For various reasons, Berlin is my favorite city in the world, and one of the reasons is certainly the quality and variety of music it always makes\u00a0available to me. I spotted a window of opportunity to get there\u00a0for a week in December and, as it happened, my week included\u00a0five performances in a row\u2014three of them spectacular, one strange\u00a0but good, and one astonishingly bad. Since even the bad one provided food for thought, I will recount them here, in order.<\/p>\n
I had arrived on a Monday, in time to have dinner with Martin and Barbara, my dearest friends in Berlin (they are also one of the\u00a0reasons it is my favorite city), but since it turned out they were both occupied\u00a0on that Tuesday, I bought myself a single\u00a0ticket, at pretty much the last minute, to the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields<\/a> performance\u00a0at the grand\u00a0old Konzerthaus<\/a> in Gendarmenmarkt. The initial draw for this concert, as\u00a0I had vaguely noticed from afar, was the inclusion of Murray Perahia as piano soloist, but by the time the date arrived he had been replaced by a young, unknown (to me) performer named Jan Lisiecki. \u00a0Boy, did I luck out! \u00a0As all the surprised reviews in the Berlin newspapers noted in the subsequent days, this twenty-something Polish-Canadian pianist was a phenomenon of the first order: not show-offy in any way, neither extreme nor insipid in his interpretations, just very, very good. Lisiecki was playing two\u00a0Beethoven piano concertos that night\u2014both the Second and the Fourth\u2014and since the latter is my favorite of the five, I was thrilled to get to hear it in these circumstances. I had a great seat, hanging over the stage on the left-hand side, so I could watch not only the pianist’s hands, but also his sweetly attentive facial expressions as he turned to watch the conductorless orchestra in between his own passages. Meanwhile, the audience had begun\u00a0to realize what it\u00a0was being treated to: about 10 bars into Lisiecki’s first entrance, I turned to my nearest neighbor (a middle-aged German\u00a0stranger) and discovered that we both had the same raised-eyebrows expression on our faces; by the first intermission, my neighbor\u00a0was pounding the railing\u00a0in enthusiasm, while\u00a0I and the rest of the gallery clapped our hardest; and by the end of the concert, the whole auditorium was roaring its approval in a very un-German, unrestrained way. \u00a0They were right, too. It was the kind of evening I remember from my first days in Berlin, back in 2003, when hearing great music played this well\u00a0made me feel…not exactly that everything was going to be all right\u00a0(because no\u00a0art\u00a0can assert that\u00a0without lying),\u00a0but that I could somehow bear whatever was going to happen, as long as music like this existed to keep me company.<\/p>\n Wednesday night was the closest thing to a sure thing in my schedule: an intimate performance by the amazing baritone Christian Gerhaher and his longtime pianist friend, Gerold Huber, in the small hall, the Kammermusiksaal<\/a>, of the Berlin Philharmonic. I had originally planned to take along\u00a0both Martin and Barbara, but she wasn’t well enough to come out that night; she urged us both to go, however, and said she would happily stay home watching crap Regency romances on TV, something she can’t get away with when Martin is present. Martin himself is not usually a lieder<\/em> fan (neither is my husband\u2014I often have to attend such things alone), but in this case the performance was so pure, so beautiful, and so instinctively collaborative that he was won over completely. The program alternated between the relatively old (Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Alban Berg) and the absolutely contemporary (two works by a living composer named Wolfgang Rihm, both written precisely for this duo), and though I didn’t love all the pieces equally, I loved the simple, straightforward presentation and the depth of feeling that was\u00a0conveyed. Gerhaher was the antithesis of histrionic\u2014he simply stood by\u00a0the piano, occasionally lifting\u00a0a finger or two from the hand that rested\u00a0on it\u2014and Huber\u00a0matched him perfectly at every turn; the newspaper critics\u00a0called their relationship “osmotic.” (The German reviews also focused\u2014a bit too heavily, I thought\u2014on the fact that two other major figures in Berlin music, Thomas Quasthoff and Max Raabe, were there in the small audience\u00a0for this performance.) The Kammermusiksaal is small enough and cunningly designed enough so that you actually feel as if you are at a house concert, even though hundreds of people are in the room, and that too was a great part of the pleasure\u2014as if these two old friends, wonderful musicians both, had simply invited us along to hear what they were working on these days.