Berlin Fest’s Staggering Musical Survey

This is a city not of today but of yesterday and tomorrow. It was ground zero for World War II, the event that had the greatest impact on the 20th century, and, mutilated and divided, it paid the price. But now the vanquished epic architecture of the Nazis is being replaced by epic postmodern architecture symbolizing a new world order of multinational corporate control. Giant assertive buildings jut forth with knife-sharp edges that seem to cut a path into the future. No one, not least the Berliners, understand where all this is leading, as the city industriously erects itself as the capital city of 21st century Europe, and maybe the world.

So it is hardly surprising that Berlin is obsessed with finding a perspective, with coming to terms, in as deep and thorough a way as possible, with the century past. To know where we’ve been is to prepare for what lies ahead. And the Berlin Festival is doing just that, at least as far as music is concerned. On Sept. 1, it began the most ambitious survey of 20th century music ever attempted.

Over five weeks, the festival will present 83 concerts, each devoted to the works of a single composer. The performing arts cannot easily offer overviews the way art museums can; performances take too much time. There can thus be no musical equivalent of an afternoon spent at the Geffen Contemporary surveying the century’s architecture. To do that at the Berlin Festival would require you to attend one or more concerts every night for 35 nights in a row (and even then, it would not be possible to hear everything, since there are overlaps).

And so the festival stands, not unlike some of the more unsuccessful large buildings that have lately risen on the new Potsdamer Platz, as a kind of monument to monumentalism rather than an inviting urban plaza. Berlin, right now, is better at building than at occupying.

Still, the festival is an awesome undertaking, and it provides a fascinating glimpse into how one of the world’s most musically important cities views recent history. It also shows the ferocious determination in Berlin to keep classical music a powerful and dominant art form. The lineup of concerts is no less than staggering.

Notable, too, is that when it comes to music Berlin remains distinctly Eurocentric, with the greatest emphasis on the Austro-German tradition. Nearly half the composers represented in the festival are from Germany or Austria, or made Germany their main residence. There are only two composers from Asia, Japan’s Toru Takemitsu and Korea’s Isang Yun (who immigrated to Berlin). There is not a single Latino and but one British composer, Benjamin Britten, whose “War Requiem” will be played by the Berlin Symphony under Israeli conductor Eliahu Inbal.

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Many French and Americans made the cut. The Americans include predictable names, such as Ives, Gershwin, Bernstein (whose music will be played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Lior Shambadal), Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. George Antheil (someone few Americans would put in the top 10 or even top 100) is present, but the great West Coast names--John Adams, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness and Terry Riley--are not.

On the other hand, relatively minor German composers, such as Rudi Stephan and Joseph Matthias Hauer, find their way into the festival. And so does Ernst Toch, a fine German composer who emigrated to a Los Angeles that has all but ignored him. There is only one living composer under 50, the modernist German Wolfgang Rihm.

And yet, argue all you want with the lineup, you can nevertheless hear an incredible amount of 20th century music played by major performers. Here’s a long mid-September weekend lineup, a small fraction of the festival: Friday night, the Berlin Radio Symphony performing Hindemith; Saturday, Kent Nagano’s first concert as music director of the German Symphony in a Berg program; Sunday afternoon, a “soiree” featuring the Arditti Quartet playing Nono; Monday, Berlin Philharmonic’s conductor-designate, Simon Rattle, tackling Janacek.

The concerts I attended on the festival’s opening weekend included both conventional and eccentric repertory and featured superb, even revelatory, performances. The Vogler Quartet played all of Webern’s string quartet music with fabulous virtuosity and theatricality. The brilliant Ensemble Avantgarde from Leipzig surveyed the peculiar compositional games played by Hauer (who invented a 12-tone system before Schoenberg, but not one with rich possibilities). A fine program of the music by Stefan Wolpe, an unjustly neglected German composer who taught David Tudor and Morton Feldman, was played by SurPlus, a German ensemble led by an American, James Avery.

Interesting events all, but very poorly attended. I noted fewer than 50 people in the audience for the Wolpe. One had the feeling that music lovers are, like most everyone else in Berlin, biding their time. They seem interested to read about and discuss the festival, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The federal and city governments are glad to support it (this year, by 50%, next year, 100%). But few actually buy tickets, at least to these more obscure chamber events.

Perhaps the festival is just too overwhelming, and people are carefully picking and choosing. But if this festival seems to be more about possibilities and making a statement than being useful in the moment, that makes it all the more a quintessential Berlin festival. It is impractical to attend comprehensively, yet one could imagine all of it archived on the Internet, finally realizing its role as an interesting musical survey. But practically, that is, again like so much in Berlin, still a few years off.