{"id":1270,"date":"2023-09-13T08:25:36","date_gmt":"2023-09-13T15:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2023-09-13T15:38:23","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T22:38:23","slug":"britannia-in-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/britannia-in-berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Britannia in Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I attended two terrific concerts as part of Berlin’s Musikfest<\/a>, and both, by chance, had British links. This was not why I picked them\u2014I chose them for their intriguing programs and their great conductors\u2014but this Britannic element turned out to be\u00a0something they had in common.<\/p>\n

The first\u00a0concert\u00a0consisted entirely of Simon Rattle\u00a0conducting Mahler’s Ninth with the London Symphony Orchestra<\/a>. Rattle, an Englishman, has lived in Berlin since the beginning of the twenty-first century, when he took up the artistic leadership of the Berlin Philharmonic. After roughly fifteen years there, he moved over to the London Symphony, which he has led for the past six years, but he is now about to\u00a0give that up in order to conduct the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. So this outing with the LSO was\u00a0one of his last formal appearances as their official conductor. The Philharmonie was sold out for the occasion, and everyone (including the audience) lived up to the high expectations.<\/p>\n

Every bit\u00a0of the seventy-five-minute Mahler symphony was thrilling, but perhaps none more so than the closing moments. As\u00a0the strings softly sounded their final few notes, gradually fading away into nothingness, the listeners respectfully maintained a total silence. The musicians kept their bows resting on the strings, with Rattle’s arms remaining outstretched in his final gesture, and still the hush continued. I began counting in my head: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand… We had reached the fifteen-second mark when the conductor finally lowered his arms and the audience burst into wild applause. I treasure moments like this at the Philharmonie: those prolonged silences, when not a cough or a rustle can be heard. And though I am not always a huge Mahler fan\u2014sometimes he\u00a0strikes me as too floaty and amorphous\u2014Rattle’s knife-sharp interpretation of the Ninth made me into one.<\/p>\n

The second great concert was Vladimir Jurowski’s evening\u00a0with his Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin<\/a>\u2014Berlin’s equivalent of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra that Rattle is about to take over. Jurowski has been with them since 2017, and under his hands the RSB\u00a0has become a fine-tuned instrument, capable of doing anything well.\u00a0 In this case, in celebration of their 100th anniversary, they performed three pieces: Kurt Weill’s 1929 suite of music from The Threepenny Opera<\/em> (labeled the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik f\u00fcr Blasorchester<\/em>); Thomas Ad\u00e8s’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra<\/em>, featuring the marvelous pianist Kirill Gerstein (who also helped out in the Weill piece); and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3.\u00a0All three were a revelation in different ways. I know the Weill practically by heart, but this version felt delightfully fresh and new. I’d never heard the Ad\u00e8s concerto before, but it was performed with such clarity and precision that every movement was graspable. And the symphony! I’d foolishly thought I had Rachmaninoff’s number, but it turned out I didn’t have a clue. Vladimir Jurowski has conducted the Third Symphony before, and has made at least one recording of it (which I will now proceed to listen to over and over). He was able to take us deep inside the music, to the point where\u00a0even those of us with reservations\u00a0about the composer\u00a0could only give up and adore this symphony.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0a charming speech\u00a0he made to the audience at the end of concert, Jurowski pointed out all the British elements in the program\u2014Threepenny<\/em>‘s London setting (along with its origins in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera<\/em>); Ad\u00e8s’s British citizenship; and, not least, Rachmaninoff’s warm welcome to England by Sir Henry Wood, who first brought the composer and this symphony to London. As an encore, therefore, Jurowski offered us a piece by Henry Wood himself,\u00a0a\u00a0figure best known as the founder of the Royal Albert Hall Proms.\u00a0(As an added fillip, Jurowski mentioned\u00a0to us\u2014in a confiding rather than boastful manner\u2014that that RSB had recently played this exact programs at the Proms.) Both the speech and the encore were\u00a0a lovely gesture of friendship across the water, and\u00a0they rounded out the program to perfection.<\/p>\n

I missed a third opportunity to hear a British-connected\u00a0performance when a last-minute illness kept me from attending John Eliot Gardiner’s concert version of the five-hour Berlioz opera Les Troyens<\/em>. Other things kept the eighty-year-old Gardiner himself away from it. In the week before his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra R\u00e9volutionnaire et Romantique were scheduled to come to Berlin, they performed the same Berlioz program at another European festival, and that\u00a0concert ended, backstage, with\u00a0the conductor punching one of the soloists in the face. (The baritone’s crime had apparently been to exit on the wrong side of the podium.) This caused such an outcry, reasonably enough, that old J.E. was\u00a0instantly shunted off to London, while\u00a0his conducting duties were reassigned to his assistant, Dinis Sousa. The scandal only\u00a0whetted my desire to hear\u00a0the program, but a severe cold\u2014and the fear\u00a0that I might\u00a0end up coughing\u00a0for the whole five hours\u2014kept me home in the end.<\/p>\n

The next day I wrote to my friend Pamela\u00a0(who, as\u00a0a former artistic director of the San Francisco Opera and a former\u00a0intendant<\/em> of the Berlin Philharmonic, is\u00a0far more\u00a0musically\u00a0aware than I am) to ask her how the performance had gone. “I don\u2019t want to fill you with regrets,” she wrote back, “but the performance last night was simply phenomenal: wonderful singers, the best chorus ever, orchestra excellent and the conductor was TERRIFIC. \u00a0It was the highlight of my musical year so far. \u00a0I\u2019m still floating.” Ah, well. One can’t be everywhere all the time, and a little well-earned regret is not a bad thing for a\u00a0habitual audience member\u00a0to feel, even\u2014or especially\u2014in Berlin.<\/p>\n

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A couple of weeks ago I attended two terrific concerts as part of Berlin’s Musikfest, and both, by chance, had British links. This was not why I picked them\u2014I chose them for their intriguing programs and their great conductors\u2014but this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[258,706,704,678,703,699,393,698,701,459,25,705,454],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-berlioz","tag-dinis-sousa","tag-john-eliot-gardiner","tag-kurt-weill","tag-les-troyens","tag-lso","tag-mahler","tag-musikfest-berlin","tag-rachmaninoff","tag-rsb","tag-simon-rattle","tag-thomas-ades","tag-vladimir-jurowski"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1281,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}