Originally Published at Gourmet.com:

A small chain of Berlin wine bars, the so-called Weinerein, offers what is arguably one of the city’s most enjoyable culinary experiences. It is also one of Berlin’s best-kept secrets. These renegade bars promote oenophilia in a casual, unpretentious atmosphere that subverts traditional notions of dining and connoisseurship. Located in the fashionable neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg in the former East, the three Weinerein—called Forum, Perlin, and Fra Rosa—operate with an unorthodox business model. They function entirely on the honor system.

Night after night, swarms of customers pile into the moderately sized establishments. An initial deposit of one euro—casually tossed into a small fountain—is required to “rent” a wine glass. Thereafter, patrons sample an impressive assortment of wines (and whatever happens to be cooking that evening). During the summer months, the crowd spills out onto the sidewalks. On leaving, customers feed a tip jar, thus deciding for themselves how much the experience was worth.

Surprisingly, this simple concept actually works. There seems to be a genuine desire among residents to keep the Weinerein in business; Berliners apparently know a good thing when they see one. Another key to understanding the success of the Weinerein is to view it as an attempt in the former East to create a trusting atmosphere that breaks with established capitalist models. Perhaps long-time residents are feeling the necessity of places like the Weinerein now more than ever as rent prices in Prenzlauer Berg continue their steady rise.

The owners of the Weinerein also run a wine store on nearby Veteranenstrasse that stocks the varied selections served at the wine bars—mostly European wines, many of them imported by the proprietors. Asked about the selection process for the three Weinerein, employee Philippe Gross answered casually. “We choose the wines based on our whim and fancy, as the mood takes us.”

On a recent Saturday night, Forum was bustling with the usual mix of locals, expatriates, students, and a few well-informed tourists. The selection of half a dozen reds that night included a medium-bodied 2006 Côtes de Rousillon and an intense, fruity 2005 Porta dos Cavaleiros. German vineyards were well represented in the selection of whites.

At Fra Rosa, equal emphasis is placed on the wine and the food. The restaurant is open every night of the week, and reservations are essential—but the evening’s menu is only revealed at dinnertime. Co-chiefs Hugo and Antonio prepare a lavish seven-course menu, with an eye to the evening’s wine selection.

Asked what he felt a fair donation was for a full meal with wine pairings, Antonio stuck to the company line: “Each guest needs to figure it out for himself. It would be wrong of me to try and tell them how much to give.”

Forum Fehrbelliner Strasse 57, Berlin (030-60053072)
Perlin Griebenowstrasse 5, Berlin (030-40690951)
Fra Rosa Zionskirchstrasse 40, Berlin (030-65706756)

On Saturday October 7, Berlin’s opera lovers had a tough choice to make.  It was between Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, at the Komische Oper, Puccini’s Tosca at the Staatsoper unter den Linden and a new staging of the Johannes Strauss operetta A Night in Venice when up at the alternative theater HAU 1. A final option was to head over to the CineStar at the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz to catch the live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s matinee of Richard Strauss’s Salome.
 
The Metropolitan Opera began its Live in HD series two years ago at the initiative of house’s then-new general manager Peter Gelb, and was an unexpected success. This season, 11 productions will be beamed into over 800 cinemas across America and in over 20 counties.

Opera is a medium that demands to be enjoyed live. Its sheer physicality cannot be grasped on a movie of TV screen. For this reason, filmed operas rarely – if ever – succeed as anything more than a compromised record. But I was keen to see what all the fuss was about, especially the crisp HD technology. Would the HD cameras add texture and depth to the picture, or would it look as flat and washed-out as the PBS Great Performances broadcasts I grew up with?

And then there was the opera itself, which I saw at the Met in 2004, when this production by Jürgen Flimm was new and the soprano Karita Mattila was being praised as the greatest Salome of a generation. That heart-stopping performance had left an deep impression, which was nursed by repeated listening to a bootleg recording that was circulating the Internet. When I heard that Mattila would be reviving Salome this season, I seriously considered booking a flight.

Adapted verbatim from a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome scandalized audiences with its brutality and perversity when it premiered in 1905. Over a century later, it still packs a punch. The opera’s climax is a ten-minute-long striptease that Salome performs for her stepfather (and uncle) King Herod in exchange for the head of John the Baptist, with whom the girl has developed a feverish obsession.

 I was skeptical when the “Met Live in HD” program was announced. Where’s the audience, I wondered. Besides, who would be willing to pay 25 dollars (or Euros, as the case is in Berlin) for a movie ticket? Still, Mattila’s Salome is dynamite and 25 Euros is a far cry from a roundtrip ticket to New York.

