One Last Concert

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

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.

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Chamber Music Spaces in Berlin

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

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.

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Kosky’s K.

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

I didn’t know what to expect. The Barrie Kosky production playing at the Berliner Ensemble was billed as “a Talmudic tingeltangel around Kafka’s Trial, after Kafka, with music from Bach to Schumann to Yiddish vaudeville.” (The untranslatable tingeltangel is an old Berlin dialect term for exactly what it sounds like: the jingly, raucous sound of a turn-of-the-century cabaret.) And I couldn’t imagine who would show up for such a thing, either. I had grabbed a ticket to the Saturday night production, which featured English supertitles, though in the event I didn’t spot any other English-speakers in the audience that night. I suspect the production is too recent, and the tickets too hot, to have seeped beyond any but local ticket-buyers yet.

As the curtain rose, we began with a scrim on which words appeared one by one in an old-fashioned typewriter font. I recognized them as coming from Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist”—the first of several snippets from this sad, sardonic, ironic tale of a man who slowly starves himself to death even after his audience has lost interest. I was to recognize other well-known bits of Kafka’s writing as they surfaced throughout the show—centrally from The Trial, which formed the backbone of the plot, but also from stories like “The Judgment” and “In the Penal Colony,” from the parable “Before the Law,” and from some late notebook entries detailing his final months at the TB sanatorium. Even “Metamorphosis” surfaced briefly, not explicitly but subliminally in the insect-exterminating outfit of one of the characters, whose poison-filled cannister was emblazoned with a cockroach. And there may have been many other references I failed to catch, for this was a production you would have to watch a thousand times to grasp…I was going to say “fully,” but any hold one gains on such material can only be partial at best.

That sense of irresolvability is part of Kafka’s enduring spell, and part of the reason Barrie Kosky—a lifelong Kafka fan—was drawn to this project in the first place. For him, The Trial is not about the obstacles thrown up by an external bureaucracy, but the far more obstinate difficulties produced by the guilt-ridden self. As an Australian Jew long resident in Berlin, with a Hungarian grandmother urging him to learn German on one side and a Polish grandmother tying him to Yiddish culture on the other, Kosky knows this struggle from the inside. He also knows that Kafka himself took time out of his secular German-language life to learn Hebrew and immerse himself in Yiddish theater. Correctly, I think, Kosky perceives the primary force in Kafka’s life and work as a kind of resistance, or ambivalence, or self-division stemming from the conflict between the individual assimilated writer and his culturally religious, shtetl-based, rule-bound background—a conflict that applies to non-Jews as well as Jews, since we’re all subject to the battle between our own personal desires and our obligations to those who surround us and gave rise to us. But Kafka is unique, perhaps, in perceiving his inner divisions in a way that seems to echo an outer reality. What’s more, he is somehow able to render these circumstances in a tone of voice that, on the page as well as on the stage, simultaneously gives rise to both tragedy and wit.

In Kosky’s production, the central character of Josef K.—or simply K., as he is called in the program—is performed by the terrific, nay, the astonishing, the really quite unbelievable Kathrin Wehlisch. She begins and ends in an outfit made up of loose white underwear and a sleeveless white undershirt, and though she acquires at various times an ill-fitting suit, some shoes and socks, and even, finally, a pair of tap shoes, her emotional mode is one of complete nakedness, complete exposure to our eyes and the eyes of those around her onstage. Often she is spotlit alone onstage, and when she moves around—sometimes haltingly, more often frantically—the spotlight follows her, hinting from the very beginning at the analogy between a theatrical cabaret performance and a legal /familial/cultural/psychological sense of persecution. Wehlisch is onstage for every minute of the three-hour performance (except when she, and we, are given a fifteen-minute break), and throughout she is at fever pitch, both physically and emotionally. Though casting a woman in the role might seem to be a statement of sorts, it does not make any sense to suggest that she has been chosen for this reason, since it seems to me that no other actor, of any gender, could have accomplished what she does here.

Wehlisch is supported in her performance by an array of uber-talented Berliner Ensemble actors taking on multiple roles: the shape-shifting Gabriel Schneider, Joyce Sanhá, and Paul Herwig, the scarily tall and bony Constanze Becker, the thrillingly insidious Alexander Simon, the incorrigibly pathetic Martin Rentzch, and—brought in from the Komische Oper—the tender-voiced soprano Alma Sadé, who plays Kafka’s final love interest, Dora Diamant. Wehlisch and her fellow cast members are further supported by the brilliant musical direction, credited to Adam Benzwi, who also conducts the eight-member band, which performs Bach, Schumann, and vaudeville-songs on everything from piano, violin, and drums to clarinet, saxophone, ukulele, and tuba. 

