The Out-of-Towners.(Berlin in Lights)(Concert review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-DEC-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Berlin in Lights, a gloriously omnivorous music-and-arts festival that recently unfolded in and around Carnegie Hall, took its title from Kurt Weill's 1928 song "Berlin im Licht." In a concert devoted to the nineteen-twenties music of Weill and Hanns Eisler, the Austrian composer-vocalist HK Gruber growled "Berlin im Licht" in appropriately rough, disillusioned style, arching his eyebrows for the lines "That's no cozy little spot / That's quite a city." Indeed, it was no cozy little classical-music oasis that Clive Gillinson, Carnegie's executive director, offered New York for seventeen days in November, in his most ambitious project since arriving on the job, in 2005. We were given the burnished and burning sound of the Berlin Philharmonic, under the direction of Simon Rattle; the no less awesome sound of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, led by the fantastically gifted young conductor Gustavo Dudamel; cabaret evenings; an avant-garde new-music marathon; club-ready electronic soundscapes; Turkish folk music by a Berlin-based group; film screenings; literary readings; ensemble concerts in area schools; and, at the end, more than a hundred New York public-school kids dancing wildly to the Philharmonic's rendition of "The Rite of Spring." Carnegie's programmers have perpetrated many lively schemes in recent years, but nothing so raffishly radical as this.

Berlin was celebrated both as place and as ideal. In the nineteen-twenties, composers such as Weill and Eisler, in league with sympathetic musicians and bureaucrats, dreamed of bringing down the walls that had risen around classical institutions. Eisler condemned conventional concerts as "orgies of inbreeding" and urged his colleagues to depict the life of the street. The Kroll Opera, led by Otto Klemperer, presented new work and revisionist productions at reduced prices, hoping to reach the working classes. Culture functionaries touted elaborate music-education schemes. All this rhetoric still resonates today, for the classical-music ritual has...

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