At the CineStar, one of the city’s grandest multiplexes, “patrons” milled about in an elegantly decorated champagne bar with live piano music playing. There was even a complimentary coat check.  But despite the cinema’s preparations (including an impressive amount of advertising), the theater was less than half full.

My impressions of the broadcast were mixed. The sound was stellar and the HD projection was indeed as sharp as hoped for, and fared much better as capturing the thrill of live performance more fully (and consistently) that most of what I’ve come across on video. A tight zoom-in of an opera singer on a 30-foot screen is an odd perspective. At moments, viewers were welcome to details better left unseen, like saliva foam forming on Mattila’s lips during an impassioned moment. The cinema audience let out a few chuckles when Mattila praised Jochanaan’s beauty, for the bass portraying the Baptist was Juha Uusitalo, a riveting but rotund singer. The sound, also, was a bit too good at times: it picked up the prompter’s voice on at least one occasion.  

The most striking detail about the transmission, however, was that the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils was censored. On the Met’s stage, Mattila went for the full monty. Inside the CineStar however, the camera cut to Herodias’ face for the two-seconds of full-frontal nudity. According to the L.A. Times blog, the decision came from Mr. Gelb himself, who wanted to keep the rating below an “R” to appeal to families. Apparently, seeing a naked soprano is more damaging to kids than the grim spectacle of Matilla making out with a severed head, while blood trickled down her chin. Censoring Salome was an error in judgment, but it was hardly a deal breaker. Despite this wrongheaded decision, the broadcast made it possible to enjoy the performance halfway round the world.

Berlin enjoys a position of prominence when it comes to opera. No other city can lay claim to three full time opera houses. There were astonished gasps from the audience as the camera panned across the Met’s cavernous interior during the curtain calls. Even in this opera-rich city, it was a thrill to spend a night at the Met.

At the behest of René Jacobs, the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden mounted a fully staged production of Handel’s oratorio Belshazzar (seen June 1). Jacobs, a frequent guest at the Staatsoper, was most recently here to conduct the Telemann rarity, Der Geduldige Socrates, a finely nuanced production. As in that Socrates, Jacobs conducted the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the early-music ensemble that plays on period instruments, as well as the RIAS Kammerchor, a superlative vocal ensemble whose repertoire includes both ancient and contemporary works.

Belshazzar, which dates from 1745, represents the composer’s turn away from opera and his dissatisfaction with the rigidity of Italian practices. The musical heart and soul of Belshazzar is its expansive choral writing, which provides the work with fierce dramatic momentum. Handel’s favoring of the chorus over the soloists is a deliberate reaction against the star system of his day, further seen in the comparative modesty of his solo writing: Belshazzar contains only two da capo arias and few opportunities for singers to dazzle the audience with their virtuosity. The work’s subtlety is furthered by many accompanied recitatives, which often give the oratorio a more modern, through-composed feel. All these elements suggest that Handel strove to achieve balance between the drama and music. Jacobs ha an excellent command of the theatricality inherent in the music. Too bad this intuitive grasp was not shared by director Christof Nel, whose static and minimal staging was distracting and unfocused.

The single set consisted of large blocks stacked together like a staircase, with pegs jutting out from the walls for the singers and dancers to climb, but for the most part they remained under-utilized. Very little of the actual action — which concerns itself with the sacrilegious Babylonian king Belshazzar and his violent overthrow by Cyrus the Great — was suggested: blocking was unimaginative, and sets and costumes were sparse. Most of the drama was confined to the orchestra pit. Nel’s staging, inert, self-conscious and stifling — the Staatsoper is pretty airless during the summer — proved an inhospitable showcase for the production’s impressive roster of talent.

The RIAS Kammerchor was justly applauded for its collective work, although Nel seemed at a loss as to how they should best be deployed. At various points in the opera, the chorus is meant to represent a group of Persians, Babylonians, Jews and even a prototype of a Greek chorus. This issue was only half addressed. The chorus wore skullcaps when they sang as Jews; a profusion of vines signaled their switch to becoming Babylonians.

The biggest applause of the evening went deservedly to Bejun Mehta, the American countertenor who sang the role of Cyrus the Great, Belshazzar’s assassin and liberator of the Jewish captives. It is a role that demands stamina and control, rather than brief bravura displays of vocal ability. Mehta sounded fresh as spring and projected his agile voice with confidence and ease. Other standouts from the mostly Anglo-American cast included the Nitocris of soprano Rosemary Joshua and mezzo Kristina Hammarström as the prophet Daniel. Nitocris — mother of Belshazzar — is by far the work’s most sympathetic character. Joshua’s controlled vibrato and careful enunciation lent her performance healthy doses of nobility and piety. Hammarström’s darker shadings and sharply hewn phrasings were effective, even if her Daniel registered as a bit too severe.