The bare bones of the show’s “plot” appear at first to be tied roughly to Kafka’s words. As in the novel, K. is arrested for reasons unknown to him and hauled to prison, then released for reasons equally unknown. After dashing about for a while trying fruitlessly to get to the bottom of his problem, he encounters his Uncle Karl, who takes him to see a powerful lawyer. This oppressive figure never appears in person but instead hides behind a curtained-off area, issuing instructions and commands in a booming voice (shades of The Wizard of Oz). When eventually this curtain is pulled aside, it reveals an Ark from which K. removes the Torah scrolls, and when he unfurls them and begins to read aloud, the words are from the parable “Before the Law,” except that the gatekeeper’s lines have been translated into Hebrew.  The Hebrew language reappears when the hidden lawyer’s voice turns into that of the father from “The Judgment,” castigating his son (for whom the trembling K. stands in) and telling him to go drown himself. Later still, K. receives instruction from a cold, severe, judge-like figure, who describes in detail the elaborate torture machine that will inscribe K’s ultimate verdict in bloody Hebrew letters on his back. (Midway through her dry description of this process, the actor Constanze Becker was faintly interrupted by a cough from the audience—at which point, in echt–Berliner Ensemble fashion, she interrupted herself to glare at the cougher in a manner that clearly suggested, “If you don’t shut up, you’ll be next.”) Throughout the show, the only respites K. experiences from these prolonged episodes of anxiety are the intermittent occasions when his lover, Dora Diamant, sings tenderly to him in Yiddish.

Yet this description does not begin to indicate how extremely weird the whole production is. For instance, Dora’s songs are derived in large part from Schumann’s Dichterliebe, with its German lyrics by Heinrich Heine (Kafka’s predecessor, so to speak, as an assimilated Jew), but here translated into Yiddish. This means that in addition to my English-language supertitles, Dora’s songs required German supertitles, so that the local audience could understand the Yiddish words. And that’s not the half of it. At unexpected moments throughout the play’s otherwise upsetting, stress-filled action, the characters would spontaneously burst into animated song and dance, much as they do in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven or The Singing Detective. But unlike Potter’s understandable lyrics, most of K.‘s songs are in Yiddish, and these too require supertitles, as do all the Hebrew bits delivered from God’s or the father’s mouth. Yet even though the music for the vaudeville bits may sound like early-twentieth-century cabaret, the lyrics seem not to derive from traditional songs, because they apply too closely to the matters at hand—K.’s nerves, for instance, which are celebrated at length in one hilarious song, or the father’s harsh commands, which appear in another. I enjoyed all these musical interludes, but my absolute favorite consisted of three bearded Jews in full Hasidic garb, comically and indeed blasphemously singing and dancing and twirling their tzitzit tassels in celebration of K.’s dire fate.

I don’t think you could get away with putting this on a New York stage, and the fact that I found myself laughing at it in Berlin—surrounded by people who were laughing at it too, and for reasons that I, as a super-secular American Jew, couldn’t begin to fathom—began to make me nervous. But that nervousness was also essential to the production. The effort to produce an underlying discomfort was not the sole aim of Kosky’s K., but it was certainly there in the mix. And as the performance wound down to its close, with the remarkable Wehlisch/K. giving a heartfelt, flamboyant, but ultimately frenetic rendering of “Mayn Yiddishe Meydele”—for once, a traditional song I did recognize—I felt my heart break.

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Berlin with a Bang

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

I am always happy to return to the concert scene in Berlin (not to mention the rest of this wonderful city), but this time the results exceeded even my high expectations. In the past few days, I’ve been to three of what might be among the fifteen or twenty best concerts of my life.

First up was the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin at the Philharmonie on Wednesday, October 15. I actually timed the trip to catch this one, arriving only that morning from New York. I’ve been following the RSB faithfully since Vladimir Jurowski took over as artistic director and lead conductor in 2017, and I’ve always been thrilled with Jurowski’s concerts. But this time there was the added allure of Christian Tetzlaff as the solo violinist in Alban Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. Having publicly announced his thoughtful opposition to Trump’s policies, Tetzlaff has been boycotting America since early this year, so I was hungry to hear him play again, especially in his home town.