<\/p>\n I had been looking forward to the Thursday opera performance for months, and so was the rest of Berlin, apparently\u2014it had been completely sold out for weeks. This was a new production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie<\/em> at the recently remodeled Staatsoper<\/a>, with musical direction by Simon Rattle, sets, lighting, and costumes by the renowned Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and choreography and direction by someone called\u00a0Aletta Collins. In the event, there was<\/em> no direction, and the choreography was the usual atrocious Berlin garbage (agonistic Wayne-McGregor-like poses and gestures that were utterly unsuited to the lightly tripping Rameau rhythms), but the real villain of this piece was Eliasson. I guess he had never seen an opera before:\u00a0there’s no other explanation for how his darkened, spotlight-pierced,\u00a0self-aggrandizing set and utterly inhuman costumes could have struck him as a good idea, given that\u00a0they literally prevented the characters\u2014including the two lovers\u2014from visibly connecting with\u00a0each other. The music was predictably\u00a0lovely (Rattle did a\u00a0fine job conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester), and some of the voices were excellent, but if you kept your eyes open\u2014as one does at trainwrecks and other similar events\u2014you couldn’t really enjoy the show. Martin alluded to it, accurately, as “Rameau in Las Vegas,” and as we were leaving the Staatsoper building (which is, by the way, even more wonderful than ever in its remodeled state),\u00a0he taught me a useful term\u00a0invented by the nineteenth-century Schlegel brothers: \u00a0Unkritisierbarkeit des Schlechten<\/em>, or “Too bad even to be criticized.”<\/p>\n Friday’s performance\u00a0(which Barbara was finally well enough to attend) again took us back to my beloved Philharmonie,\u00a0this time to the large hall, where we were hearing Valery Gergiev conducted the always-terrific\u00a0Berliner Philharmoniker<\/a> itself. That\u2014the autocrat meeting this notoriously self-assertive orchestra\u2014promised to be interesting enough, but the interest was enhanced, or at any rate complicated, by the strangeness of the program. Gergiev had picked four pieces in a row\u2014Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun<\/em>, large excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel<\/em> and Prokofiev’s Cinderella<\/em>, and finally Stravinsky’s Firebird<\/em>\u2014that were all scores to dances. It made for a fascinating combination, and it also stretched the Philharmoniker players beyond their usual comfort zone, which tends more toward the German classics and the wild post-moderns. Here they were forced to become intensely and enthusiastically Russian at times, and that was quite something to see and hear\u2014as if they were inside and outside at once, going through the proper motions and then being won over, themselves, by the music. It was far from the best performance I’ve ever heard at the Philharmonie (those were all conducted by Rattle, and there were many of them); but it was thrilling in its own way.<\/p>\n On Saturday night I went alone to an opera that Barbara and Martin declined to come to with me, but only on the grounds that they had already seen it twice. They predicted I would love it, and they were right. It was Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges<\/em>, performed in German\u00a0at the Komische Oper<\/a>, which is the old East-Berlin venue that has always translated works into the local tongue. I had actually seen half of this opera performed in its original Russian at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Opera House (and I only left at intermission because I had to interview a Shostakovich source: otherwise I would happily have stayed for the whole thing), but the German version at the Komische was, if anything, even better. From the minute the squabbling chorus members appeared onstage at the beginning\u2014clad entirely\u00a0in white, with whitened faces and white gloves, like marble statues or solid ghosts\u2014I knew I was in for an intelligent, hilarious treat.\u00a0It’s a great, self-mocking opera to begin with (the Prologue argues about whether it should be\u00a0a comedy, a drama, a romance, or a farce; the scariest of the several villains is a cook; and the love-interest actually does emerge from an orange), but in this case the direction had made it into something more: a commentary on how ridiculous opera is, combined with a childlike delight in ridiculousness and make-believe. The singers were all excellent actors who could also move beautifully (there was more choreography in this opera’s little finger than in the whole\u00a0of Thursday night’s Rameau), and the sets\u2014which were\u00a0carried on and off by the performers\u2014were, like the costumes, so brightly, beautifully colored that one felt one was looking at a child’s picture-book. It had that quality I have rarely seen outside a Mark Morris opera:\u00a0a combination of “let’s put on a show” enthusiasm with a totally professional level of skill. My hat comes off to everyone involved, including\u00a0the director, Andreas Homoki, the conductor, Ainars Rubikis, the fine Komische\u00a0musicians, and most of all the terrific singer-actors, not one of whom I’ve ever heard of before, and all of whom I hope to see onstage again soon.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For various reasons, Berlin is my favorite city in the world, and one of the reasons is certainly the quality and variety of music it always makes\u00a0available to me. I spotted a window of opportunity to get there\u00a0for a week … Continue reading