The Berliner, said the composer Kurt Weill three years before his “The Threepenny Opera”, was “reckless and dogged, cynical and enthusiastic, quick-witted and helpless”. All at the same time? Not everyone may have welcomed the fact that the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and its chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski paid their respects to Kurt Weill’s music during the Advent season. Jurowski, however, who was born in Moscow in 1972 and was music director of the Bavarian State Opera, sees Kurt Weill (1900-1950), who fled from the Nazis to New York and became a Broadway composer, as perhaps a kind of comrade in the fate of emigration.
With the bold, almost weird concert on the third Sunday of Advent, Jurowski obviously did the “quick-witted” Berlin audience a favor. The approval of the rather unpleasing but fascinating anti-advent performance in the concert hall at Gendarmenmarkt was completely unequivocal. Can that be? – instead of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi suddenly Kurt Weill and his Violin Concerto for wind band and solo violin, then his ballet with singing “The Seven Deadly Sins” concocted with Bert Brecht, premiered in Paris in 1933. Can that touch you or stir you up in the run-up to Christmas?
But yes. Stravinsky’s gambling poem “Jeu de Cartes” and the first symphony from the seventies by the then young “GDR avant-gardist” Friedrich Goldmann put the crown on the “frivolous” Berliner and his orchestra. This concert can be enjoyed emotionally and intellectually bit by bit, but at the same time it can be heard as a statement against the Christmas music routine that flares up every year worldwide.
Weill begins his rare violin concerto from 1924, which is overshadowed by the wind sound, gently and solemnly with an introverted fugato for two clarinets, supplemented by bassoon, trumpet and percussion, before the solo violin begins very calmly. The violin artist Christian Tetzlaff plays it with aplomb and with melodic charm, who brings the lively, then hectic escalations of the half-hour work, in which a Charleston dance of the 1920s drives its essence, as brilliantly controlled as possible over the three-movement round.
Fornication, anger and gluttony – that’s Christmas music by Kurt Weill
Jurowski wanted to open the concert – an act that can hardly be overestimated – with an extremely seldom performed large piece by the composer Friedrich Goldmann (1941-2009), the composer and conductor of the GDR, who had massively penetrated experimental contemporary music, and was influenced by Heiner Müller , Luigi Nono and Paul Dessau. The fact that he was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen for a short time, but was prevented from teaching by the Cologne music prophet when the Berlin Wall was built, can be heard in his first symphony from 1972: Jurowski transmits three-movement sound aggressions, motor energy, bizarre tonal gestures and delicate episodes with precise emphatic force to his Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.
After that no nice “rest” with classical-romantic symphony after the break, but rather a continuation of the music from the thirties, first with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Jeu de Cartes” from 1936: virtuosic poker game in three rounds, rich in subtleties full of stylistic surprises in the big orchestral sound , abruptly peppered with quotations from music history, with four aces and a joker who interferes insidiously – paragon of insidious orchestral art.
The perfectly gruesome alternative to the musical mulled wine of the Christmas markets: the ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins”, third, last, brutally sparkling social satire by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill, now in neo-baroque style patterns with a large orchestra. Katharina Mehrling, who has risen glamorously in Berlin’s Komische Oper and the Bar Jeder Vernunnun, devotes herself to the cesspool of indecency, anger and gluttony, greed, envy, pride and laziness – a tour de force of cynical self-therapy – unfortunately hardly wordable over the microphone as a double “Anna”. through America’s cities in high capitalism.
But Maestro Vladimir Jurowski also wants to indulge in Christmas bliss, just in a different way than usual: on December 23, in the Berlin Philharmonic, he brings out “The Night Before Christmas” from his Moscow memories, an opera from 1894 by Nikolai that has hardly ever been performed in this country Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s brilliant teacher – in concert in a “scenic setting”. Certainly he is aiming at the, according to Kurt Weill, “enthusiastic” but not “helpless” Berliners.