And boy, was I rewarded! Following a brief, wrenching, and not entirely musical new piece by the youngish Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun (which featured, among other unusual sounds, the shouts and screams of the musicians), Tetzlaff gave us the Berg concerto. He and Jurowski have been collaborating since 1999, so they know and appreciate each other’s approaches, and in this case the sympathetic blending of soloist and orchestra was at maximum level. The Berg is a piece which highlights the soloist—he is not so much playing along as setting the tone—and the tone Tetzlaff lent the piece (or derived from the piece: it is never clear, with him, which way the influence goes) was essentially tragic. This made sense, given that the concerto was written in memory of the recently deceased daughter of Alma Mahler Gropius and Walter Gropius, the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius. Tetzlaff always dances when he plays, but this time his gliding, bending steps and curving, shuddering back had an almost klezmerish feel, as if he were the village fiddler called in to commemorate the shockingly early death of the local belle. That this atmosphere could accompany the most delicate and subtle expression of musical phrases is just one aspect of Tetzlaff’s many-faceted genius. Honestly, I could hear the guy play for hours without ever tiring of it, and I am always sorry when his part of a concert is over. In this case, though, I had an added treat in store, because when the intermission was over, Christian Tetzlaff—now changed out of his concert duds into more casual clothes—came and sat in the row behind mine to listen to Jurowski’s and the RSB’s superb performance of Brahms’s Second. What a mensch! I thought, considering that most soloists and even some composers rush out the door as soon as their part in the program is over. (Korsun, I noticed, was not in her seat for the second half.) But Tetzlaff, who is a Brahms expert himself, must have felt rewarded by the RSB’s animated and intense version of the symphony. Huge kudos to all.

My second concert took place in a much smaller venue: the Pierre Boulez Saal, which is Berlin’s latest and best chamber-music auditorium. Holding fewer than 700 seats, all arranged in the round, the Boulez Saal is a pleasure for performers and audience members alike. In this case, the incredible Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst was playing there for the first time on Friday, October 17. Like other foreigners faced with this knowledgeable and enthusiastic chamber-music audience, he and his piano accompanist, Roland Pöntinen, seemed almost overwhelmed by the excited applause that greeted their every piece, reaching its pinnacle before and after the two encores. I was drawn to this concert by the fact that it featured Anders Hillborg’s earliest piece for the then-young Fröst, Tampere Raw from 1991, and that was indeed a pleasure to hear. But as so often happens, the most unexpected delights came before and after the Hillborg. Once again I got Berg and Brahms in a row, and once again they proved an unusually complementary pair, with Berg’s 1913 Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano leading effortlessly into Brahms’s 1894 Sonata for Clarinet and Piano in F-minor. The Debussy and the Poulenc that followed the Hillborg were charming too, but my absolutely favorite thing on the program was the first encore—an adaptation of one of Brahms’s Hungarian dances (adapted by one of his brothers, Fröst told us) that included some wild bits of improvisatory clarinet playing. Fröst’s sound is unlike anything I’ve ever heard on a clarinet before, ranging from the mellowness of a cello to the piercing quality of a trumpet, but with most of it in the quieter cello range. He too dances, but unlike Tetzlaff, he dances in a way that often seems at odds with the music—as if the impulses were coming from his own body rather than from the external sounds. Never mind, though: whatever he needs to do to produce those sounds is fine with me.

My third and final concert may actually have been the best of the three, though with everything at such a high level, it is always hard to tell. I was back at the Philharmonie on Saturday, October 18, this time to hear Simon Rattle conducting the famed Berlin Philharmonic itself. It struck me in advance as a rather odd program—I only knew one piece on it beforehand—and Rattle’s presence was the thing that guaranteed my attendance; I have learned over the years to trust his programming more than I trust my own taste.

This concert began with Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, a weird medley of folk tunes adapted for “military band.” It was possibly louder and certainly more eccentric than anything I’ve ever heard in the Philharmonie before. I knew almost nothing about Grainger before this, barring his name (his dates are 1882 to 1961), but apparently Rattle has been a great champion of his, and now I’m open to hearing more. For the moment, though, that fifteen minutes sufficed. It was immediately followed by a beautiful, intense, persuasive rendering of Prokofiev’s First Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, written in 1923, when the composer and the Russian Revolution were both still young. A great deal of the beauty and intensity were attributable to the astonishing yet somehow understated soloist, a Dutch woman named Janine Jansen whom I’ve never heard before. She was spectacular, and the orchestra did everything in its power to showcase and support her.

