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

I had a very musical time last week, starting off with the Staatoper’s new production of Telemann’s rarely-seen (or heard of) Der Geduldige Sokrates, and ending last night with the Komische Oper’s striking and messy vision for Handel’s Orestes. In between these Baroque bookends was a visit from Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Modern Orchestra on Wednesday for a program at the Konzerthaus Berlin.

As much as I would like to tell about Sokrates, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till my review appears in Opera News Magazine. So let me start with Wednesday’s concert.

Boulez / Varèse / Boulez 

It’s not that often that four out of five composers represented on a concert program are on hand to introduce their work. But that’s precisely what happened when Pierre Boulez led a program of entirely modern and contemporary music at the Konzerthaus Berlin. The one absent composer was Edgard Varèse, whose “Amériques,” the evening’s second piece, was the closest thing to the standard repertoire. 

The concert was well-attended, but many of the seats were sold at the Abendkasse, where tickets were still available right up until showtime. The massive force of the Ensemble Modern Orchestra was youthful and casually-dressed. The first piece was Mark Andre’s “…auf…” II, the second part in a trilogy about the resurrection (Auferstehung) of Jesus (the first part was premiered by Hans Zender). It opens with banging on the uppermost register of a grand piano with a sustained pedal, producing a sound that is hollow and dead. Eventually, harmonic and dissonent pattern emerge and are echoed by another grand piano. Section by section, the entire orchestra joins in with much rumbling and wheezing, as if awaking from a deep slumber. Basses and cellos snapped their bows back inelegantly and violins played a shill high C in unison, producing a sonic quality similar to Penderecki. The ambitious work gathered moment throughout a rather cacophonous development replete with ear-splitting typany and sheet-metal, playing the harp of a grand piano, and a frustrated bit of communication between the first and second violins. At the end, the young and shy Mr. Andre assumed the stage to make an awkward bow.

The musicians did a little shifting around before Amériques could get underway. Boulez, a maestro known for his clean, mathematical precision, seemed to let his hair down a little for the piece and conducted a colorful, jazzy and festive account of this wonderfully inventive work. Cellos sounded like engines revving up, trumpets did bebop riffs and sirens wailed, all in a careful prepared and well-timed fashion.

While the sound was very immediate (especially for the staid accoustics of the Konzerthaus) and the musicians plowed on through the piece with minial conducting from Boulez, there was a like watch-like precision that came at the expense of spontineity. Boulez switched tempi elegantly and sharply and reined the wild percussion in during the fitful coda, but it sounded a bit too polished for Varèse; the orchestra’s springs where showing slightly.  

After intermission came the “Obst,” a four-movement work by Enno Poppe that opened with Webern-like tone rows and ended with an oddly vacant, mournful Ligeti-esque sound. The piece was alternately playful and sinister and featured elements of serialism, minimalism and neo-romanticism, often changing mood dramatically from movement to movement.  

Matthia Pintscher’s “Towards Osiris,” which follows, had more a sense of controlled chaos in its darting strings and inventive, unpredicable percussion. It shared with the Poppe, however, a feeling of ultimate incompleteness and unresolvedness.

The evening ended with a glowing account of Boulez’s own Notations, I-IV and VII.

Iphigenie in Berlin

In the past decade or so that Handel’s operas have been rediscovered and mounted afresh by opera houses world-wide,  directors have sought solutions to the difficulties posed by opera seria, a medium where the arias have not so much dramatic content as emotional power. How to keep the evening from becoming one long boring succession of da capo arias?

Sebastian Baumgarten, who designed the Komische Oper’s current revival of Handel’s Orestes (Orest in German) opts to liven things up not only with scenic and dramaturgical innovations, but musical ones as well. Accompanying the recitatives was a continuo of mandolin and accordian, played by musicians in sailor garb, who sat at a table for the bulk of the performance. Naturally, there was plenty of Berlinish experiment and excess: from the dreamy video art to the obnoxious mid-90’s filmed confessions; from the back-projection of Plattenbauen to Hermione’s cheesy wedding album. There was a fair amount of sadism, slapstick, punk-dykishness and even cannibalism.

