their precision always feels a bit bloodless to me—so I was eager to hear what the runner-up in that town could do.
As so often when it is not the Berlin Philharmonic itself playing, the hall was not sold out, and I was able to snag an incredibly great seat in the A section for a mere 85 euros, the top price for a ticket that night. You will perhaps get a sense of my seating privilege if I tell you that a man who looked exactly like Chancellor Merz—and who, at the end of the concert, was spirited out a small back door into a waiting black car protected by security—was seated on the aisle at the end of my row. However, since all tall male German politicians basically look alike to me, it could have been anyone.
But back to the concert itself. The orchestra’s regular conductor, a Czech named Petr Popelka, is evidently not afraid of giving his audience exactly what they want, and here he offered us two Beethoven works, in a program unmarred by fashionable gestures toward new commissions or young composers. Moreover, they were two of my favorite Beethoven works, the Fifth Piano Concerto and the Seventh Symphony. It is no good streaming things like this, because the full effect only comes when you hear them in person, and chestnuts though they may be, I feel I never get to hear them often enough. Popelka is a lively conductor (at times, indeed, too lively—in the closing bars of the symphony, I had to rest my eyes from his antics by gazing steadily at the terrific drummer), and under his guidance the players performed the Seventh Symphony superbly. That alone would have made the evening worthwhile.
But the high point of the program was the piano concerto. Malofeev, who looks like a gangly blond teenager, is in fact 24. Born in Moscow and now resident in Berlin, he already has an international solo career, having performed with major orchestras in Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and elsewhere. I was so captivated by this performance of his that in retrospect it is hard for me to describe. He played the quiet notes so delicately, and with such a sense of their slightly varying internal rhythms, that I had to remain alert to be sure of catching them all. Always attentive to the cues from his conductor, he nonetheless seemed lost in the music at times. Whenever he played with his right hand only, he rested his left on the edge of the piano-strings box (unimpeded by the usual upright music stand, since he was playing from memory)—as if he were a cowboy gently reaching for his horse’s neck with one hand while he held the reins with another. Generations of music teachers must have tried to get him to stop doing this, but I’m glad they failed; the gesture is charming, and idiosyncratic, and clearly from the heart. But more important even than how Alexander Malofeev looked was how he sounded. Watch for him—he will soon be coming to a concert house near you, and you will not want to miss it.