When her part ended, you might have suspected the concert had reached its high point, but you would have been wrong. For after the intermission we were treated to the best performance of John Adams’s Harmonielehre that I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing. Yet another work by a then-young composer (Adams was not yet forty when it premiered in 1985), Harmonielehre possesses the exuberance of a brilliant neophyte trying out just about everything that an orchestra can do. At the same time, it maintains a strict discipline over its players and listeners, with various competing “minimalist” rhythms modulating, disappearing, and returning over the course of its forty-minute duration. As I sat enraptured by its three marvelous movements, I thought of Beethoven: how I never want a Beethoven symphony to end, and it never seems to want to end, either. The Adams piece, this time, gave me the same feeling. I have heard it before in the last forty years, and I know I liked it then, but this performance was something else. The exuberance of it carried me out of the concert hall, down Potsdamerstrasse, and onto the double-decker M29 bus, where I luxuriated, from my second-story, perfect-view-of-the-city seat, in the satisfied feeling of having once again returned to Berlin.

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Back with Esa-Pekka!

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

No sooner had I bid a regretful adieu to Esa-Pekka Salonen, as he departed the Bay Area last June, than he reappeared in my life by way of the New York Philharmonic. And New Yorkers are not the only ones who will benefit from his severance from the San Francisco Symphony. Over the next year or two he will be taking “creative director” jobs in Los Angeles and Paris, along with a host of guest conducting stints that will bring his talents to the world at large. So once again it is San Francisco’s loss and everyone else’s gain.

Of the two concerts he is scheduled to give in New York this fall, I was particularly eager to see the first because it also featured one of my favorite pianists, Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Aimard is a great soloist in part because he is a great team player: both his excellent musicianship and his modest deportment allow him to blend in beautifully with whatever orchestra he is playing with. I last saw him at the Concertgebouw, performing Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra under the skillful conductorship of Karina Canellakis, and it was a delight.

Salonen is one of his longtime collaborators, so I knew this Geffen Hall concert on October 4 was likely to be good, but what I didn’t realize in advance was how intelligently the program would be constructed. Aside from Debussy’s La Mer, everything on the program was new to me, but it was all introduced in a fascinating way.

The first half consisted mainly of three of Pierre Boulez’s Notations, each presented in two forms: as the brief piano solo Boulez had written in 1945 (Notation IV Rhythmique, Notation VII Hieratique, and Notation II Tres vif), followed immediately by the orchestral version that Boulez had elaborated from his initial piano piece in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. For his “intros,” as it were, Aimard was located at the very back of the orchestra, nearly hidden on the lefthand side; but he was as essential to each full rendering as if he were right up front. As if all this weren’t complicated enough, Salonen had separated each Boulez double-play from the next by inserting an appropriately matched Debussy piece: Gigues (from Images for Orchestra) between the first and the second, and Rondes de printemps (from the same piece) between the second and third. This palate-cleansing method was salutary in regard to both composers, for the early twentieth century Debussy pieces gave us a much-needed rest from Boulez’s rigor, while they also revealed how fruitfully Boulez’s sensibility had been influenced by but also departed from the musical inventions of his admired forebear. If I had heard this half of the program described, I would not have been able to imagine how positively enjoyable it would be—and yet it was.

The second half began with Debussy’s Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra, which is downright beautiful and pleasingly various, especially the way Aimard and the New York Philharmonic rendered it. (I have to say, it made La Mer, which followed it, sound boringly mushy by comparison—but then, you may not share my prejudices against that overplayed Debussy work.) For each of the three movements of the Fantasie, Aimard succeeded in making the piano into an orchestral instrument—occasionally blending in completely with the strings, winds, and percussion, but also standing apart from them when enunciating its own unique runs of notes. Here there was no Boulezian hardness to overcome: it was all pure pleasure, and yet it was demanding pleasure, pleasure that asked the audience members to bring something to their listening. If the snippets of Debussy that had adorned the first half were palate cleansers, here we were treated to a whole fantastic dessert. And yet the two men at the center of it all—Salonen on the podium, Aimard at the piano, both briefly hugging each other at the end—could not have been more casual and modest in the way they fielded the audience’s enthusiasm. Even their bows and smiles were a delight to witness, because they made us feel the music had given as much pleasure to them as it had to us.

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Dudamel in New York

Posted on September 22, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

Now that Esa-Pekka Salonen has left the San Francisco Symphony, I find that my orchestral allegiances have shifted from the West Coast to the East. There is no surer sign of this than the fact that this fall I have requested more tickets from the New York Philharmonic than from any other organization in New York—including Carnegie Hall, which usually dominates my autumn schedule.