In the title role, tenor Kenneth Tarver was something of a disappointment. He looked the part in a tall golden crown, wielding an ax and staring about him all wild-eyed, but for much of the evening he sounded underpowered, especially in comparison to the other soloists and the chamber choir.

Jacobs, a long-time advocate of underrepresented works in need of rediscovery, has worked closely with the Staatsoper for more than a decade in planning their series Barocktage (Baroque Days). There were reports that he spent all six weeks of rehearsal time with the ensemble. The musicians, playing on period instruments, were exceptionally disciplined and attentive to the nuances of the score.

A. J. GOLDMANN

Big changes are underway at the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden. In May, the house’s general manager Peter Mussbach was abruptly dismissed. More dramatically, the Staatsoper announced that it would take up residence in the Schillertheater — western Berlin’s historic repertory theater — during a three-and-a-half-year-long renovation, slated to start in 2012.

The Staatsoper ended a dramatic season on a high note on June 30, with the fourth and final performance of David Alden’s elegant new production of Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, conducted by Constantinos Carydis.

Christine Schäfer was the evening’s star attraction. Her Fiorilla — the German soprano’s first Rossini role — was proud, rash and also vulnerable, much like Berg’s Lulu, a role for which she is prized. Schäfer lent the role an unexpected hefty Germanic flavor, though one that did not clash with Rossini’s trademarks, including some brilliant coloratura runs which she ornamented with bold flourishes.

She appeared onstage in a tight-fitting pink dress, sporting a Gucci bag, and sang her first aria with lush, luxuriant tones. For the rest of the evening, she provided sharp, incisive singing, sounding bouncy, angular and smooth as needed, with an unexpected but appropriately vulnerable air during her love duet with her faithful husband, as the orchestra responded with hushed strings and compassionate horns. In Fiorilla’s touching final aria, biding farewell to Selim, Schäfer’s voice seemed too tightly coiled as she strained for her high note, but here, as elsewhere, she showed great sensitivity to text.

This production bartered in types. The poet Prosdocimo — the primum mobile of the meta-libretto — was played by Alfredo Daza as a hard-drinking writer in the Hemingway mold. By turns gruff and charming, his warm baritone sustained him beautifully for most of the evening.

Franscesco Facini filled in for an ailing Alexander Vinogradov as Selim, the Turk of the opera’s title. In his red snakeskin pants, patchwork shirt and diamond-studded belt buckle, Facini looked like a Wild and Crazy Guy. He sang an exquisite opening duet with Schäfer, matching her energy and flexibility. He sounded slightly underweight in the ensembles, during which he took a back seat and let his better-rehearsed cast members take over.

Renato Girolami made the pathetic, buffoonish Don Geronio both cantankerous and lovable: dressed in a natty pinstripe suit, he looked very much like a character out of an early Fellini film. The muscular, quick-witted jealousy duet between Geronio and Selim — here performed while martinis flew across a bar — was one of the evening’s high points. Another was Geronio’s subsequent mouthful of an aria, delivered with breathtaking speed, accuracy and stamina.

American tenor Lawrence Brownlee brought some swaggeringly assured high Cs to his riveting performance as Narciso, Fiorilla’s spurned lover. Although Brownlee was the cast’s sole non-European, he brought an intensely Italianate quality to the show-stopping role, which he sang sporting a bathrobe and cowboy boots.

The arresting mezzo Katharina Kammerloher gave a vibrato-heavy, forceful performance as the Gypsy Zaida. Her henchman Albazar was played by a stuttering and nervous Florian Hoffmann, who spent much of the evening silently clutching a typewriter.

Alden’s staging struck a fine balance between elegance and irony. The Möbius strip patterns on the golden wallpaper (which hid a full bar in one corner) looked something like a club in Soho, while the humorous video projections (of hard-drinking writer, dancing lipsticks, a helicopter decorated like a Turkish flag, and swaying palm trees) enhanced the opera’s irreverence and levity. In the opening scene, giant window shutters opened and closed, casting the sort of shadows associated with film noir. The Broadway-esque décor was a welcome compliment to the boulevard comedy of the recitatives, although the production suffered from some unwelcome excesses, including sombrero-sporting musicians, Playboy bunnies and a couple of fawning gigolos.

