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

Musicians of Germany’s Kammersymphoniker Berlin orchestra perform at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Markus Schreiber

BERLIN - Berlin’s Holocaust memorial played host to an open-air concert on Friday, with musicians spread out across the field of concrete slabs and performing a modern experimental piece.

The Kammersymphonie Berlin twice performed composer Harald Weiss’ sombre 17-minute piece “Vor dem Verstummen” (“Before Silence Falls”) to mark the third anniversary of the monument’s opening to the public.

The orchestra members were scattered among the 2,711 grey concrete slabs, against which some people leaned while listening to the music while others wandered around the labyrinthine memorial covering 19,000 square metres.

The idea was for every visitor to “hear and see something different,” said Daniel-jan Girl, who helped organize the event.

Occasionally, the music was joined by sounds of police sirens or squawking birds.

“It forces you to concentrate on the music itself,” said Anders Eklund, 41, from Stuttgart, praising the concept though he said the resulting sound was uneven depending on where one stood.

Conductor Lothar Zagrosek presided over the concert, which began just before sunset, with TV monitors set up to help the orchestra members follow him from around the memorial.

Weiss’s work was scored for chamber orchestra and a solo mezzo-soprano, Tanja Simic. In discussing his approach to the piece, Weiss said: “the only thing more beautiful than music is silence.”

Between the two performances Friday, German actress Tatjana Blacher recited poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a Jewish Holocaust victim whose German-language poetry was also used as the text in Weiss’ composition. Meerbaum-Eisinger - a native of Czernowitz, then in Romania and now in Ukraine - was 18 when she died in December 1942 at a Nazi SS labour camp at Mikhailovska.

The memorial, next to the Brandenburg Gate and Tiergarten Park, has become a key Berlin landmark, attracting more than eight million visitors since it opened on May 10, 2005.

It was designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and cost about $42 million to build. It is open 24 hours a day.

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.