This year the New York season began with a bang, with two successive Gustavo Dudamel concerts at the grandly refurbished Geffen Hall. I have seen and heard this charismatic conductor in numerous settings—at Carnegie Hall, long ago, leading the Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the group that originally formed him; at UC Berkeley’s intimate Hertz Hall, rehearsing and speaking to the members of the undergraduate student orchestra; and with his own longtime Los Angeles Philharmonic, both as visitors at Carnegie and in their native Disney Hall. I never tire of him, this bundle of energy who cares so much about musicians, audiences, and the state of the world. His commitment to bringing forth both new and old music shines through in every program, and his connection with his players, whoever they are, is tangible. He is always fun to watch—and to those carpers who snobbishly insist that he is too popular, I would answer, “And the problem is…?”

A full year before he is due to take over as the New York Philharmonic’s artistic director, Dudamel is already drawing sold-out crowds and over-the-top applause. Some of this is just the trendiness of a new thing, but a lot of it can be attributed to what he delivers. In these two September concerts, he offered us a world premiere (Leilehua Lanzilotti’s of light and stone), a stellar soloist in a great concerto (Yunchan Lim in Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3), a twentieth-century symphony by a dead American composer (Charles Ives’s Second, from around 1910, though it didn’t premiere until 1951), a twentieth-century symphony by a living American composer (John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, from 1988), and Beethoven’s monumental Fifth Symphony.

The world premiere, the Bartok, and the Ives (in that order) constiututed the first of Dudamel’s two programs. Like most commissioned premieres, the Lanzilotti piece struck me as inoffensive yet not compelling; I didn’t mind sitting through it, and I won’t mind terribly if I never hear it again. But with its range of modes and moods, it set the stage, anyway, for the other two pieces on that program.

Charles Ives is an oddball composer to begin with—a secluded talent, with a belated exposure to the world, and a highly melodic modernist, if he was a modernist at all. I have to admit that I still don’t know what to make of his Second Symphony, with its frequent digressions into phrases from familiar tunes, its explorations of musical highways and byways, its overall inexplicability. What is he trying to say here? I found myself thinking, which is not necessarily a useful musical question, but one that often comes into my narratively literal mind. But the rendering of this piece by the Philharmonic under Dudamel was certainly as powerful a presentation as that strange symphony could have wished for.

And the Bartok! Yunchan Lim turns out to be one of those astonishing piano prodigies whose musicianship and depth of feeling are as remarkable as their technical ability. The concerto itself shows the Gershwin-like side of Bartok rather than the more esoteric, prickly side one finds in, say, the quartets. In this case, the music seemed to want to sweep us away with both its brash and its tender moments, and Lim made the most of every one of them. The fact that we could hear every note of the pianist’s absolutely accomplished yet somehow modestly rendered performance can be attributed not only to Dudamel’s conducting skill, but also to the alert responsiveness of the orchestra under him.

I attended the second program as a matinee this past Sunday, and due to a mild and soon-resolved emergency, I unfortunately had to miss the Corigliano symphony, with which Dudamel concluded the performance, his final one of the series. But I streamed a recording of the piece afterwards (the Barenboim recording, with the Chicago Symphony) and I could tell exactly how wonderful it would have been to hear this moving, expansive, vigorous tribute to those who died of AIDS played in Geffen Hall. It’s a fitting piece for this concert hall, this orchestra, and this city, and its forty-five minute length—which is sometimes wrenching but never boring—would have passed like a dream in that setting, not to mention in the company of all those avid listeners. Already, during the concert’s first half (which was devoted to Beethoven’s Fifth), I was impressed by the degree of attention and silence around me, and I’m sure the obvious devotion of the audience would have come into its own in the second half.

Sometimes I worry that I have heard too many performances of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in my life. I know this blasphemous idea occurred to me briefly a few years ago, when I heard the Vienna Philharmonic do it as part of the whole cycle. Maybe I was just tired then, or maybe Dudamel’s version this past Sunday was just uniquely good. In any case, that perfect performance of a perfect work—in its waverings between delicate peacefulness and overwhelming vigor, in its carefully speeded up and slowed down passages, and in its iconic refusal to let go—was splendidly served by the hyper-sharp but in this case just-right acoustics of the renovated Geffen Hall. Listening to those final repeated themes and crashing chords, and watching Dudamel go all-in with his characteristically contagious yet controlled enthusiasm, I was reminded of what he had told the Berkeley students about his origins as a conductor: how, as a little boy, he had arranged his stuffed animals in a circle around him and then “conducted” them to recorded music. Last Sunday afternoon, sitting happily in Geffen Hall, I imagined I could still see that little boy.