Meastro Constantinos Carydis led a scaled-down Staatskapelle in a finely balanced reading that could have used a bit more panache in spots. In the overture, strings and percussion responded coyly to plaintive horns. In Act II, a piano replaced the harpsichord in the recitatives, perhaps in a nod to the nightclub setting. After the eponymous Turk set sail on a ship that seemed borrowed from a production of Anything Goes, Carydis hushed the orchestra and ended the boisterous finale with a whisper.

A. J. GOLDMANN

Each September, Berlin celebrates the opening of the new concert season with musikfest berlin. This year’s installment features 16 orchestras, both homegrown and international, performing over 40 compositions. The musikfest, a co-production between the cultural organisation the Berliner Festspiele and the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, demonstrates how the various elements in Berlin’s rich music scene (the city boasts seven symphony orchestras and three opera houses) can work in harmony. Guest performances of orchestras from Holland, England, France and throughout Germany, highlight Berlin’s status as a prized destination for internationally-renowned ensembles.

This year’s installment places special emphasis on the works of Olivier Messiaen (who celebrates his centennial this year), Karlheinz Stockhausen (who died last year) and Anton Bruckner, composers united by their Catholic sensibilities. Popular and lesser-known works of this “spiritual triumvirate” forms the core of the programming (at least one work by each composer is featured at every concert), and are heard alongside pieces by Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Helmut Lachmann, Wolfgang Rihm and Peter Eötvös, among others.

Highlights from the first week of the festival included a visit from the Orchestre de Paris and its conductor Christoph Eschenbach performing a varied programme of Messiaen, Ravel and Zemlinsky. Tuesday’s concert at the Philharmonie features soloists Christine Schäfer and Matthias Goerne in Zemlinsky’s lush “Lyrische Symphonie,” in a full-blooded performance that brought out Zemlinsky’s debt to Mahler and Schoenberg.

Schäfer was in excellent voice: agile, full of gentle phrasings and dramatic conviction that put one in mind of her magnificent Lulu and Pierrot Lunaire (the latter recorded with the Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of Pierre Boulez). Her account of the fourth movement, “Spricht zu mir, Geliebter” was especially haunting. Goerne appeared despite a cold and was not in best form, often underpowered and holding himself a bit in reserve. Nevertheless, he pulled off an accurate and warm account.

The Berliner Philharmoniker debuted at the festival on Wednesday with a white-hot performance of Messiaen’s ambitious and sprawling Turangalîla Symphonie, which was prefaced by the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. In the Messiaen, the esteemed Pierre-Laurent Aimard appeared on piano along with composer Tristan Murail on the Ondes Martenot. Sir Simon Rattle’s approach recalled his handling of Le Sacre de Printemps, a work to which the Turangalîla is sometimes compared. Though excessive bombast marred several of the symphony’s ten movement, there were many moments of clarity and warmth, most notably the ghostly seventh movement, “Turangalîla 2,” with its controlled alternation between ghostly, meditative passages and majestically grand flourishes.

Week two of the festival will include performances from four of Berlin’s other leading orchestras: the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, led by Ingo Metzmacher; the Berlin Staatskapelle, headed by Daniel Barenboim; the Konzerthausorchester and its new musical director Lothar Zagrosek; and the Rundfunk-Sinfornieorchester Berlin, under the baton of Marek Janowski.

The festival’s closing event is also the undeniable highlight: two sold-out performances by Rattle and the Philharmoniker of Stockhausen’s early masterwork Gruppen für drei Orchester, where the audience is surrounded on three sides by separate orchestras, each conducted by its own conductor and following a different tempo. The programme also includes Messiaen’s Ex exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, which like the Stockhausen pushes beyond the traditional boundaries of the concert hall. The concerts will be held in Hangar 2 of Berlin’s historic Tempelhof airport, where the Philharmoniker briefly relocated last season after a fire at the Philharmonie that rendered the hall temporarily unusable. The soon-to-be-closed Tempelhof was the base of the US-led Berlin Airlift 60 years ago during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. The cavernous Hangar 2, a 4200-meter squared space with 18-meter high ceilings, is ideally suited to works that so insistently defy concert music conventions. Coming at the beginning of the season, the closing programme is an auspicious sign of the excitement yet to come in Germany’s most musically diverse and sophisticated city.

A.J. Goldmann

A.J. Goldmann

Berlin

Sunday night’s concert by the Berlin Philharmonic of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen für drei Orchester at Berlin’s historic Tempelhof Airport was more than just another concert. The performance felt like a requiem for Tempelhof, which will close at the end of October.