 The singing was serviceable, with Kristina Hammarström (as Orest) leading an energetic cast. In this production, the matricide Orest is driven to alcohol and pills. Hammarström portrayed his destructive personality with an intensity that boardered on parody. Christina Clark’s Hermione was brazen and even uppish. Andrian Stooper was a wimpy but affecting Pylades. As the villians Philoktet and Thoas, Maria Streijffert and Peteris Eglitis were suitably rough and ragged and met their ends very creatively.

The focus of my attention during the two-hour-long performance was Christopher Moulds and the orchestra of the Komische Oper, who performed a subtle, multicolored and lively account of the glistening Handel score. Even with a production that tires itself out by trying to be radical, this 300-year old-score remains fresh and surprising. 

It is often complained the Pierre Boulez takes an overly analytic, clinical even approach to conducting music. This is perhaps no more evident than in his interpretation of Gustav Mahler, whose music he has long championed. In dispensing with the late-Romantic techniques and approaches of other conductors, Boulez often can bring a fresh perspective to Mahler, by treating him like a mid to late 20th century composer. Stripping away the sentimentality and expressiveness can make the music seem frigid at times.      On Friday night, however, Boulez brought the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Carnegie Hall for a curious performance of Mahler’s Seven, that was anything but cold.
However, the warmth seemed to be generated more by an erudite music scholar than a committed performer. Throughout the five movements of this moody epic, Boulez seemed to be telling the audience to listen very carefully.
    It was a quirky and unorthodox performance that went beyond categories of like or dislike. With his highly surgical reading, Boulez gets you to wonder what makes Mahler tick. But in asking myself that question on Friday night, I wondered additionally, what made Boulez tick.
    Boulez, who is 81 this year, has behind him a long and distinguished career as both a conductor and composer. Prior to turning to music (studying with Messiaen, among others) he studied mathematics. This early training is evident in the Serialism of his early works and his methodical and calculating conducting style.

Friday night’s concert was performed without intermission –as not to diminish from the symphony’s integrity. However, the orchestra tuned up between movements, like surgeons sharpening knifes during an operation.  

    Though Boulez conducted the piece without a baron, his presence onstage was often like a giant metronome. The Chicago musicians are to be commended for delivering he kind of crisp, clear and accurate playing that his interpretation demanded. The first movement could be very sterile, with a monochromatic texture that made the work sound transparent. Uniform pacing and dynamics often revealed musical intricacies but came at the expense of emotional effect. Boulez treated the various elements of the orchestra with surpring equality. Even in the glorious tenor horn solo, with its rich sustained tones, wasn’t much favored over the other instruments. I guess you could call Boulez an egalitarian in that respect.

    One of the upshots of such clarity was that the piece retained unmuddled even at incredible volume. Equalizing the instruments made some details pop out unexpectedly; the ostinato in the violins and with heavy, loud arpeggios in the harps and highlighted intricate detail work in the winds, tympani and percussion. But such emphasis could seem excessive. For instance, before the tenor horn reentered with the main theme, the ultra-slow arpeggios in the violins seemed rather cumbersome. And in trying to make themselves heard over the strident strings, the winds could be piercing and shrill. The highly metrical, unvaried characteristic of the tempo made for an interesting yet puzzling experience.

The second movement seemed almost exaggeratedly slow in tempo. Boulez seemed to dissecti the music measure by measure: transfiguring it in the process. The lush theme sounded more like a danse macabre than the shimmering night music that Mahler indicates. As usual, Boulez tried to put melody and accompaniment on equal footing. His account of the scherzo was jerky with especially heavy staccato. The folk themes sounded almost Fellinieque. The harshly plucked mandolin solo in the second Night Music movement was cold and expressionless.

Boulez tore into the finale with heart-thumping pace. The horns did marvelous work while the rest of the instruments struggled to be heard over them. The reading of this movement was angular, precise and carefully articulated but lacked the emotional commitment to save is from sounding meandering and bombastic. There was crispness and attention to detail, but little momentum.

All in all, Boulez’s academic approach to the Mahler Seven made the work sound more like a dissection than a proper performance. And while it was different and instructive, I still can’t decide whether I like it.