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Mark Morris at the Joyce

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

I tend to avoid the hot, muggy months in New York, so I have missed most of the Mark Morris company’s recent summer performances at the Joyce Theater. But this year I had to be in New York anyway in July, and a huge added benefit was getting to see the delicious Program B. This program invitingly contained three older gems—“Ten Suggestions” from 1981, “Going Away Party” from 1990, and “The Argument” from 1999—along with the world premiere of a new dance set to John Luther Adams’s music.

A built-in disadvantage to watching new dancers in old roles is that one might make invidious comparisons, but the current crop of Mark Morris dancers is so good that I almost, though never quite, forgot about the earlier shadows who filled those parts. Since these shadows included Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris (who were alternating in the “Ten Suggestions” solo when I first saw it in about 1990), this was inevitably a difficult task for any replacement dancer. But the marvelous Dallas McMurray, who has similarly taken on nearly impossible Mark Morris roles in the past, carried out his own version of “Ten Suggestions” with grace, aplomb, and his special brand of endearing humor. There is something eternally fascinating about watching this Pierrot-like figure in white pajamas perform a series of experimental, sometimes tentative, sometimes playful moves to Tcherepnin’s piano Bagatelles, Opus 5; the music itself ranges from bright and cheerful to thoughtful and melancholy, and so did McMurray’s gestures, which involved props such as a hula hoop, a chair and a long white ribbon.

I realized while watching “The Argument” that although I had chased this dance from coast to coast when it first came out (it always seemed to be in New York when I was in Berkeley, and vice versa), I had never actually seen it before. So this piece, which had also included Morris and Baryshnikov as two of the original three men, was a complete revelation to me, despite all that I’d heard about it. In its present incarnation, Courtney Lopes and Brandon Randolph were particularly compelling as one of the three argumentative-and-then-making-up couples, but everyone in the dance—including Sarah Hillmon with Dallas McMurray and Billy Smith with Joslin Vezeau—did a fine job executing the exacting, complex, yet seemingly natural roles. The music is by Robert Schumann, who always seems to bring out the best in Mark Morris (I am thinking now of Morris’s 2001 V, set to Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a dance which roused me from my post 9-11 stupor and made me feel alive again). And in this case Morris brought out the best in Schumann as well, assigning beautifully sharp and evocative dance gestures to each phrase of the cello-and-piano Fünf Stücke im Volkston.

The new piece, “Northwest,” arrived in a strange location on the program, just after the opening work and before the intermission, as if shyly hiding itself among the others. But that turned out to be a canny choice, because it showed us—coming immediately after the spectacularly airy leaps and lifts of “The Argument”—that the earthbound, monochromally clad dancers, each armed with multiple yellow paper fans, were purposefully toning down their sparkling technique in the service of something else. Clearly modeled on indigenous dance modes (which, at least in the North American continent, tend to involve relatively simple footwork that can be executed by participants of any age), the moves in “Northwest” relied heavily on the upper bodies, arms, and hands of the dancers. And unlike “The Argument” (or for that matter the final piece on the program, “Going Away Party”), this new work made no attempt to differentiate between male and female dancers: the three men and seven women were all dressed in the same loose shirts and shorts, and their movement styles were uniformly ungendered. Normally Mark Morris focuses closely on numbers in his work, and this piece was no exception, except that the numbers proved extremely hard to count: what began as a dance for nine people intermittently lost or gained one or more dancers onstage, until eventually we saw all ten cast members at once—and even then they were divided into a group of six and a group of four, as if to thwart any wish for symmetry. When we finally got two circles of five, I thought, “Aha, now I know where I am!” But that was a temporary feeling. Like Adam’s spare harp-and-percussion music, to which it remained wholly true, “Northwest” consistently refused to let us settle in place.

I had misremembered “Going Away Party,” the last piece on the program, as Mark Morris’s “goodbye and fuck you” to Brussels, where he had a highly productive three years in the late 1980s and early 1990s—years that were marked by occasional audience incomprehension and critical abuse in response to some of his most stunning works. But I was wrong, it turns out: Morris just made this good-ol’-boys dance (performed to a recording of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys) because he wanted to, midway through his Brussels stay. I saw it long ago, and though I loved it then, I would not have guessed it would age well. But all the humor and pathos, now detached from any particular historical moment or location, are left to stand on their own, and the piece remains a total delight. The semi-square-dance arrangements are performed by three couples, as in “The Argument,” but here a seventh figure has been added to the mix—originally performed by Morris himself, now delicately rendered by Billy Smith. And the occasional presence of that extra figure—the one we seem to be saying goodbye to, especially in the titular “Going Away Party” and the final “When You Leave Amarillo, Turn Out the Lights”—lends a huge depth of feeling to what might otherwise seem a lighthearted send-up of Texas country music. It is not Brussels we seem to be bidding adieu to here, not a temporary foreign posting or even an important career era, but life itself.

