A fruitful crossroads

Last fall, the chatter about Kent Nagano and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal spiked. But only briefly. Nagano sounded noncommittal, and most of the music world dismissed the rumors that he would become the orchestra’s next music director.

But those rumors, it turned out, were correct. And last month, after Montreal made its announcement, Nagano explained in a telephone conversation why he had played it so cool. It all had to do with politics in Berlin.

Nagano felt he couldn’t just walk out on the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin, which he has revitalized since becoming its music director 3 1/2 years ago. Politicians here control the purse strings of the city’s arts institutions, and the city is broke. Officials are looking for any excuse they can find to merge or even fold orchestras. Constant vigilance is necessary, and Nagano, who is a celebrity in Berlin, feared putting his band at risk.

There is in Berlin right now enormous insecurity in the arts. It is ever in the news that this conductor or that administrator is threatening to resign if the needs of his ensemble or company are not met. Simon Rattle made that threat before he assumed the post of music director of the Berlin Philharmonic last season. Daniel Barenboim is constantly badgering the government for the support he insists the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the superb and challenging opera company he runs, deserves.

From all these reports, it would be easy to think that Berlin’s bubble has, or will shortly, burst. The latest closure is the Berlin Symphony. But it wasn’t a very good orchestra, and there are still 10 left!

In fact, in the current issue of the Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser writes that “Berlin is the most musical city I have ever encountered.” Having spent last fall there, she says, she became hooked on the symphony and opera. Thanks to the city’s musical climate -- and to the physical and acoustic intimacy of the vineyard-style Philharmonie, Berlin’s main concert hall and the inspiration for Walt Disney Concert Hall -- she learned, for the first time, to really appreciate conductors.

After spending mere days here, I second her enthusiasm. For all its problems, and to some extent because of them, it feels musically vital in a way that no other city I know can equal. Vienna can seem more musical, but a lot of that is nostalgia and image. London and New York teem with music, but not with the kind of intellectual vibrancy and sense of adventure you find in Berlin. Paris is maybe hipper, but it doesn’t have the German capital’s deep musical resources. Tokyo has many orchestras, amazing venues and phenomenally devoted audiences, but it is very traditional.

My stay in Berlin mainly involved attending MaerzMusik, the new music component of the annual Berlin Festival. That alone was something that set this city apart. A look at Charles Ives, on the 50th anniversary of his death, was one of its many components. Others included a series on new French music and a look at sound installations, mixology and new media, along with much else. This, moreover, was but an adjunct to the main Berlin Festival of the performing arts, held in the fall.

What drew me to MaerzMusik was not Ives -- there were only three pieces being performed, and not by major performers -- but the American composers whom the Germans consider Ivesian. The music of these experimentalists, including Christian Wolff, Tom Johnston, Gloria Coates, Phil Niblock and LaMonte Young, is not so well known or easily encountered at home. The Ives component was an immersion in discussion and new work, which included a symposium and concerts that ran for hours and hours. There was so much music and so little break (or refreshment) that late one evening, after Young’s three-hour work, a Paris-based journalist nearly passed out, faint from hunger.

The audiences were large -- often very large -- intent, well-informed and vocal. A table with an impressive selection of books, scores and CDs was always mobbed. There are any number of German books about American music -- on Ives, Cage, Feldman, even a biography of Kent Nagano -- that cannot be found in America.

One felt at these MaerzMusik events almost in the center of a musical universe. But they too were but a small satellite within a much larger sphere of musical activity.

Rattle is revolutionizing the Berlin Philharmonic with an enormously varied range of programming. The conservative programs the orchestra brought earlier this season to Disney Hall were atypical -- the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which presented the concerts, angered the conductor by rejecting the newer and edgier stuff Rattle was also conducting on tour. Nagano’s programs with his Berlin orchestra are also models of invention. It is a rare night when either the large or chamber music hall of the Philharmonie is dark, when something of interest isn’t happening.

Berlin politicians who want to consolidate the city’s opera companies like to cite as an example of redundancy an evening when it happened that all three -- Deutsche Oper, Komische Oper and Staatsoper -- were presenting “The Magic Flute.” But that ignores all the other evenings. Right now, Barenboim is in the midst of his annual April festival, for which he has chosen an intriguing mix of Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky. This week he’s conducting radical productions of Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aron” and Tchaikovsky “Pique Dame” at the Staatsoper. Last week he led three programs with the Chicago Symphony, each with a work by Bach, Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky.

Is it any wonder that Barenboim, for all his complaining about Berlin politics, finds ways to keep working at the Staatsoper, but that he has decided not to remain with the Chicago Symphony once his contract expires in 2006? He has said in interviews that he no longer has the patience for the increasing nonmusical demands on his time that it insists upon. Berlin, in short, is a lot more serious.

This city has not turned out the way many predicted when the wall came down 14 years ago. It has not become a 21st century version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The population has not exploded as was expected. With the financial outlook grim, some institutions that have weathered earlier storms may not continue to do so.

On the other hand, there is little complacency. Orchestras, opera companies and other musical organizations continually have to prove themselves.

Audiences and critics here are appreciative but tough. There is, for instance, a backlash against Rattle. No one with whom I’ve spoken has had a good word to say about him. He’s deemed to be flashy and shallow. That’s clearly an overreaction. But it means he can’t take the love fest that the city first offered him for granted.

The insecurity also engenders commitment. Initially, Nagano felt it simply would not be possible for him to stay with his Berlin orchestra beyond 2006, the year in which he is scheduled to become music director of not only the Montreal orchestra but the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Two weeks ago, however, he held a news conference to announce that his association with the Deutsches Symphonie would continue, albeit at a reduced level, until 2008.

Nagano has not yet indicated what that will mean for Los Angeles Opera -- his contract as music director there ends in 2006. But he has said that Berlin matters. And it does.