Conclusion of the Berlin Music Festival: Where listening again is fun

How differently new music can age. Viewed from a distance, it sometimes reveals overlooked aspects. What was once considered pleasant turns out to be far more complex when in doubt. And not everything that appears as avant-garde stays at the forefront permanently.

The Berlin Music Festival, which ended on Wednesday, is first and foremost an orchestra festival that sensibly combines the current programs of the ensembles coming to Berlin as guests. Romantic music forms the core of the offering, plus there is a lot from the 20th century and some completely new.

Vocal music, to a lesser extent, is also part of the festival's profile. Musical theater plays a more peripheral role. This year there was a whole range of stage works to be heard and seen in staged or semi-staged performances. Right at the start, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Helsinki Chamber Choir under Nicholas Collon played the only opera by the composer György Ligeti in the Philharmonie. “Le Grand Macabre”, composed in 1978 and revised again in 1994.

Death travels through a Breughelland that is as corrupt as it is fictional, the people are buffoons, but death itself doesn't cut a much better figure either. With plenty of quotes, including from the film music, Ligeti puts together a lurid collage in the form of a lustfully exaggerated satire that mixes cynicism with slapstick. There is a bit of laughter, but looking back there wasn't much left of the evening, apart from the shrill, virtuosic vocal acrobatics of soprano Sarah Aristidou and her appearance with the clattering “Scissorhands”.

All the greater and more lasting is the joy over an equally rarely performed stage work of the 20th century: together with the South African Cape Town Opera, the British Chineke! Orchestra the opera “Porgy and Bess” by George Gershwin in a semi-staged performance on September 15th at the Philharmonie. Gershwin is often reduced to the role of a creator of elegant, catchy melodies with swing, who was also the tennis partner of the avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg after he had to flee into American exile in 1933.

The fact that Gershwin was no less a modern composer is often overlooked. He was perhaps less pronounced than the pioneer of twelve-tone music, but like the Chineke! Orchestra under Enrique Mazzola clearly developed the score from 1935, Gershwin mastered his disarmingly sing-along melodies, such as those of his hit “Summertime”, just as confidently as he did precise, expressive orchestral timbre painting, stylistically and harmonically always attuned to the dramaturgical development.

In addition to the varied orchestral movement, there was an opera ensemble that, despite the lack of a stage set, was so vocally and physically present that one was happy to follow the actually difficult material. The libretto tells of the poor life of the African-American residents of the fictional harbor street Catfish Row and their hardships. Alcohol, gambling and drugs are the means of choice for the protagonists to escape their everyday life between fishing and cotton picking in the evenings. Porgy also walks on crutches.

The singers paired the harshness of the material with humor, especially Lukhanyo Moyake in the role of the drug dealer Sporting Life. Siyabulela Ntlale played Porgy asserting his dignity with a voluminous, deep voice, as well as Nonhlanhla Yende's serenely radiant Bess. It was a pleasure to follow the couple in their very brief happiness as they hurried back and forth at the edge of the stage in front of the orchestra musicians. In the end the applause didn't want to end. At some point the entire hall was standing up to the upper tiers.

Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Story” offers a Spartan experience. The stage fairy tale was created in 1918 towards the end of the First World War in exile in Switzerland with limited resources. A speaker and seven musicians can be heard, at the weekend in the Berlin Festival House they were the actor Dominique Horwitz and a chamber ensemble led by the violinist Isabelle Faust.

Five years ago, Horwitz and “Isabelle Faust & Friends” presented this work in concert, and now they got visual reinforcement from the Salzburg Marionette Theater. A total of nine players were used backstage to operate the simple, gnarled figures by the artist Georg Baselitz. Baselitz's crookedly proportioned mannequins with their abstracted heads fit almost too well with Strawinksky's brittle, angular, very sparingly used music, which frames rather than accompanies the speaker's part.

We could already read about Karlheinz Stockhausen's opera spectacle “Wednesday from Light”, which premiered at the Deutsche Oper as part of the music festival, at the beginning of the week. In contrast, the conclusion of the festival with the RIAS Chamber Choir under its artistic director Justin Doyle was aesthetically broken and austere. They brought together two 20th-century requiems based on early music, one by the “postmodern” composer Alfred Schnittke, the other by Maurice Duruflé. With Schnittke, the woodcut-like harmonies of orthodox singing collided with very contemporary electric bass and drum rhythms, while Duruflé seemed to elude time with minimalist, floating figures. Both unique works, precisely presented. Aeternam habeas requiem.