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This Past Month or So

Posted on June 17, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

It’s a truism, I suppose, that there is no such thing as listening objectively to music. But criticism is somehow built on the idea that the critic is doing exactly that—bringing her expertise to bear on the sounds emerging from the musicians and then conveying her non-subjective, analytic assessment to her readers. I’ve never pretended to any major level of expertise (my sole qualifications for this role being some years spent as a violin student in my youth, plus decades of assiduous concert-going since then), and I confess that most of my previous blog posts have revealed a significant degree of subjectivity. Still, the events of the past five weeks have forced me to reconceive the relationship between what I am taking in when I go to a concert and what is there inside me to begin with.

It began with my return from Berlin in the second week of May, when I had to accustom myself again to being back under our current authoritarian regime. Somehow it’s very different reading the New York Times online from across the Atlantic and actually waking up to it each morning in situ. But I got over that shock rather quickly and resumed my usual habit of New York concert-going. Top on my schedule were two Evgeny Kissin concerts at Carnegie Hall, one featuring him as a soloist and the other billed as “Evgeny Kissin and Friends.”

I had never actually heard Kissin live before, so I was amazed to discover what a phenomenon he is. I don’t just mean his playing, though he is certainly at the level of my other favorite pianists: Mitsuko Uchida, Igor Levit, Kirill Gerstein, Jan Lisiecki, and so on. But I don’t think he is noticeably above their level, and yet the audience response to him makes him seem like some kind of rock star. For the May 17 solo concert, which featured pieces by Bach, Chopin, and Shostakovich, the house was packed, with some audience members even crowded onto the stage behind Kissin. The conclusion of each segment of the show was greeted by wild roars and avid clapping, and the final set of standing ovations went on so long that Kissin was forced, or at least encouraged, to give three separate encores. I enjoyed the Shostakovich pieces and loved the Bach; my companion at that concert loved the Chopin works, which she knew well. But I never got the sense of lift-off that a great concert always leaves me with. I’m thinking, for instance, of the mammoth performance of all 24 Shostakovich preludes and fugues that Igor Levit treated us to at Carnegie not so long ago—a knockout that was greeted by the normal level of intensely admiring applause rather than Kissin’s nearly insane level.

My spring stay in New York had been prolonged until the end of May mainly so that I could hear the second of the two Kissin concerts, which featured Shostakovich’s 1934 Cello Sonata in D Minor, his 1968 Violin Sonata, and his 1975 Viola Sonata, the last piece he ever wrote. I love the viola sonata and had never heard it live, so I knew this would be a treat; and given the other two “friends,” cellist Gautier Capuçon and violinist Gidon Kremer, whose work I already knew and loved, I figured the chosen violist, though unknown to me, would be up to snuff. 

In the event, the Ukrainian-British violist Maxim Rysanov more than exceeded my expectations. His rendering of the viola sonata was out of this world, and since it was the one piece on the program where the piano was absolutely required to fade into the background, we could hear him beautifully over Kissin’s soft chords. It helped, too, that I could remember the circumstances of Shostakovich’s composition of this piece. Dedicated to the young violist Fyodor Druzhinin—who had recently taken his teacher’s place in the Beethoven Quartet, the composer’s lifelong musical mouthpiece—it was finished only a month before Shostakovich died. After playing through the piece for the first time on August 6, 1975, Druzhinin was so thrilled that he sat down that very night to write a long, grateful letter to Shostakovich, who was by then in the hospital. According to Shostakovich’s wife, Irina Antonovna, the letter had its intended cheering effect. “Dmitri Dmitriyevich read your letter and was very pleased,” she told the young violist. “It was the best medicine for him.” But days later, on August 9, he succumbed to the lung cancer that was killing him, so he never got to hear his final work played live.

There is something I haven’t told you yet, which you probably need to know to understand the rest of this blog post. Ever since about 2018, my only and much-loved younger sister had been battling metastasized colon cancer. At first she was told the disease was simply “chronic” and she was able to take chemo pills to control it; later, though, this morphed into painful chemo infusions every two weeks, which gradually destroyed her body without fully getting rid of the disease. In early December of last year she bravely decided to quit chemo and take the consequences. I visited her in San Antonio for Christmas that year—the first time, we realized, that we had spent Christmas together since our childhood—and she was in remarkably good spirits, given the circumstances. But since then things had been getting worse.  I had been back to see her in mid-March, and I was scheduled to go again on June 9. We were speaking regularly on the phone together, at least twice every week, and she promised me she could hold out until then.