Tempelhof Airport opened in 1923 in the center of Berlin but was expanded drastically during the Third Reich. Today the main building is one of the most monumental examples of surviving fascist architecture, along with the old Reich Air Ministry building. Tempelhof was taken by the Soviets during the Battle of Berlin. Three years later, in 1948, it was used as the airbase of the U.S.-led Berlin Airlift during the blockade of West Berlin. Nowadays, only a handful of small private and commercial planes (mostly regional) use it daily. Amid financial burdens and plans to expand one of the city’s international airports, the city voted to pull the plug on Tempelhof.

On Sunday evening, well-dressed couples walked past the imposing limestone façade — with its neon sign, massive windows and stern eagles — to a hangar that had been converted into a concert hall for the evening’s performance.

Stockhausen, who died last year at the age of 79, wrote Gruppen between 1955 and 1957. The work is scored for 109 musicians divided into three groups, which surround the audience in a horseshoe formation. It runs about 25 minutes. The premiere of Gruppen, exactly 50 years ago, was held in Cologne. Conducting the performance then was the 29-year-old Stockhausen along with fellow composers Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna. Each ensemble plays at a different tempo. Given the demands the work places on musicians and conductors and the difficulty of finding a suitable venue, it is rarely performed. The last major performance of Gruppen in the U.S. was held 15 years ago at Tanglewood.

“It’s a Mount Everest piece,” says Richard Toop, a Stockhausen expert, in a telephone interview. “It’s a festival piece. You need rehearsal time and you need conductors who know what they’re doing and how to work together. The different tempi and speeds need to be synchronized. It’s a shock to the system.”

Music scholars use words like “revolutionary” to describe Gruppen. It has been claimed that the work is as important to the second part of the 20th century as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was to the first. In fact, Stravinsky was himself among the piece’s early admirers. “Stravinsky admired two things about Gruppen,” Mr. Toop clarifies: “First was the sound of the orchestra, because it sounds like no piece before it. Secondly, Stravinsky was fascinated by its sheer complexity of rhythmic structures.”

Both the composer’s youth and the work’s elaborate scale, uncommon among the avant-garde compositions of the time, magnified Gruppen’s impact. Part of what still makes Gruppen exciting is how unpredictable it is, even to audiences familiar with multidimensional performance. “The three groups combine to produce an extraordinary, entropic mass of sound,” Mr. Toop explains. He contends that one need not understand Gruppen’s complex structure to appreciate it: “It’s almost better if one doesn’t attempt to listen in a particular way. It’s a ‘go with the flow’ piece.”

The sold-out concerts on Saturday and Sunday were not the first appearances by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in the 15,000-square-foot Hangar 2. The orchestra briefly relocated to the hangar last season after a fire at the Philharmonie, the orchestra’s home.

On the program, the Stockhausen was performed twice. Audiences had the opportunity to switch seats between performances. For a work as multidimensional as this, your perception changes drastically depending on where you are placed. Not only is Gruppen THX surround sound avant la lettre, but it also makes music into an interactive experience.

An earlier performance by the Ensemble Intercontemporain was interrupted by the intermittent din of helicopters and jet engines. Luckily the runways were clear in time for Gruppen, either by fortune or design.

Daniel Harding and Michael Boder joined Sir Simon at the podiums. They faced the audience as the musicians played with their backs to the crowd, which added a dramatic visual component to the performance. The coordination and rhythmic precision was laudable, but perhaps most striking was how accessible the piece sounded. The opening string passages seemed more lyrical than anxious. Throughout, the constantly shifting balance of sound and textures was fluid and organic. The famous moment where a single chord is ricocheted from orchestra to orchestra, creating the illusion of sound bending across the hall, was dizzying and forceful.

Though the threat of chaos hovered in the air, the musicians reined in the cacophony, diffusing it with control and even humor. Hints of mambo and rock ‘n’ roll came from the extensive percussion, and jazz riffs bubbled up in the horns. Gruppen is a challenging work, no doubt, but one sign of the Philharmonic’s success was how few empty seats there were during the encore performance.

There are many suggestions for the future uses of Tempelhof and its massive airfield — ranging from luxury condos to an ice-skating ring — but so far no concrete plans. For Berlin’s sake, let’s hope for something as original and unpredictable as the work performed over the weekend. Gruppen’s message of radical originality is left to inspire us. As Mr. Toop explains, “If Stockhausen knew that something had been done by somebody else, he didn’t want to do it.”