First, though, I returned to California for the last three of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final four concerts with the San Francisco Symphony. The circumstances of Esa-Pekka’s hiring and then departure have been enough to break the hearts of all music-loving San Franciscans. When he first arrived, just as the pandemic had started, we saw him as an immense sign of hope, and his concerts after that were indeed so thrilling that we all felt as if we had a marvelous new orchestra in our midst. Then, last year, the short-sighted symphony board decided that they could do without his inventive, expensive programs (not to mention raises for all the symphony players), and they cut back on the budget they had promised Esa-Pekka in order to lure him in. He promptly refused, rightly, to renew his contract. We all wrote letters to the board begging them to reverse their decision, but to no avail: they wanted to save on artistic funds so they could renovate and expand their symphony hall. So now we in San Francisco will have an upgraded building in which nothing of interest will be performed. What this meant, for me, was that in addition to the nationwide disaster of our 2025 government and the huge personal tragedy of my sister’s health, I was suffering from the minor but still significant prospect of this local loss. Hence the importance, and the emotional impact, of Esa-Pekka’s final concerts.

On May 30, my first full day back in the Bay Area, I attend the first of the three remaining concerts, the “Beethoven” one, which featured Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony along with his Violin Concerto. Hilary Hahn was the scheduled soloist, so that was guaranteed to be great, right? And can any Beethoven symphony be a disappointment? Well, maybe. I don’t think it was just jetlag that made me feel the Fourth is not Ludwig’s best work; as I said to a friend at intermission, there’s a reason we don’t hear it very often. And though every note of the Violin Concerto was familiar and precious to me, that too was a problem. I had heard it all before, and I wasn’t hearing anything new, as one must in a live concert if it is to be outstanding. As I say, this could be my problem as much as the program’s, since I was sleepy and anxious and worried about whether I would reach San Antonio in time. And in fact I texted my brother-in-law the very next day, or perhaps the day after, asking him to alert me if there was any sudden change in my sister’s condition.

He wrote to me on Tuesday, June 3, saying there had been a sudden decline that morning—my sister had stopped eating and was sleeping all the time—so I instantly changed my airline ticket to the next day. I was there with her on Wednesday night, Thursday all day long, and Friday morning, by which time she had lapsed into complete unconsciousness. She was still partly awake on the Thursday, though, and I am pretty sure she knew I was there; I knew I was there, anyway. On that Friday morning I kissed her forehead, stroked her hair, told her I would love her always, and left to return home, since the hospice nurse was saying it could take her a week or more to die. 

You will think I am crazy, perhaps, but I did not give up my ticket to Esa-Pekka’s concert that Friday night. On the contrary, I decided that Salonen’s version of Sibelius (whose Seventh Symphony formed the bulk of the program) was exactly what I needed at that moment. I have always loved music with the forward impulse of a narrative and the measurable rhythm of a dance, but it this case I found Sibelius’s characteristic floatiness—his suspension of time, his refusal to come down to rest, his overall vagueness, if you will—to be immensely soothing. And that initial sense of relative peacefulness carried me through the rest of the program as well: a world premiere, Rewilding, by the talented young composer Gabriella Smith (whose work I have been following since she was fifteen years old), and Richard Strauss’s 1895 Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. I cannot tell you whether either of these works was objectively good, or even objectively well-played. All I can say was that, following on the beautifully performed Sibelius, they allowed me to remain passive and unthinking.   

My sister died the next morning, on June 7, and nothing will ever be the same again. But like a good little critic who knows that life (and music) must go on, I took myself off to the final Esa-Pekka concert the following Friday.  The featured piece—in fact, the only piece—was Mahler’s Second, and though I am not a huge Mahler fan, I thought that his Resurrection Symphony might somehow be consoling. But it was not. Death in music, I learned, is not at all the same as death in life. The former is willful, changeable, melodramatic, and a tad self-glorifying; the latter is just pure pain.

It didn’t hurt me to be at the concert, but it didn’t help. And in reporting on it, I can therefore be of no help to you, because my internal state so overwhelmed the external circumstances as to make me useless as a critic. I am not blaming myself for this; it is the natural reaction, and I would be ashamed not to have it. Whether it is of any interest to you, I cannot say. I do not, in general, talk about my personal life in these blog posts, because they are supposed to be about the external world: our shared external world, in which I include music and the other arts. But in this case I thought you ought to know the whole story.

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Four More Concerts

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

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.

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Easter Weekend in Berlin

Posted on April 24, 2025 by Wendy Lesser

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.

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